CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - Draft Reflection: Four A's on Your Own Draft (10 Points)

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:
  1. To reread your own first draft as a text worth studying
  2. To turn a Writing Fellow conference into a concrete revision agenda
  3. To surface the assumptions your draft makes about texts and readers
  4. To name what the revision aspires to before beginning it

The Assignment

Purpose

After each Writing Fellow conference, you will complete this short reflection before you begin revising. Its premise is simple: your first draft is now a text — one you can read the way this course reads everything else. The reflection applies the Four A’s protocol (adapted from Gray, J., “Four ‘A’s Text Protocol,” National School Reform Faculty (NSRF), https://www.nsrfharmony.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/FourAsTextProtocol-N.pdf) to your own draft, so that the conference’s momentum becomes a revision plan while it is still warm. This is a standalone reflective exercise: it prepares you for the revision you were already going to do, and it changes nothing about the essay assignment itself.

Task

Reread your first draft after the conference, then answer the four A’s about it:

  1. Assumptions: What assumptions does my draft make — about the texts (what they say, what they can be made to say) and about the reader (what the reader already knows, already believes, or will grant without being shown)?
  2. Agree: What do I still agree with in my draft after the conference? What survived the conversation and deserves to anchor the revision?
  3. Argue: What do I now want to argue with in my own draft? Where does it overclaim, dodge, or say something I no longer quite believe?
  4. Aspire: What does the revision aspire to? Not “fix the transitions,” but the essay the draft was reaching for and did not yet become.

Your response should include one quoted line from your own draft (treat yourself as citable — quote the actual sentence, not a paraphrase) and one quotation from a course text that you now want to bring into the essay or reweigh in light of the conference. The whole reflection should come to roughly a 1-2 paragraph equivalent.

If it helps to see the pre-draft side of this scaffold, the three workshop minis — Thesis Workshop, Evidence Workshop, and Counterargument and Concession — are this reflection’s companions from before the draft existed, and rereading what you wrote for them is a fast way to see how far the draft has traveled.

Criteria

A strong reflection is honest in the “Argue” section (a draft you cannot argue with is a draft you have not reread), specific in the “Aspire” section, and quotes both required passages: one line of your own draft and one line of a course text. Completion-quality reflections that skip the self-quotation or treat “Agree” as a summary of the whole draft will be returned for one revision.

A Note on the AI Policy

To restate the course policy in one line: every sentence of this reflection — like every sentence of the draft it reflects on — must be your own prose, with no generative AI tool producing any part of it.

Citation

Adapted from: Gray, J., “Four ‘A’s Text Protocol,” National School Reform Faculty (NSRF), https://www.nsrfharmony.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/FourAsTextProtocol-N.pdf.

Formats (UDL)

You may render the reflection as prose, as four labeled bullet clusters, or as annotated quotations (your two required quotations, each followed by labeled commentary that carries the four A’s), as long as all four A’s and both quotations are present.

See also: Four A’s Reading Response (/Participation/FourAs) for the protocol in its reading-response form.

Submission

Submit a word processed or PDF document through Canvas within a few days of your Writing Fellow conference; the assignment for each essay cycle will give the exact deadline.

Please refer to the Style Guide for code quality examples and guidelines.