Workshop and colloquium

Workshop Details: On this day you must bring a short prospectus of your essay; it can be an outline or an abstract but it must lay out what you propose your paper will be. Some of it can still be surmise but you must be narrowing in fairly closely to what your final argument will be.

On this day we can talk about anything we want – texts, secondary texts, logic, theory, footnotes style, but at the beginning we must have a brief presentation of what you plan to develop – the prospectus mentioned above. We may just read each one and have critique, depends on the class size, or we may have group units on this.

Colloquium Details: The penultimate stage of the research paper process will be the colloquium presentation.  Half the class will present one day and the other half the next; the half not presenting will be involved in critiquing. 

Presentation Details (10 minutes):

The presentation should run about ten minutes.

At the beginning of the presentation, the student-presenter will provide the class with a handout containing a solid abstract of the paper.  The abstract can be two pages long and can use bullets if it helps. 

During the presentation, the student-presenter will basically read the abstract to the class, but will amplify parts of the abstract by reading from the larger paper.

This reading from the larger paper could include the introductory paragraph, concluding paragraph, or summarizing paragraphs.  More often than not, however, the parts from the larger paper will provide illustrative dilation of a topic in the argument, that is, a paragraph or two of making one of the major points of the argument.

The abstract as read should provide a pretty comprehensive syllabus of the argument of the paper. 

The presentation, as I said above, should take about 10 minutes. 

Critique Details (five minutes):

The reviewer, who should have received a draft of the paper in advance, will then provide the class a written critique of the paper – strengths and weaknesses – of about one page in length and will talk for five minutes. 

The strengths and weaknesses could be common compositional ones, problems or achievements in logic, clarity, or elegance, but we should like to see particular critical comments based upon knowledge of the material, history or criticism.  That is, the reviewer should point out if the paper seems unaware of mixing two contradictory styles of criticism or overlooking an important historical text or context.

The critique is not really the place for stylistic criticism, but if one passage is particularly well written or particularly opaque, the critic might point that out.

The goal is to help the author.

After the Critique Details (five minutes):

The class will then question the student writer for five minutes and then we will move to the next presentation. 

We will have to work by the clock to move through three presentations an hour.