Kathleen Tizon

Session Notes

Agenda

Feedback Review

• Focus on the structural feedback.
• Establish a narrative
• Last paragraph
• First part would fit better elsewhere

Thesis Summary

• Language gestures toward meaning: it doesn’t possess it.

Statement Review

• Add a note about how these interest came to be.
• Medieval lit through contemporary lens
• Move personal details up in the piece to provide context earlier for your narrative.
• Fill in the opening with more of the why.

Reverse Outline

P1: My personal background

• Language influence
• Two loves of undergrad: contemporary literary theory and medieval literature

P2: Academic motivation

• Wesleyan’s faculty as a transition

P3 + P4: Evidence of my ability to research

P5: Why Penn

Revision Focus

• Restructure
• Personal narrative throughout
• Focus on the why behind everything you have done

Pre-Read Feedback

Key Take-Aways

Great work on this, Kathleen! I enjoyed reading it and appreciate you sharing it with me! I’ve left some praise and notes (with examples) below. Here, I’ll list a few big-picture points of feedback.

• I want to know more about you! Focus more on the why behind what you do and what you have done, or at least lead with it. As it is, you lead with facts, which do not help the reader connect with you.
• There are pockets of the personal, which make the statement feel a little disjointed. It’d be stronger if you switched up the order of your ideas and maintained a personal thread throughout.
• You open by answering “Why Penn?” rather than “Why me?”
• The last paragraph seems out of place. That personal info about language seems like it’d fit better earlier and could be something you firmly place in your framework/theme of exploring the relationship between literature and Nature, experience and language.
• There are some really interesting ideas that, to me, have insufficient context. They could be opportunities to bring in more personal info.

Praise

• I can feel your passion and pride for the work you have done, and I assume that readers of your statement will be moved to help you continue that pursuit.
• You have a wonderful grasp on your interests and how your previous research projects have influenced your aspirations.
• Your interest in Penn comes across well.
• I found your second paragraph especially interesting and would like to know more.

Notes

• Some sentences feel complex just for the sake of it, where an entire phrase could be cut without changing the meaning.

Through both the ambiguities and the precision of language, we encounter signifying fragments of an innate, complex humanity that comes through the stories that are told.

• At least to me, some phrases/sentences are unclear.

I am fascinated by the abstractions of language and the way in which the reader achieves a kind of agency in mediating meaning through various signifiers.

1. I don’t know what it means to mediate meaning, but this seems like an interesting idea, and I want to understand it.
• Some paragraphs start with simple facts, which would serve better as evidence for bigger, more personal ideas.

My senior honors thesis at Wesleyan […] was awarded the English Department’s Dorchester Prize for best thesis.

1. Instead, why not start the paragraph with why you wrote your thesis? Get your reader to root for you, then reveal that you were rewarded for your passion and effort.
• There are a few too many adverbs, which muddy some sentences. They could be omitted, or replaced by new adjectives or verbs.

These inescapable resources are inevitably related, but in conflict – neither can confirm the other directly.

Above all, I hope to do scholarly research in a passionately motivated environment.

1. I’d suggest choosing one adjective or listing adjective, rather than qualifying one.
• This very well could be because I’m unfamiliar with the subject, but I find that many of the nouns you use should be verbs. As nouns, there’s no corresponding subject or object, which makes it hard to follow what you’re saying. I don’t have enough context as a reader.

I argue that the dream vision is the most appropriate vehicle for facilitating the developments and deferrals that go into the constitution of subjectivity.

1. Who/what is doing the developing and deferring? What does it mean for those to go into the constitution of subjectivity?
2. Does the dream vision not facilitate the developments and deferrals? Is it important for it to be a vehicle for facilitating rather than the thing that facilitates?