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

Please complete this short reflection after each Writing Fellow conference (that is, after the Essay 1 and Essay 2 conferences, which are the two required ones) and before you begin revising. Your first draft is a text now, and you can read it 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 you turn the conference into a revision plan while the conversation is still fresh. This is a standalone reflective exercise, so it prepares you for the revision you were already going to do and 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? I’m not asking about fixing the transitions. I’m asking about the essay this draft was reaching for and hasn’t become yet.

Your response should include one quoted line from your own draft, and please treat yourself as citable here by quoting the actual sentence instead of paraphrasing it. Include one quotation from a course text as well, one 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.

The three workshop minis (Thesis Workshop, Evidence Workshop, and Counterargument and Concession) are this reflection’s companions from before the draft existed. Rereading what you wrote for them is a quick way to see how far the draft has come.

Criteria

A strong reflection is honest in the “Argue” section, specific in the “Aspire” section, and quotes both required passages, one line of your own draft and one line of a course text. If you skip the self-quotation, or treat “Agree” as a summary of the whole draft, I’ll hand the reflection back to you for one revision.

A Note on the AI Policy

To restate the course policy here: every sentence of this reflection, like every sentence of the draft it reflects on, has to be your own prose. No generative AI tool may produce 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 for the protocol in its reading-response form.

Submission

Please submit a word processed or PDF document through Canvas within a few days of your Writing Fellow conference. The assignment for each essay cycle gives the exact deadline.

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