Lecture: Midterm Review & Exam
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 8
Opening
Picture a business major reading a competitor's report, a nursing student reviewing a new care guideline, and a club treasurer weighing a budget proposal. Each of them has to do three things before anyone trusts their judgment. They have to say what the text says. They have to say how it persuades. And then, only then, they say whether they agree. That's the one new idea in this lecture. Everything else is review.
Here's where we are. In Week 1 you met the five questions and the writing process. In Week 2 you learned to summarize before you respond. Week 3 built the paragraph, and Week 4 built the thesis. Week 5 taught narration and exposition. Week 6 explained how a real text persuades, and Week 7 had you build an argument of your own. Next week, in Week 9, the second half opens with research.
So here's my plan. Most mistakes a first-year writer makes aren't deep misunderstandings. They're a swap. You trade one half of a pair for its neighbor. I'm going to give you one pair for each of the first seven weeks, with one quick test for each. Then I'll add the new habit.
1. Revision vs. editing
Imagine you've written a cover letter. On the second draft you move your strongest experience from the last paragraph to the first. Then you fix a misspelled company name. Both changes help. But they work at very different levels.
Writers swap these two jobs all the time, which makes them a swapped pair. A swapped pair is two neighboring ideas that a writer mistakes for each other, such as a summary and a response or a topic and a thesis. Naming the one distinction between them is the cure.
Here's the first distinction. Revision is re-seeing a draft's ideas, focus, and structure, which changes what the draft says and how it is organized. Editing is improving a draft's sentences and surface: word choice, sentence shape, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
The test is one question. Does this change alter what the draft says, or how it's organized? If yes, it's revision. If it only touches the surface of a sentence, it's editing.
Remember the committee note from Week 1? A club volunteer was reporting a change to a food-drive roster. Between the first draft and the final copy there were 7 changes. Four were revision and three were editing. One revision moved the roster request from the first sentence to the end, after the reason. One edit added a comma after an opening phrase.
Pause and try this. The writer moved the request to the end. Revision or editing?
Ask what the change does to the whole note.
Here's the answer. It's revision. It changes the note's order, so it changes what the committee meets first.
2. Summary vs. response
Think about a group chat in an apartment building. The property manager sends a long letter about repairs. A neighbor posts one line: management is messing with the water again. It sounds like a summary. But it already holds a verdict.
Week 2 kept two jobs apart. A summary is a short restatement of what a text says: neutral, covering the whole text, and written in your own words and sentences. A response is your reasoned evaluation of a text, kept separate from the summary: you agree, disagree, or complicate the writer's claim and give reasons that point to the text.
The test for a summary sentence is to hunt for an opinion-leak. That's a judging word that slipped into a report, such as "rightly" or "sadly".
In Week 2 you summarized Eisenhower's farewell address. Here's an illustrative sentence from that week: "Eisenhower rightly warns the nation about defense spending." The word "rightly" judges the address. And "defense spending" is close to the topic, not to the address's claim.
Pause and try this. Which single word turns that sentence from a report into a verdict?
Read it once more, slowly, in your head.
Here's the answer. It's "rightly". Drop it, state the claim in neutral words, and save your judgment for a separate response with reasons.
3. Topic sentence vs. title
Look at a neighborhood newsletter. One paragraph opens with three words: "Our block party." Another opens by saying the block party should move to the park, because closing the street blocks two driveways. Only the second one tells you what the paragraph has to prove.
That's Week 3's pair. A topic sentence is the sentence, usually the first in a body paragraph, that states the paragraph's controlling idea. A title only names a subject.
Here's the test, and it's two words long. Could a reader answer your opening with "prove it"? If so, you've got a claim. If "prove it" makes no sense as a reply, you've written a title.
The running draft gives us both. Its weak paragraph opens, "Phones are a problem in lectures." That's a subject with a complaint attached. Its revised paragraph opens, "The strongest reason for a phone-free default is that the benefit is not spread evenly." A reader can push back on that. And once the point is a claim, the rest of Week 3 follows. Every sentence serves the point, which is unity. And the point gets evidence plus explanation, which is the PIE move.
Pause and try this. "Phones are a problem in lectures." Topic sentence or title?
Try saying "prove it" back to it.
Here's the answer. It works like a title. It names a subject and a complaint, so there's no claim for the paragraph to prove.
4. Thesis vs. topic
A friend tells you their essay is about campus parking. You ask, "What about it?" And they go quiet. That silence is the gap between a topic and a thesis.
Week 4 took Week 3's test and stretched it over a whole essay. The thesis is the sentence, sometimes two, that states an essay's main claim. It has to pass the two-part test. It's arguable, so a reasonable person could disagree. And it's specific, so it names what's claimed and often why.
The running draft started with a topic: the phone policy in lecture classes. Then it became a working thesis. That thesis says the college should make lecture sections phone-free by default, with a stated exception for documented accommodations and emergencies. And it says why: the benefit falls hardest on the students who struggle most, and the cost to everyone else is small. Many people prefer an open policy, so it's arguable. It names who, what, the exception, and why, so it's specific.
Four impostors sit where a thesis should be. A topic, a fact, a question, and an announcement. None of them takes a side.
Pause and try this. A sentence asks whether the campus should move to a four-day class schedule, and ends there. Which impostor is it?
Look at the mark at the end.
Here's the answer. It's a question. A thesis answers. Your answer to that question could become the thesis.
5. Showing vs. telling
A friend texts you two words about a commute: worst ever. You believe them, but you can't see a thing. Then they tell you the bus doors froze open in the rain. Now you're on the bus.
Week 5 named the difference. Telling is writing that names a feeling or a judgment, and so asks the reader to accept the writer's word instead of experiencing the moment. Showing is writing that gives the concrete sensory detail of a moment, so the reader experiences it and reaches the feeling without being told it.
Remember the camping trip? The telling version said the first trip was a disaster. The showing version said the tent poles kept slipping through wet fingers, and the instruction sheet in a pocket had turned to gray pulp. You can feel that one.
The cure hasn't changed since Week 5. Showing is specific sensory evidence, not more adjectives. Piling "cruel" and "icy" on the rain still tells.
Pause and try this. "I was miserable the whole time." Showing or telling?
Find the word that names a feeling.
Here's the answer. It's telling. "Miserable" names the feeling, so the reader takes your word for it instead of seeing why.
6. Ethos vs. logos
Two nurses at a community clinic give you the same advice about a swollen ankle. One says, trust me, I've seen this many times. The other explains that keeping the ankle above the heart lets gravity drain the fluid. Both might be right. But they persuade in different ways.
Week 6 gave you four appeals, in order: ethos, pathos, logos, kairos. Two of them get swapped most. Ethos is the appeal to the speaker's credibility and character. Logos is the appeal to reasoning and evidence.
The test is the "from anyone?" test. Would the sentence still convince you if a stranger said it? If yes, the reasoning is doing the work. That's logos. If the force depends on who's speaking, that's ethos.
Two neighbors travel with this pair. Kairos is timing and pathos is feeling. And a label isn't analysis. In Week 6, "King uses pathos to make the audience emotional" was a label. "King's speech persuades by making delay sound like the real danger" was a claim. Its evidence was that "Now is the time" opens four consecutive sentences, in the speech King delivered on 28 August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial. I'm naming that move, not analyzing it again.
Pause and try this. A recall notice explains which part fails and why. Ethos or logos?
Ask whether a stranger could say it.
Here's the answer. It's logos. The explanation convinces no matter who wrote it, so the reasoning is doing the persuading.
7. Warrant vs. evidence
A tenant tells a building board that the laundry room is full every evening. A board member asks, "So what?" The tenant has evidence. What the tenant hasn't said is why that evidence should lead to a later closing time.
Week 7 named the missing piece with the Toulmin model. The course keys four of its parts: claim, grounds, warrant, and rebuttal. Grounds are the evidence and reasons an argument points to in support of its claim. The warrant is the usually unstated assumption that links an argument's grounds to its claim; it explains why that evidence counts as support for that particular point.
So here's the test. When a reader asks "So what?", they want your warrant.
In the running draft, the grounds are the research on schools that banned phones. It found the gain in exam results concentrated among the lowest-achieving students. The warrant is that a college should adopt a low-cost practice whose benefit lands on the students who most need it. Without the warrant, the finding tells the committee nothing to do.
There's a neighbor pair here too. Answer the strongest objection, the steel man, and never a weak copy, the straw man.
Pause and try this. "The laundry room is full every evening." Grounds or warrant?
Is it something you point to, or the reason it counts?
Here's the answer. It's grounds. It's what the tenant points to. The warrant would explain why a crowded room means the hours should change.
8. The three-sentence habit
Picture that club treasurer again. Another officer hands her a budget proposal. The first thing she says is, "I agree with this." Everyone looks at each other. Agree with what? And why?
Here's the new idea. The three-sentence habit is the reading discipline of writing what a text says, how it persuades, and whether you agree in three separate sentences, in that order: summary, then analysis, then agreement.
Why that order? You summarize first, so you answer the text the writer wrote, not a straw man of it. You analyze second, so you see how the text is working on you. You agree or disagree last, with a reason that points to the text. Skip the first two and you get the agreement collapse. That's the slip in which a sentence such as "I agree with this" stands in for both the summary and the analysis. The reader judges a text without first reporting it fairly or explaining how it works.
Let's run it on the running draft's revised paragraph. Sentence one reports that the benefit lands mostly on the students who struggle most, and that the exception doesn't undo the policy. Sentence two says the paragraph persuades mainly through logos, because it turns one research finding into a reason a committee can act on. Sentence three can go either way. You might agree because the uneven benefit is the strongest reason. Or you might hold back because the research came from schools, and a lecture hall may differ. Either works, because it comes third and carries a reason.
The collapse sounds like this: "I agree with this paragraph because phones are distracting." That reason is about phones, not about the paragraph.
Pause and try this. "I agree with this paragraph because phones are distracting." What's missing?
Count the jobs that sentence actually does.
Here's the answer. The summary and the analysis are missing. It jumps to agreement, and its reason isn't about the text.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Revision re-sees; editing polishes. A summary reports; a response judges with reasons. A topic sentence invites "prove it"; a title doesn't. A thesis takes a side; a topic doesn't. Showing gives sensory evidence; telling names the feeling. Ethos is who's speaking; logos is reasoning that would convince from anyone. Grounds are what you point to; the warrant says why they count. And the three-sentence habit runs summary, then analysis, then agreement.
The midterm covers Objectives 1 to 4 as taught in Weeks 1 to 7, and you take it on your own, without AI. Read each item for the pair it's testing.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the practice set, and the discussion. Then, in Week 9, Research: Finding & Evaluating Sources, the text in front of you becomes a source, and the three-sentence habit is how you'll read it.
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