Three forms of activity easily integrate into witing-intensive courses. First are those activities which focus only in the CONTENT, such as for example lectures and discussions of texts. Second are activities related solely to WRITING as separate from the content concerns of the course. Grammar drills or sentence combining exercises fall into this category, but so would lecturing on writing in general or examining models of good writing regardless of the content. Third are activities which teach BOTH WRITING AND CONTENT. Peer critiquing, journal writing, and group brainstorming teach both writing and content as does examining model essays which are chosen for the quality associated with the writing and also the worth of this content. The following advice are meant to show how writing may be taught not simply as a skill that is mechanicalthrough sentence and paragraph modeling), nor merely given that display of information (by concentrating solely on content), but as a generative intellectual activity with its own right. They have been based on three premises:
that students can learn a deal that is great themselves as writers by becoming more careful readers;
that astute readers deal with the dwelling for the text and discover that analyzing the author’s choices at specific junctures provides them with a surer, more detailed grasp of content;
that students will give their writing more focus and direction by thinking about details as areas of a whole, whether that whole be a sentence, paragraph, or chapter.
Thus, focus on a discipline’s language, methodology, formal conventions, and methods for creating context–as these are illustrated in texts, lectures, and student papers–is an effective method of teaching writing.
Summary and Analysis Exercises
A) Have students write a 500-word summary of about 2000 words of text; then a 50-word summary; then a sentence summary that is single. Compare results for inclusivity, accuracy, emphasis, and nuance.
B) Analyze a text chapter or section. How can it be constructed? What has the author done to really make the right parts add up to an argument?
C) Analyze a particularly complex paragraph from a text. How is it come up with? What gives it unity? What role does it play within the entire chapter or section of text?
Organizational Pattern Work
A) Scramble a paragraph and get students: 1) to place it together; 2) to comment on the processes that are mental within the restoration, the decisions about continuity they had to produce based on their sense of the author’s thinking.
B) Have students find several kinds of sentences in a text, and explain exactly, within the terms and spirit of the text, what these sentences are designed to do: juxtapose, equate, polarize, rank, distinguish, make exceptions, concede, contrast. Often, needless to say, sentences will do a couple of of the plain things at a time.
C) Have students examine an author’s punctuation and explain, again in terms of the argument, why, say, a semicolon was used.
D) Have students outline as a method of analyzing structure and talk about the choices a writer makes and how these choices donate to reaching the writer’s purpose.
Formulation of Questions and Acceptability of Evidence
A) exactly what do be treated as known? What exactly is procedure that is acceptable ruling cases in or out?
B) Discuss how evidence is tested against an hypothesis, and how hypotheses are modified. (How models do my homework are made and placed on data; how observations develop into claims, etc.)
C) Examine cause and effect; condition and result; argumentative strategies, such as comparison-contrast, and agency (especially the utilization of verbs), as basic building blocks in definition and explanation.
Peer critiquing and discussion of student writing may be handled in a true number of different ways. The purpose of such activities is to have students read the other person’s writing and develop their very own critical faculties, using them to greatly help one another improve their writing. Peer critiquing and discussion help students understand how their very own writing compares with that of the peers and helps them uncover the characteristics that distinguish successful writing. It is essential to understand that an instructor criticizing a text for a course is not peer critiquing; with this will not provide the students practice in exercising their very own skills that are critical. Here are some different types of various ways this is handled, and then we encourage you to modify these to match your purposes that are own.
A) The Small Groups Model–The class is divided into three sets of five students each. Each week the student submits six copies of his or her paper, one when it comes to instructor and another for every single person in her group. One hour per week is dedicated to group meetings by which some or all the papers into the group are discussed. Before this combined group meeting, students must read all of the papers from their group and must write comments to be shared with the other writers. Thus, weekly writing, reading and critiquing are a part of the program, and students develop skills through repeated practice that they will be struggling to develop if only asked to critique on 3 or 4 occasions. As the teacher is present with each group, he or she can lead the discussion to help students improve these critical skills.
B) The Pairs Model–Students can be paired off to learn and touch upon one another’s writing such that each student will receive written comments from 1 other student plus the teacher. The teacher can, needless to say, go over the critical comments along with the paper to help students develop both writing and critical skills. This method requires no special copying and need take very classroom time that is little. The teacher may decide to allow some time for the pairs to go over each other’s work, or this could be done outside the class. The disadvantage with this method is the fact that the trained teacher cannot guide the discussions and students are limited by comments from only one of the peers.
C) Small Groups within Class–Many teachers break their classes into small groups (from 3 to 7 students) and permit class time for the groups to critique. The teacher can circulate among groups or sit in on an entire session with one group.
D) Critiques and Revision–Many teachers combine peer critiquing with required revisions to teach students simple tips to improve not only their mechanical skills, but in addition their thinking skills. Students might have critical comments from their-teachers as well as from their peers to utilize. Some teachers like to have students revise a draft that is first only comments from their peers and then revise an extra time on the basis of the teacher’s comments.
E) Student Critiques–Students must certanly be taught how to critique each other’s work. Although some teachers may leave the type of the response up to the students, most attempt to give their students some direction.
1) Standard Critique Form–This is a couple of questions or guidelines general adequate to be applicable to virtually any writing a learning student might do. In English classes, the questions focus on such staples of rhetoric as audience, voice and purpose; in philosophy, they might guide the student to look at the logic or structure of a disagreement.
2) Assignment Critique Form–This is a collection of questions designed designed for a writing task that is particular. Such a form gets the advantageous asset of making students attend to the aspects that are special to your given task. If students use them repeatedly, however, they might become dependent they critique on them, never asking their own critical questions of the texts.
3) Descriptive Outline–Instead of providing questions to direct students, some teachers choose to teach their students to write a “descriptive outline.” The student reads the paper and stops to write after every section or paragraph, recording what she or he thought the section said and his or her responses or questions concerning it. The student writes his or her “summary comments” describing his or her reaction to the piece as a whole, raising questions about the writing, and perhaps making suggestions for further writing at the end.
Since writing in itself is of value, teachers do not need to grade all writing assignments–for instance journals, exploratory writing, and early drafts of more formal pieces. Teachers could make many comments on such writing to help students further their thinking but may watch for a far more finished, formal product before assigning grades.