Teaching Tips: Writing

Story critique (essay)
This is a five-paragraph essay.
1st paragraph:
Introduction
Capture your audience’s attention, maybe with a question or an interesting idea.
Give the background for the story. Include who wrote it and when and its name.
2nd paragraph:
Character and setting
Who is in the story? Where are they in the story? When does the story take place?
3rd paragraph:
Conflict and plot
What is the storyline? What happens in the story? What do the characters do and say?
4th paragraph:
Climax and theme/moral
When does the story resolve itself? What is the story about? What does it try to teach?
5th paragraph
Conclusion
Give your opinion on the story without using personal pronouns.
The last sentence should be reflected/repeated in the essay title. (This brings your whole paper full circle and makes it more coherent.)

This is my favorite paper to teach because my students enjoy it (as much as they enjoy any paper) and overall they do a very good job with it.

To Begin
Talk about why people need to define the words they use.

Dating
An example I give here is two people dating. One says, “I love you.” The other says, “I love you, too.” Both think the other person understood what they said and agrees with it. But, in this case, the first person means, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” and the second person means, “I like being with you till somebody better comes along.”

Challenger
Another strong example is the issue of the Challenger explosion. The engineers working on the Challenger wrote the administration and said “the secondary O-rings” have problems. Administration wrote back and asked if the primary O-rings were good. Yes, they were, but the secondary O-rings were problematic. Administration decided that as long as the primary O-rings were okay, there was no reason to worry about the secondary O-rings.

The issue here was that administration heard “secondary” and thought “back-up.” The engineers were saying “secondary,” which was the official name, meaning “second kind of.”

Because the two groups did not understand each other, the Challenger launched and blew up in sight of everyone standing there and an entire school whose teacher was on the ship.

Sometimes the difference in definitions can make a life and death difference.

This illustrates to the students why they might need to define words, even words they use all the time.

Real life examples of definition paragraphs
I also give examples of definition paragraphs from real life. This is growing over time and you could probably come up with your own set of real life definition paragraphs.

Abstract Nouns

Then I give definitions of and examples of concrete and abstract nouns.

It is important that students know the difference between abstract and concrete nouns because they need to know what they are going to be defining.

Students Begin

Then I have the students choose an abstract noun to write on.

To help them think through, as a visual/kinesthetic prewriting activity, I have them look up definitions for their word online. I usually have them look up multiple definitions for the word. An easy way to do this is put “define x” into Google. Then the first one is web definitions for the word, if such exist. Here they are looking for any quote on the topic.

Then, still as part of their prewriting, I have them look up quotes on the word. Here they are looking for a quote they agree with.

This is a good time to go through MLA internal citations and Works Cited for electronic sources. Only these two sources are used in the paper and most of the students do a good job with this. It’s much easier for them to say something like: “Princeton’s definition of honor is…” Or Benjamin Franklin said, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” (”Health”).

Definition Paragraph

I discuss with the students types of definitions. I have the students use the definition they found and add to it or define it more precisely.

I also have them use the quotation they found, if they wish.

I suggest they start off with questions or a personal anecdote which tell why they are interested in this word.

A student example of beauty.

A student example about love.

Three Examples

The next three paragraphs are, I tell them, examples of this word that match their definition of the word. And, since I told them to pick a word that means something to them, most of them have examples from their lives or the lives of those they know.

This is where their imagination and creativity can run riot, giving many details. I often get long papers because I allow them to choose their topic and their examples.

Conclusion

Obviously there ought to be a concluding paragraph to tie it all together. What should go in it? They can remind the reader of the definition. They can say what the word does not mean. They can recap the illustrations. They can add an example that was too short to give in the illustration paragraphs. They can give an example that is NOT their definition and say why it is not, ending with their definition again.

Online examples

This is one I wrote in class with the students watching, to show them the thought process I went through.

This is a student definition/illustration paper written in class.

What We Learn from Writing on the Job is an article by Lester Faigley and Thomas P. Miller in College English, Vol. 44, No. 6. (Oct., 1982), pp. 557-569.

I read this article in 1994. Below is my review at the time:

“What We Learn from Writing on the Job” did not tell me much that I did not already know. Having taught business and professional writing at the university level for the last five years, I have read this article before and used a similar study done by IBM to acquaint my students with the necessity of writing on the job. I had forgotten the high percentage of collaboration and the different types of writing done by the average in-house writer, so those numbers were interesting to re-read.

It’s been fourteen years since I last wrote it and I have not taught business writing since then, except for one not-so-great interview experience.

So I thought I would re-read it.

Here are my new thoughts:

The article discusses issues that were certainly relevant in the 80s, a lack of study on writing at work, for example. But this deficiency has been fixed and is no longer a problem.

However, there is one point that is useful for college English teachers and our students:

By the measure of the median the 200 people we surveyed wrote 2.9 letters and memos to persons inside their company or agency and 5.2 letters to persons outside in a given week. Only 17 individuals did not write letters or memos on the job.

This might be something we can share with our students. Writing is necessary, even when you are not an English teacher.

Students can feel put upon, having the impression that no one understands their position and everyone is against them. This can be exacerbated when the class deals with controversial issues. There are several ways to bring balance, not just to the classroom, but also to the student’s understanding of an issue.

When students deal with controversial topics, they can write on the side they agree with and, unfortunately, they will often make sweeping logical errors because it is the side they agree with. One way to minimize this is to require them to write on the side they disagree with, although as a teacher you have to know which side they are on before the assignment is given. Another is to require refutations. A third is to have them write on both sides of the argument, creating two balanced papers arguing first against their stance and then for it. All these approaches are useful and in addition to honing the students’ argumentation, they can sometimes bring the students around to another point of view.

This is my second proposal for the TYCA-SW.

which is all wrong.

Write Mindset says:

Write how you talk.

I am a college teacher, so maybe I’m all wrong. After all, the post says:

One of the main reasons people find it difficult to write is ….the fault of our education systems.

But I tell my students they should NOT write how they talk, for several reasons.

1. They don’t speak in complete sentences. Writing is supposed to make things clear to the reader. Generally incomplete sentences don’t do that.

2. They have to fill in the gaps. When they are speaking, if someone doesn’t understand, that someone can ask them. But when they are writing, the reader can’t ask questions. The students need to consider what things will cause questions and answer those in their writing.

3. Most conversations flow. They are like a creek, which hits a boulder here and moves, hits a sand bank there and shifts. Writing, usually, has a purpose. It’s supposed to complete that purpose. If it does lots of other things in the writing, even if it still gets to the purpose, people will be put off. If I am spending my time reading, you had better not be wasting my time by wandering off the topic.

Jenny D is doing/has done her dissertation on the writing/reading correlation. What makes better readers of 4th graders?

I don’t teach 4th graders anymore, but “higher writing/medium reading” and “medium writing/higher reading” seem to be good ways to go. Of course, so is “lower writing/medium reading,” but you know that I as a writing teacher am not going there.

It looks like, according to my reading of what she says, that the reason higher writing/ higher reading doesn’t work is the teacher doesn’t have as much time to focus on each piece of work. The class is doing more things related to writing/reading, but in about the same amount of time as everyone else.

Does this say anything for my classes? What is the focus? What should the focus be?

I think that I ought to think about examining fewer samples in 1301, since we do so much writing there. A single excellent example or perhaps one excellent and one mediocre piece, with a discussion of the problems with the mediocre piece, might serve my students better.

I’ve rewritten my syllabus for 1301, but not for 1302 yet. What should I do with it? I like it just about where it is. We’re doing one novel, two plays, a bunch of short stories, and a lot of poems. And maybe one novella. But we’re only writing four papers.

Just a thought, since it was on a similar tangent.

Killian Advertising has some atrocious cover letter “bloopers.” Except that they were done on purpose, so I don’t think they can be called bloopers. There are other horrible writing examples on other pages.

And, believe it or not, they say that college teachers often send them examples of terrible writing. They say it happens because the teacher grades it, the student doesn’t like the grade, the student goes to the dean, the dean chastises the teacher, and the teacher-untenured-sends it on to Killian. So beware of your writing appearing on the web.

I first read about it at the Cranky Professor.

from an advertising perspective. Maybe I need to re-read this before freshman comp next semester. Disrupt! And, even more importantly, what would this mean in terms of evangelism?

Killian Law #3: Every persuasive communication involves an element of the unexpected.

Okay, the paper had something that didn’t have me cracking up. It said, “Give students a chance to improve their grades by rewriting their papers.”

I teach writing. So they have lots of writing to do. And they are required to rewrite their two biggest papers and their first paper. After that, I allow rewrites.

How do I grade the rewrites? I grade them the same way I graded the original, except I take off double the amount of points if they don’t fix something I marked. If they try to fix it, but it is still wrong, I don’t double the points. Then I average the two grades. I think that is more than fair.

And it gets them seeing what their errors are, so they improve on the things that they tend to miss. In a way, it’s a personalized grammar exercise. They have to fix the grammar errors they made and no one has to work on grammar they understand already.