May 05, 2005
Writing "What it does" statements for essays.
One of the things that I have been struggling with as an instructor is how to avoid correcting students' writing and instead help them become better writers. In the former case, the instructor works on the written product, editing, polishing, making changes, etc., while in the latter case, the instructor tries to help students develop the skills to do all those things themselves.
The former mode is easier to do, which is why I have fallen into the trap of doing it in the past. The latter mode seems to me to be much more beneficial for the student in the long run but I am not sure how to do it. Here is one idea I am going to try in the fall with my SAGES university seminar course.
This idea stems from the fact that I feel that getting a good structure for a paper is key to good writing. In other words, how do the ideas in the paper "flow." If you ask people what each paragraph in an article or paper or essay is about, they will tend to tell you what each paragraph says. i.e., they will describe its contents.
But this time, I am going to number each paragraph in the essay and also ask students to say in one sentence what the paragraph does. i.e., what is its role in the essay. Students should be able to say things like "provides evidence for the author's first main reason", "summarizes an opposing view", "provides statistical data to support a point", "uses and analogy to clarify the idea in the previous paragraph", etc.
So if as a class we are going to read an essay and there are fifteen of us in a class, student 1 will be responsible for paragraphs 1,16,31,46, etc; student 2 for paragraphs 2,17,32,47, etc. and so on. Then at the beginning of the discussion of the paper, we will go around the class and each person will say what each paragraph says and what it does. At the end, we should all have a quick synopsis of the essay, both in terms of content and structure.
Students, when writing their own essays, will also have to provide a "what it does" sentence for each paragraph in their essay. I am hoping that this exercise will make students more self-conscious about the structure of their own writing and better able to critique the writing of others.
I got this idea from the book Engaging Ideas by John C. Bean (chapter 8, p. 138).
Mano Singham
Posted by mxs24 at 08:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 04, 2005
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Cheers,
Kim
Posted by kke1 at 09:33 AM | Comments (1)