Portfolios. We started class by setting up the portfolios you will use to workon and turn in most of your writing for this course. A sample portfolio is posted to the right under course documents. We got most of the permissions fixed so I could take a quick look - and if you don't hear back from me that means you are good. If something is causing trouble for you - send me an email or we can set up some time for us to have a conference.
Baseline essays. After you set up your portfolios, we talked for a minute about the baseline essays. In general, my read of the baseline essays suggests that we should focus on:
- close reading of the texts you are writing about (most of you took a position on whether to build on the shore or not, but these replies did not really deal with the central points of the reading, which was about the importance of barrier islands, and the negative effects of building artificial barriers to "harden" the shoreline),
- making sure you are in a "conversation" with the assigned readings
- developing context (background and other explanation for why you are writing about what you are writing about)
- providing detailed examples, illustrations, information to support your points (development).
We will also spend some time on organization, both the overall organization for academic essays, and the organization of paragraphs and sections - but you are actually doing pretty well with this one. Also, most of you are pretty solid on spelling, grammar and sentence correctness.
We will also work on writing process. The most important gains for you in this course will be to learn a process to use to plan your papers BEFORE you open up a document and start composing sentences, and to develop effective practices for revising. Actually, we started on this today in our talk about summaries.
Reflection on baseline essays. During the last part of the first hour, you posted your baseline + revised baseline to your portfolio. Then you scored it according to the rubric. This scoring process included a sentence or two to explain your score (why you took off points). After you scored your essay you wrote a short essay where you described:
- what you did well in your writing
- what you need to work on
- and what you need to DO to strengthen the weaknesses in your writing.
Summaries.
You started the second part of class by working in groups to identify the main focus and supporting points of the Introduction to They Say/I Say. After reviewing how to skim an article by making use of the organizational features of academic writing (titles, headings, the fact that each section will focus on what is stated in the heading and each paragraph in that section will develop that focus in a different way, as well as the facts that topic & concluding sentences generally state the focus for a paragraph, and introductions & conclusions to essays often provide short overviews or reprises of what the essay focuses on), you created a list of the points => which we then put on the board.
We used a section by section format - rephrasing (rather than writing down quotes) the main points of each section. Research shows that readers who put what the read in an essay into their own words retain more of the reading, write better papers, and get higher grades. I'm just saying. You decide what you want to do. We then made a list of important terms => terms we would need to mention if we were summing up this Introduction. This is the first part of good process for writing a summary. At the same time = you can't use that list of "what's in the essay" in the order it is written: the purpose of a summary is to consolidate/encapsulate = shorten up the material from the essay, and to do that you usually need to combine and rearrange the author's points. So after you have your list of points - think about the best order for presenting them and how you will combine + rearrange them so that you hit the main points in fewer words.
Assignment sheet. As pointed out in TS/IS => no summary includes EVERYTHING, and what it does include will depend who you are writing to and why you are writing (audience + purpose). We took a look at about half of the criteria on the assignment sheet for your first summary. You will be summarizing Brandon King's essay on The American Dream. And you will use the assignment sheet and Chapter 1& 2 as directions for how to write that summary.
The American Dream. You spent the last section of class identifying Kings main focus and supporting points, and listing the terms that you will need to hit in your summary. I also directed your attention to the templates in They Say/I Say that indicate how to write summaries for when you are going to agree, disagree or respond in some more complicated way.
Amazing! What a lot of work we did in this class!
For Thursday:
Read: Chapters 1 & 2 of TS/IS
Write: Finish posting your writing about your baseline essay to your Portfolio, and send me your link if you haven't done so already.
Write: a draft summary of King's essay. Post your notes/brainstorming/ planning process AND your draft essay. That way, when we workshop your summaries in class, you will have your notes there to use as a resource. Your planning writing and the draft summary should be attached to the file cabinet page in your portfolio for Summaries.
Good writing - and see you on Thursday!
No comments:
Post a Comment