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Part 1
Post a Refined Feature Essay Draft to this submission area. This submission should be revised following the required Exploratory Draft & Peer Review Cycle 1 that everyone completed by Wednesday of Module 7.
Please highlight the changes you made before posting your Refined Draft. You should also include a short note at the top of your paper, detailing how your approach to your argument/purpose has evolved, and any new questions you have for your reviewers at this stage.
Part 2
First, visit Reading Assignment 2 – Sample Feature Essays. Click around and read through whichever essay seems interesting based on the title, then pick two that stand out. You might select an essay with a style you’d like to emulate, an essay that you have lots of ideas for how to improve, or an essay that traces its question in an interesting way. List the two essays you’re examining in more detail here. (The two essays are attached below)
How would you describe the style of each of these essays? Casual? Formal? Academic? Humorous? Investigative? How does the tone relate to the purpose as you see it? Anything you’d like to emulate or avoid here?
How does the essay go about pursuing an answer to its question? Can you trace the evolution of the question from the beginning of the essay to the end? How does the essay reveal new insights about the question?
How does the essay use (or not use!) paragraphing and structure to guide the reading through the reasoning? Do you see any gaps in the logic or areas that need more transitions or connections between ideas?
By now, you have a draft of your Feature Essay and you are about to receive some feedback on your Exploratory Draft as well. While the Exploratory Draft is about 1500 words in length, the Final Version should be about 2000 – and it’s not enough to simply tack on and additional 500 words as you move from early draft to the final piece of work. Instead, you’ll need to start thinking now about how each of your ideas fit together in pursuit of your original question.In addition to getting raw material on the page, you also need to return to your Exploratory Draft to think about your structure and organization. Between the exploratory and the final drafts, you need to start filling in gaps in your reasoning, see the structure of how each paragraph transitions into the next, and recognize where you need more evidence or analysis.At this stage of your drafting, a Reverse Outline will be of great help! Please watch the short video below or open Reverse Outlining from UNC Chapel Hill in a a new window. Then complete the exercise that follows.
To get started with Part 2 of this assignment, return to the most recent working version of your Feature Essay to complete your Reverse Outline. I highly recommend that you 1) print your essay out and 2) read it out loud! The second tip can be awkward for sure, but it can also help you catch gaps in your logic or spots where you’re stumbling over your sentences due to lack of clarity or completeness. After reading your essay draft, please complete the following:Write down the main idea of each paragraph in a complete sentence.
Then write down the first sentence of each paragraph in a separate section.
How well do the main ideas line up with the first sentences in each of your paragraphs? The first sentence of each paragraph, as a topic sentence, should preview the main point and show how the new information relates to the previous paragraph.
Choose three of your topic sentences to revise (and/or identify three paragraphs that need to be split up so that each paragraph only covers one main idea) and take a crack at revising them. Write the old version first, with the revised version underneath it.
Identify three concrete revision tasks that you want to tackle as you keep working on the Feature Essay. You should be especially mindful of areas where you need more analysis or reasoning to substantiate your claims!