This is a truly exceptional class. The average grade is about 3.09 (3.00 is a "B"), whereas I have been giving somewhere between 2.65-2.85 for most essays this year. I think part of it is your natural talent, and another part is that you have practiced so many essays over the course of the year. But having seen the first drafts, which were an absolute MESS to tell you the truth, the most encouraging thing to me is that this is a class that is really willing to get their hands dirty doing draft revisions. This will serve you well for the research papers, provided that you can keep up your motivation and your time management. (This is always a problem for students in the last five weeks of the spring term.)
The stuff I emphasized in our workshops last week (paragraph organization, and how to incorporate quotations from sources) will also be key to the research paper. That's the other reason I made such a big deal about it. But let me add one more comment that you should take into the research paper. Something that came up on many of these drafts... some of you need to cool it with the descriptive adjectives and adverbs. And with overwriting the sentences to use thesaurus words and long, winding constructions. None of this substitutes for actually having a point to make. Perhaps it was just a consequence of this particular assignment, but for the next one just be aware that there is a mile of difference between describing something and analyzing it. I don't mean to be mystical about that difference... to make it as simple as I can, good analysis is going to result in sentences with strong nouns and verbs. Otherwise you're just...
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