Reaction to the Reaction Papers

Esteemed Students: You first batch of reaction papers are very good. Because we will not have time at our meeting today to go over them in any detail, I thought I would give you some feedback this way.

The strengths of the papers were that you all seemed to have done the reading, that you took the assignment seriously and used proper spelling and grammar, That most of the papers fell in the proscribe range in their length. All of you are competent writers and a couple of you are really good.

Potential areas for improvement include:

1. Make sure you are engaging the assigned text, not going off on some philosophical discourse of your own. The way you do that is with quotations or references to specific facts and examples. Remember my first goal in this assignment is to make sure you have done the reading, so prove to me that you did.
2. Proofread your finished paper carefully for typos and sentences that do make sense.
3. Refer, at least glancingly, to all of the readings. Given the schedule and problems of the first week I did not mark you down if you did not, but I will in the future.
4. Grad students only: When you use a quote, I want you to footnote it. History students will use Turabian citation format, Anthropology students may use whatever inferior format is the standard in their discipline.

Also, I am surprised that a number of students did not turn in a paper. Some of you spoke to me and others did not. Since we are dropping the lowest two grades on the reaction papers this might not be a problem, but make sure you get me a paper from now on.