Purpose
This essay gives you a condensed preview of the writing process we will follow in this course.
Background
I will try to persuade you in this course to approach writing with two key ideas in mind: first, that writing is a form of conversation with others interested in the topic you are writing about, and second, that writing is a process of revision rather than something to get right the first time.
To encourage these attitudes, most of the writing exercises in this course will follow a pattern consisting of most or all of the following:
- Class discussion of the material you will write about, to generate ideas and literally start a conversation.
- Writing a first draft of an essay.
- Sharing that draft with one or more classmates, for their reactions and suggestions. This is called “peer editing” or “peer review” by writing instructors.
- Writing a second draft of the essay, presumably incorporating your own new ideas once you been away from the essay for a day or so, and any suggestions from the peer reviews that you feel improve the essay. Notice that the point of peer review is not to tell you what you must do, but to give you things to consider and make your own decision about.
- At either the first or second draft stages, meeting with me to get my suggestions about the essay. Generally I will require a meeting at one of these stages, and be happy to meet with you should you want to at the other (or anywhere else in the process).
This essay introduces you to a brief example of this process.
Activity
In class on August 30 you had a chance to talk about, or hear other people talk about, various aspects of cryptography. Write an essay that continues some part of this conversation. For example, you might write about why you agree with, or disagree with, something someone else said; you might say in writing something you were thinking of saying in class but didn’t have a chance to; if you thought something you heard was particularly interesting, you might write about why. You may, of course, write about things besides these examples too.
The main thing I expect these essays to do is continue part of the class conversation in a meaningful way. So your essay should minimally summarize what was already said that you’re building on, and then go on to say something new about that topic. “Saying something new” will amost certainly involve describing the point you are making, and then, depending on exactly what you add to the conversation, might include explaining why you take a certain position, how your point differs from or complements what was already said, why the idea you’re adding should matter to readers, what implications it has beyond the things you say in the essay, etc. I expect that summarizing part of the existing conversation and then adding to it will take between one and two pages.
I hope that the conversation in class will really be multiple overlapping conversations with lots of different ideas and points of view. Do not try to summarize and extend all of them! Pick one that you can dig into instead of touching superficially on many.
Write your essay with a word processor. I recommend Google Docs, because it makes your essay easy to share with other people and easy for them to comment on. But if you would prefer to use Word or some similar word processor on your own computer you may.
Follow-Up
We will do peer reviews of drafts of this essay in class on September 4. If you use Google Docs to write the essay, just be prepared to share the essay with the person you work with in the peer review. If you write with a word processor that doesn’t support sharing documents with other authors (such as Word), bring two printed copies of the essay to class with you. In all cases, please bring your computer to class on that day so you can access other people’s essays online if you need to.
During the two days following the peer reviews, i.e., September 5 and 6, I will meet with you to share my thoughts on it and answer questions you have for me. You can make an appointment for this meeting via Google Calendar. Please make the meeting 15 minutes long, and schedule it to finish before the end of the day on September 6. So that I have time to prepare for these meetings, please share your Google doc draft, or email me your non-Google-doc draft, by the start of class on the 4th.
Following the peer reviews and meetings with me, you’ll have a chance to revise your draft essay. Share your revision with me, or email it to me, by 11:59 PM on September 11. If your second version is in a Google doc you already shared with me for the first draft, sharing it again just involves emailing me a quick note that the document is ready for me to look at.
Finally, recall that I grade things relative to what I expect you to be able to do on them. The second paragraph under “Activity” above describes what I expect of these essays. To be a little more specific, for the first drafts I expect to see clearly that you are working towards an essay as described in that paragraph. It doesn’t have to be there yet; it is after all a draft. For the second version, I expect to see that the essay has improved with respect to the description.