Rough Draft Workshop III: 

The Rough Draft Workshop Rides Again

Housekeeping:

The Workshop

The Workshop

Back to the lab again. Surely you know the drill by now?

Answer the following questions in response to your peer's projects (as always, you should also provide any other recommendations or criticisms that occur to you). Feel free to include comments/suggestions in the text of the essay itself (by using the editing screen and a different color font).

1. Is the project clearly based on a definition? I.e., is it clear that the fundamental objective of the paper is based around a definition or series of definitions?

2. How strong are the criteria that the writer is using to compose their definition? Can you think of any items that also match the criteria used that the writer (as far as you can tell) would likely not want to be included the category being defined?

3. What is the strongest counterargument you can think of to refute the argument of this paper? E.g., what would you point out/argue for to suggest that the author has their definition wrong, has neglected to consider a certain issue, or has presumed too much in their definition argument?

4. What do you take to be the strongest element of this project?

5. What do you find to be the weakest part (most in need of improvement) of the project?

6. On the sentence-level, did you find the paper to be well written? Does it contain poor grammmar or sentence-fragments? Does it include "run-on" sentences? Is it unnecessarily wordy at times?

7. Does the author provide clear exigence for the project? I.e., do they make it clear why they think this is an important term/concept to be defined in the present moment? Do you get a sense of why this project would be interesting today rather than, for instance, 50 years ago?

8. What grade would you assign this project if this were the final draft?