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Final Seminar Essays and Responses Your essays are due by the night of Sunday, May 9. I'd love to have essays before this time, so please send your completed essay to me as soon as it is ready. You should send the entire seminar (including me) your essay as an e-mail Word or RTF attachment. Do not worry about the format for the essay; any accepted scholarly format will work. (I don't care, for example, if you have a Works Cited list or if you instead put full bibliographic information in your endnotes.) If you are already thinking of a journal you might send your revised essay to, go ahead and put in the format that that particular journal uses--that way you save one step as you revise and prepare to submit your essay for consideration. You will be sending me and the other seminar participants polished and "finished" work, but we all realize that the essay you produce by the end of the seminar is nonetheless a draft. As you respond to other essays, keep this in mind: you are being most helpful at this stage by offering the most candid critique you can, so that the writer will benefit from honest recommendations for improvement. You will need to read FOUR of the essays and comment on each of them. (You're welcome to read all seven of the other essays and to comment on them, of course, but I'm expecting only four.) You should read the essays of the two people who follow you alphabetically, and then choose any other two essays to read (that way, everyone will get at least two responses from seminar members, along with a response from me). Use the alphabetical list at the end of this page to determine the two essays you must read (if you're at or near the end of the list, go to the beginning of the list to get the two names you need). Send all responses to me by Friday, May 13, at noon, at the very latest. If you get responses done earlier than that, please send them to me as soon as they're ready (and it would really help if you sent them as you do them instead of sending them in one completed batch). These responses should come to me as e-mail attachments, a separate file for each response, and please title each file clearly (e.g., “Response to Kelly”). Do not send your responses directly to the writers of the essay you read; I will forward them for the reasons I give below. Your responses should be frank and judicious. You are writing a "reader's report." Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each essay as you see them. Give your overall impression of the value of the essay for your understanding of Whitman and related issues. Was the essay original, convincing, persuasive in its thesis and support? Was the topic well-chosen, or too large or too small for an essay of this length? Do you understand Whitman and/or his influence better than you did before you read the essay? If so, how? Any advice on where the writer should go from here as she/he thinks of revision? Try to make your report a single-spaced page or less, in which you report on the strengths of the essay, its limitations, and recommendations for revisions. You should indicate an overall impression--from highly positive to unenthusiastic--and you should give reasons for your reaction. You should make clear what parts of the essay work for you and what parts do not. Don't feel compelled to fill up a page if you don't have a page of useful things to say. A concise paragraph can serve well. On the other hand, if you do have a lot to say, please take the time to say it now: if your comments need to exceed a single page, that's okay, but do try to stay as close to a single page as possible. You can sign your responses or leave them anonymous--whichever you feel most comfortable doing. (You'll find that readers for many journals are given this same option.) If you want your response signed, just type your name at the end of the response. If you don't type your name at the end, I'll assume you want the response to be anonymous and will send it on unsigned. This exercise is there to allow your work at this stage to have a larger public than just me. In the past, these responses have proven to be one of the most valuable parts of the seminar. After I receive and read the responses, I will give you a portfolio of responses to your essay, with the encouragement to keep working on it in months to come, if you're so inclined. I'll be happy to help with revisions, and a good place to begin is with a handful of readers' reports from a group of peers who have just been immersed in Whitman's work. I'll e-mail you my marked-up copy of your essay as soon as I get through them, along with the responses from everyone else. I'll take the quality of your responses into consideration as I evaluate your work in the seminar; they seem to me a major part of your participation, a kind of capstone to the semester as, Whitman-like, you read and write each other. Alphabetical List: Kelly Franklin, Melanie Krupa, Dimitrios Latsis, Jennifer Loman, Benjamin Miele, Paul Morton, Tim Robbins, Stefan Schoeberlein.. [Home]