PEER REVIEW

Type 1: No Claim

Problem: there is nothing at stake, no issue to be resolved; the thesis leads to listing rather than analysis

"Ghostbusters is a movie that has a lot of phallic details"

Solution: turn to specific details and ask “why” or “how”

"Why does Ghostbusters employ so many phallic images?" (the answer to this would be your thesis/so what"): "By focusing on phallic images, Ghostbusters changes our understanding of the film by suggesting it is primarily concerned with how men can reassert power in a world with increasing female power."

Type 2: Obviously True Claim

Problem: the statement does not require proof, so there’s no point in writing about it

"The men in Ghostbusters band together to defeat the demon"

Solution: Turn your statement into a question and make an assertion that readers might disagree with

"How do the men defeat the demon?" "The men use displays of heterosexual power to defeat the demon which changes our understanding of male sexuality by connecting it to power over women "

Type 3: Conventional Wisdom

Problem: because almost everyone agrees with the statement, there is no room for analysis or development

"Ghostbusters show that people are not comfortable with women gaining power"

Solution: look to complicate the subject by taking multiple points of view

"The pattern of anti-female images in Ghostbusters changes our analysis of the order in which male fears about female power surface by suggesting that when women gain power men primarily fear the loss of male camaraderie."

Type 4: Personal Conviction

Problem: like conventional wisdom, these statements tend to be reaction rather than analysis; they prevent exploration of an idea

"I think it's great that women got more respect during the time period in which Ghostbusters was filmed"

Solution: try to replace opinions with ideas, which question and complicate claims rather than repeating them

Are women being shown as having actual power here? "The fact that the demon can only exercise power through proxies such as the dogs and the stay puft marshmallow man changes our analysis of feminism in this film by suggesting that women can only have power through manipulating men."

Type 5: Overly Broad

Problem: the thesis avoids complexity and could be said about almost any topic. Watch out for phrases such as “advantages and disadvantages” or “pros and cons”

"Ghostbusters shows the pros and cons of women gaining power"

Solution: Rephrase your ideas by replacing broad nouns with specific ones, weak verbs with strong ones and vague adjectives with specific ones. If you are talking about two ideas or sides, try to subordinate them: does one (newly specified) idea outweigh the other?

What kind of power do women have? "The pattern of yonic symbols changes our analysis of female power by insisting that women still, ultimately, can be reduced to their sexual and reproductive functions"

What are pros and cons? which ends up having more power? why?

RESULT?

AWESOME PAPER!!

Getting Something Out of this

• What would you like to "steal" from your partner's paper for your own? How could you employ it?
• Having seen another paper, where can you see a reader getting easily confused? What could you do to avoid that?

How to Usefully Create a Rough Draft and Peer Review one

Thesis Starting Points

Detailed Feedback

On the separate sheet of paper on which you wrote the persistent grammatical error, thoughtfully answer the following questions:

1. What “work” does the thesis/so what require from the paper? What will the writer have to prove in the applications? (So What)

2. Based on question 1, does the essay fulfill the thesis’ promise? What does it still need to prove? What does it talk about that was not introduced by the thesis?

3. Which piece of evidence and its accompanying interpretation is most convincing to you? Give three specific reasons this reading is well handled. (Application)

4. Which reading did you find least convincing? What makes it hard to follow or difficult to “buy”? (Application)

• Which of these theses "start types" does the paper's so what fall into?
• Use the solution to write a question for the writer to focus on

Why Peer Review?

• Allows the writer to see how a reader experiences his/her writing
• Points out places where applications are not clearly linked to collations and so whats
• Give writers specific, useful feedback
• Allows reader to recognize similar patterns in _own_ writing

On your partner's paper, use highlighters to mark each of the three parts each clause serves. if it does not serve any of the three leave it blank

When you get the paper back:

1. In the comments section of your draft, list 1 specific action you will take in changing the organization ("I will remove all mentions of my beliefs in the summary"= good. "I will organize it"= not good)

2. List one specific question you still have about organizing you want to ask me. ("How do i separate out my ideas about farming from Diamond's?"= good. "Is this organized?" = bad.)

On your partner's paper underline what seems to be their so what from one of their responses. What analytical question are they answering (make it about the actual pattern they are talking about not about "O")

When you get the paper back:

1. In the comments section of your draft, write a sentence or two about if your partner saw what you wanted them to and what still needs work

2. Use the answering an analytical question/so what templates we discussed last week to rewrite your so what (or write for the first time)

3. What further feedback would be helpful for you on your so whats?

First Impressions

• Start by reading through the essay and mark any grammatical or stylistic problems you note. On a separate sheet, write down the most persistent grammatical/stylistic problem you notice
• Next, on the essay, underline the thesis: the uber so what the paper will have to prove. If you can’t find a thesis, note this!
• Also on the essay itself, mark any immediate questions/confusions you have. Be specific: don’t just put a “?”: state “I’m not sure how this proves your point” or “I don’t follow this argument”

For Your Rough Draft

• Create an outline using the shapes on your research board
• You MUST have: summaries of the primary and secondary sources, collations from your text and your authors, the data collation template for at least 3 of these, written applications for 2 of those collations, and a working thesis and encounter
• You should have created a path through these, and moved things around as necessary
• The rest _can_ be bullet points, stream of consciousness writing, etc

What are rough drafts?

Revising

is about content. It involves developing your ideas more fully, and making sure your paper is structured in such a way that it helps the reader to follow your thinking. If proofreading is the gas gauge, revising is googlemaps—it’s about figuring out the best route to take, detours to avoid and where you ultimately want to end up.

A rough draft is sometimes called a discovery draft, because this is where writers explore their ideas, often discovering new ideas in the process. This is a very exciting stage in the prewriting process, the stage where writers start to find out what they have to say about the various ideas that arose in their brainstorming process. And like the brainstorming process, the writing of a rough draft needs to be uncontrolled—open, free, with no set limitations.

Only by being open, free and generous with your explorations will you generate enough words (your “raw material”) to later cut, shape and fashion into a polished essay. Just like with the sculptor’s chunk of marble, you can expect that much of your rough draft will end up as debris—cut away, chiseled off, sanded down—before the final product takes form. So it’s important to give yourself plenty of time and enough freedom of expression to really generate a hefty chunk of raw material—the rough draft.

http://catpages.nwmissouri.edu/m/WC/prewriting4.html

Proofreading

is an absolutely necessary step—it’s like keeping your eye on the gas gauge while driving (you will fail to get where you want to go without it). It involves checking:

Appearance (margins, indentations, page numbers)

Spelling (spell check is a good start, but watch out for homophones and misused words)

Grammar (commas, semi-colons, punctuation)

Quotation citation (all quotations should be a part of your own sentence—at the very least, write something like In response, Monkey said, “blah,blah,blah” (47). The actual quote should be followed by quotation marks, then the page number in parentheses, then a period. Ellipses (…) should be used when omitting words within the quotation—they are not necessary at the beginning or end of the quotation. Quotations longer than 4 lines (which should be used sparingly) are set off in block format. They do not use quotation marks, and they end with a period and then the page number in parentheses. They must still be part of a sentence.)

SO WHAT : By looking at the insistence of heterosexual power in Ghostbusters in conjunction with the defeat of female power, we can see that male bisexuality is privately acceptable but must result in public heterosexual power, which most readers don't see; this is important because it changes our analysis by suggesting that actual sexual practices are far less important to gender relations than the display of power through heterosexual tropes.

a secondary source-- basically a data collation

http://www.runleiarun.com/ghostbusters/chapter11.shtml

So what: noting the connection between phallic symbols and female power changes our analysis, suggesting that sexuality becomes a way to conquer female power

I had initially thought that Ghostbusters reinforced masculinity. But the treatment of the marshmallow man can be linked to the idea of masculinity in the movie. This reveals that heterosexual power, as opposed to behavior, is key to the movie.If the defeat of Gozer demonstrates that men must publicly embrace heterosexuality to defeat women, the suggestion that the ghostbusters help her agent, the stay-puft marshmallow man, "get laid" would seem to endanger the men further by ceding heterosexual male power to Gozer. However, the idea of all the ghostbusters banding together with the decidedly phallic feature marshmallow man in search of a sexual experience shows how very flexible sexual behavior is as long as it results in decisive male heterosexual power over women (symbolized by the explosion of white goo over the city). In essence, the increased bisexualty of male behavior, or at least male to male connection, makes the men have more powerful moments of heterosexual control

SO WHAT : By looking at the insistence of heterosexual power in Ghostbusters in conjunction with the defeat of female power, we can see that male bisexuality is privately acceptable but must result in public heterosexual power, which most readers don't see; this is important because it changes our analysis by suggesting that actual sexual practices are far less important to gender relations than the display of power through heterosexual tropes.

Application

Paragraph 1: I initially thought that Bertocci's claim that the men must become bisexual to defeat Gozer explained the sexuality in this text. But the insistence on heterosexual power of the ghostbusters shows that a turn to bisexuality cannot explain all. One way that they are different is that the end result is an eruption of male power and sexuality that defeats a woman who disappears into a yonic space, but they are still similar in terms of men having to join together sexually for this to happen. This suggests that violence against a female character changes the turn to bisexuality in Ghostbusters. One could argue that male heterosexuality in Ghostbusters become valuable because it is a means of defeating female power. This allows considerable latitude in male sexuality--they can indeed "cross streams" and have emotionally and physically close relationships-- as long as, ultimately, their turn to each other results in overpowering a woman sexually. In this sense sexuality becomes far less important than gender relations--in essence sexual becomes a private matter as lomg as it results in public, visible domination of women through sexuality.

SO WHAT : By looking at the insistence of heterosexual power in Ghostbusters in conjunction with the defeat of female power, we can see that male bisexuality is privately acceptable but must result in public heterosexual power, which most readers don't see; this is important because it changes our analysis by suggesting that actual sexual practices are far less important to gender relations than the display of power through heterosexual tropes.

Connection: Female Power

Connection: Religious symbols

shot from below/looking up; "prehistoric bitch"

masculine apppearance "are you a god?" power over animals,

churches, pyramids,

"no one steps on a church in my town"

"are you a god"

Contrast: Human vs Animal

"Prehistoric bitch", dogs, "nimble little minx" vs "we have the tools we have the technology" "Dr."

tall buildings; churches; pyramids; shot from below/looking up; "prehistoric bitch" "we neutronized her" "we have the tools" hold guns at crotch level; "sticks"; african american man off to side; men usually shot in groups; column to sky; marshmallow man dressed like sailor; "my town"

Contrast: female power vs phallic symbols

Connection: Phallic Symbols

tall towers, buildings, hold guns at crotch level, call them "sticks" "tools," marshmallow man explodes into white goo...

Anomaly

3 Caucasian men shot as a group, touch each other often, cross streams

marshmallow man:

sailor looking "to get laid"

slits in face

masculine identification

manly profession

the emphasis on the fluidity of sexuality suggests we need to examine why they defeat a symbol of masculine heterosexuality