I told my Honors students I would be giving a paper at a conference later this week and they wanted to know what it was about, so I told them. And then I heard a question I've never heard a student ask before: Can we read it?
And why shouldn't my students read my conference paper? It's actually relevant to what they're studying, which isn't always the case. And so today I made a few semi-final edits to the paper (the final edits come when I deliver the talk) and posted it on Moodle.
I was, frankly, a little nervous, mostly because I don't want my students to see in my writing things I complain about in theirs--too many weak linking verbs, for instance, or insufficient grounding in the scholarly conversation. I've explained to them the difference between a conference paper and a journal article, but as I was editing, I kept wanting to insert little explanatory notes about why I was doing what I was doing.
I read my students' work all the time but now the tables are turned: it's time for my students to read me, and it feels really strange.
1 comment:
Sounds like it could be a great learning experience!
I've had profs in the past hand out drafts of their papers and say to pretend we're reviewers. (I've given them the occasional seminar talk. Maybe I'll do that again this year if there's still time in the semester.) You can pretend that you left in the weak linking verbs on purpose. :) Or you can be upfront and show that even full-fledged scholars such as yourself have to polish their drafts, and that you will seriously take their critiques into consideration before sending to a journal.
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