Notebook questions for Monday

After you read the excerpt from "Best American Answers to the Question 'What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It,'" please answer the following questions in your notebook:

1. Which answer did you find most eye-opening or astonishing? Briefly explain.
2. Which resonated most with a belief you already hold, and how?
3. Which offered the most persuasive evidence or argument for its "thing I believe in even though I can't prove it"? What specific elements made it persuasive for you?

Peer edit

Your peer editing handout

Notebook questions for law school personal statements:

6–8 minutes:

·      Which is most effective as a personal statement and/or essay? Find three especially effective aspects of that essay.

·      Which offers the strongest argument? Summarize the argument (possibly in the thesis statement, if you found one) and identify two or three claims the writer uses to support it.

Prompt for people who are still looking for direction for Essay #2

How important is it to “answer the question”? You can begin specifically by considering this issue in the context of college essay prompts and the essays you are writing (or will write) in response to them. But your answer may lead you to other contexts and bigger questions. What is valuable about meeting people’s expectations, and to what extent do we want to surprise and/or challenge those who measure our worth, or to exceed their expectations (even, perhaps, when we run the risk of being penalized in some way for “not answering the question”)?

In-class work for Monday, September 25

1.     Choose the three essays among these seven that seem most like argument essays to you, the ones that seem to make a debatable point. For those three essays, identify a sentence that you think is the best candidate for a thesis statement in those three essays.

2.     Imagine that your group is the admissions committee for an elite graduate program for college administrators seeking an advanced certificate in Social and Emotional Learning. Excellent writing skills are one of the criteria for admission. Other qualities the committee is looking for are strong leadership abilities, good critical thinking skills, and emotional intelligence.

You have a group of seven finalists, all of whom have been deemed equal in every respect (graduate school transcripts, publications, service to their universities, etc.) and now you must choose which two candidates to admit based on the writing samples you have before you.

If you have time left over, revise the following sentence in your notebook:    

We are taught not to panic, never to run, when lost, but the experience itself is so shattering, so robbing of rationality and all teaching, that every time before I'd been lost, panic and running ensued. 

Revise the last section of the sentence above, making it as clear and concise as you can.