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English 85: The American Novel, Sections A & F (Week 8)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION - COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS PROJECT

Group process write-up. Please send me an email (melanieh@humnet.ucla.edu) sometime between now and the end of finals week with your reflections on your group process-it doesn't need to be long, one medium-sized paragraph will suffice, and what you say won't affect your (or anyone in your group's) grade. For once, you don't need to worry about your writing, complete sentences, etc.-just send me your thoughts (as long as they're understandable!). The purpose here is that I would like to get a sense of how each group decided to do the project so that I can give advice to my future classes on what previous students have found worked or didn't work in the past.

Questions to consider: How did your group use (or not use) class time-did you find that I gave you too much class time, too little, or just the right amount? What kinds of things did you delegate, and what kinds of things did your group do or discuss as a whole? Did you meet outside of class or communicate by email, phone, IM, etc? How do you feel about your role within the group? About how your group worked together? What advice would you give a student starting this project in a future quarter? You don't have to answer all of those questions, and you can discuss other things to, just send me something. Again, this is totally informal-write it when you feel like taking a break from something else.

Posting reminder. Make sure your group decides who will be responsible for doing the posting(s) on Tuesday of finals week (to the E-campus discussion board), i.e. whether one person plans to do all the postings at once or whether each person in the group be responsible for posting part of the projects, etc.

Final examination studying. After all the groups have posted the outlines, make sure to look at each other's. I also suggest that you look at my other section's outlines in order to see how different approaches could be taken to the same theme. As you look at and study each other's outlines, you might think specifically about:

• key themes and ideas from the outlines that you might be able to discuss in your final explications.
• key scenes and textual details mentioned in the outlines that might be able to work in your essays for the final exam
• the way that each group organized their outlines and made connections between the novels. Pay attention to the different ways that ideas can be structured in a comparative assignment so that you can get ideas for how to structure your final essays.