Foundations |
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By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do each of the following without consulting notes or other resources:
Before
coming to class on Thursday, you should complete the following assignments: Read: course syllabus, this lesson, and Chapter 1 in Everything’s an Argument Our class activities this week include the following: Think Fast: In a
brief essay, describe your writing ability, noting both your strengths and
your weaknesses. Presentation: A
Review of Rhetoric (Professor Canada) Cooperative Learning: Introduce yourself to the other
members of your group. Working
together, brainstorm a list of ideas for improving your essays. Discussion: During
this time, we will discuss the insights and questions that have emerged
during our reading, “Think Fast” exercise, my presentation, and cooperative
learning. Workshop: Trade
your essay with someone nearby.
Using what you know about effective rhetoric, write down at least
three strengths and at least three weaknesses in your partner’s essay. Make suggestions for how the writer
can improve the essay Think Again: Using
what you have learned or reviewed in this lesson, revise your essay about
your writing ability. Make sure
that this essay has a thesis, effective topic sentences, well-organized
paragraphs, ample support, and an engaging style. Conferences: While
the rest of you are working on the “Think Again” exercise, I will meet with
two of you in one-on-one conferences.
During this time, I will review some of your writing, orally quiz you
on lesson objectives, and field your questions. Announcements: We
will wrap up this lesson with announcements regarding upcoming lessons, as
well as other relevant subjects. Names and TermsMake sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following names and terms:
Resources
You can
find more information about the subject covered in this lesson by consulting
the resources listed below: The SF Writer is a handbook containing
extensive information designed to help writers prewrite, write, and revise. The University
Writing Center, located in Dial 131, has tutors who can help you
improve your writing. Call 521-6168
to make an appointment. Updated August 12, 2002
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IntroductionYou probably have been writing for about as long as you have been tying your shoes. Now, a decade or more later, you can tie your shoes perfectly without thinking, but writing may remain tedious, frustrating, even maddening for you—as indeed it does for many other people of all ages. What's so hard about writing? For starters, writing is a more complex task than shoe-tying, requiring several advanced cognitive skills. Also, the challenges have increased since you began writing. In the beginning, it was enough to write a description of your house or a letter to a friend. By the time you are in college, professors are requiring you to compose various types of arguments and support them with material gathered from research. Although writing these types of essays will never be easy, it can be made easier. This lesson is designed to help you review what you already have learned about writing effective essays and to prepare for the challenges of writing researched arguments—the focus of this course. DiscussionRhetoricBefore you set out to write good essays in this course and other courses, you will want to be sure that you know what good writing is. In other words, you will want to know something about rhetoric, the art of communicating effectively. You already know quite a bit about rhetoric. You know, for example, that writing should be clear. After all, the whole point of writing—or speaking, for that matter—is to take the ideas in your own head and move them into someone else’s head; if the message is not clear, if the ideas get garbled along the way, the point of communicating is lost. You know, too, that the message you are attempting to convey should be accurate and insightful. If it isn’t, why bother to stick it into someone else’s head? If the message does not engage the audience’s attention or contains distracting errors, the audience may have trouble absorbing it; thus, your message also should be interesting, perhaps even fun, to read and should be free from misspellings, typographical errors, and other lapses. Finally, you know that you have an obligation to your audience to be honest—to let readers or listeners know, for example, when the ideas you are conveying are your own and when they come from someone else. In fact, these four elements of good writing—“effective rhetoric,” if you are feeling sophisticated—are exactly those we will strive to achieve in this course. They are also the ones I will use when I grade your essays. On the syllabus, I have described them under the headings of content, clarity, style, and integrity: ContentThe portfolio must contain all the assignments described on this syllabus. Each individual project in the portfolio should thoroughly and insightfully address its subject with accurate, credible, timely, and relevant information. Oral remarks made during the presentations, furthermore, should be accurate. Argumentative essays should state clear, substantive, contestable, and precise claims early and support these claims with appropriate evidence. ClarityEach written project in the portfolio, as well as oral remarks made during the presentations, should present information in a clear, logical fashion. In general, each paragraph in the written projects generally should begin with a precise topic sentence, followed by clear, well-organized sentences that support the topic sentence. Transitional words and phrases should effectively guide the audience through the information. StyleAll work should engage the audience with lively, concise writing or oral presentation and should generally lack lapses in tone, register, punctuation, mechanics, spelling, word choice, and grammar. Each project should effectively incorporate source material with proper use of attribution, paraphrases, and quotations. Longer projects should begin with engaging introductions and include satisfying conclusions. Both written and oral projects should be functional and attractive, conforming to all appropriate professional standards. In particular, all parenthetical citations and lists of works cited in the written projects should conform to MLA style. IntegrityEach project must be your own work. That is, except for properly cited quotations, every sentence and phrase must be in your own words. All interpretations, except for those properly cited, also must be your own. If you turn in someone else's work, use a source's exact words without placing these words in quotation marks, or use an interpretation you found in a source without giving credit to the source, you are guilty of plagiarism and may fail this course. You must be prepared to prove that you have done all your own work by showing me your sources and discussing the details of your project with me in conference. If your writing contains these elements, you not only will earn an A in this course, but will stand a good chance of succeeding in other endeavors, as well. Communication, after all, is at the heart of virtually every profession, as well as family and community life. But how exactly does a writer achieve these elements of effective rhetoric. In other words, how do you become a good writer? The Writing ProcessYou may have learned in your earlier writing courses that writing is a process. That is, rather than simply sit down and produce a polished final draft all at once, even the best writers actually go through stages—three, to be exact. First, they do some prewriting. That is, they generate some ideas for their essay, poem, novel, or whatever writing project they happen to have in mind. Next, in the writing stage, they put these ideas into some kind of form—often an outline, followed by a draft. Finally, and most importantly, they do some revision, making changes in organization, content, and other areas in order to improve the draft. Frequently, one of these stages will lead the writer back to an earlier one. In the process of revising an essay, for example, a writer may realize that he or she needs to generate more ideas and thus returns to the prewriting stage. Below are some tips for managing each of these stages effectively: PrewritingWhat do you want—and need—to say on this subject? That is the question you want to answer in the prewriting stage. In this stage, you generate ideas and find information to put into your essay. Sometimes prewriting—or, as ancient rhetoricians such as Aristotle put it, invention—takes place in the writer’s head. When embarking on particularly long, important, or ambitious projects, however, writers generally should do some prewriting on paper or on a computer screen. They also will want to sketch a plan for their project to make sure that they use their time effectively and complete the best possible final draft by the deadline. When you have a writing project, begin by making a list of the various tasks you need to complete. When writing a college research paper, for example, you will need to do some prewriting, find sources, take notes, create an outline, write a draft, revise this draft several times, compile a list of works cited, and proofread the entire paper carefully. Once you have made this list, assign each task to a specific day or group of days on your calendar. Be realistic so that you don’t fall behind and plan to start early. By starting early—visiting the library on the day you receive the assignment, for instance—you lengthen the amount of time you have to write a strong paper. With this extra time, you can stop when you get tired or stuck and come back to it later. Extra time also means you have a better chance of getting the sources you need for your project. After you have your schedule, do some prewriting. For example, you might try freewriting, in which you spend three or four minutes writing everything that comes to your mind about your topic in paragraph form without stopping. Some writers prefer clustering, in which they jot words in bubbles and then branch off into related words in separate bubbles. Others like simply listing words and ideas on a sheet of paper or on a computer screen. Find out what generates the most good ideas for you and use this prewriting technique. In many cases, you also will need to conduct some research on your topic, as well. As you read articles and examine other kinds of evidence, take abundant notes, recording not only the facts and ideas you encounter, but your own reactions to this information. If you take your notes in the outline view of a word-processing program, such as Microsoft Word, you will make the next step—creating an outline—much easier. Place each fact or idea in a separate part of the outline so that you can move things easily later. WritingYou might think of the lists, diagrams, notes, and other items you generated during the prewriting stage as the raw material for your essay. In the writing stage, you put this material into a form that will make it easy for your audience to digest and appreciate. First, begin organizing your notes into an outline. Look for patterns among the many separate statistics, observations, details, and other items you have collected and generated. For example, you may notice that two statistics, a quotation from a survey respondent, and one of your own insights all seem to be making the same point. Create a heading for this point and move all of the related evidence under this heading. If a piece of information does not seem to fit anywhere, place it under a heading called "Miscellaneous”; you may find a place for this information later in the writing process. Continue sorting your notes until every point is under a heading. Look for ways to combine or divide headings and points so that they occur in bunches of three to five. Read your entire outline and then write a thesis based on the information it contains. At the top of your outline, create a heading called "Introduction" and place this thesis under it. Now read your outline again. Move headings and points until the outline seems relatively logical and well-organized. When you are ready to write a draft—that is, a version of your essay in paragraph form—refer to this outline. Depending on the length of the essay and the structure of your outline, you may write a paragraph for each major point or a paragraph for each minor point. In any case, try to stick to your outline as much as possible. If your outline is logical and you stick to it, you increase your chances that your paragraphs—groups of related sentences often organized hierarchically or chronologically—will be unified. A unified paragraph is one in which all of the information relates to the same specific topic. In general, you will want to make sure that each of these paragraphs also begins with a topic sentence, a sentence that announces the point of the paragraph and connects this paragraph back to the thesis. The remaining sentences should relate directly to this topic sentence and should appear in an order that will seem logical and natural to the reader. Again, your outline can guide you. If you have taken thorough, accurate notes in your outline, you can even save yourself a lot of typing by simply cutting and pasting points from your outline into your draft. Often, the sentences in an paragraph should be organized according to levels of generality. That is, the paragraph should contain perhaps three to five sentences that are only slightly more specific than the topic sentence; each of these sentences should be followed by other sentences that are even more specific, and so on. Under this scheme, the topic sentence is a “level 1” sentence, the slightly more specific sentences are “level 2” sentences, and so on. Thus, the sentences in an effective paragraph might be labeled in this way: 1 Topic sentence 2 Supporting sentence 3 Details and explanation 3 Details and explanation 2 Supporting sentence 3 Details and explanation 3 Details and explanation 3 Details and explanation 2 Supporting sentence 3 Details and explanation 4 More specific elaboration 4 More specific elaboration 3 Details and explanation Does this structure look familiar? It is the same kind of structure you created in your outline. That’s why following a logical outline can help you to draft a logical paragraph. Finally, make sure that your paragraph contains transitions, words and phrases that indicate connections among sentences. In this paragraph, for example, I have used words and phrases such as "In other words," "Finally," and “for example” to help the reader see the direction of my ideas. The writing stage may be the most difficult one for you. Nevertheless, try not to give in to writer’s block, the mental state in which a writer feels paralyzed and cannot seem to complete a draft or even make much progress in it. If you have typed your notes directly into an outline, you already have taken an important step toward fending off writer’s block because you now do not have to confront the ugly and terrifying blank page or blank screen. If you still have trouble getting started, however, you may be worrying too much about minor things such as style and grammar. To free your mind of these distractions and focus on getting a draft done, try writing a "speed draft." Give yourself two uninterrupted hours to write the entire paper. Set an alarm to go off when your time is up. Even better, use a watch that beeps every fifteen minutes or half-hour. Force yourself to produce a complete draft in this time. The finished product will be very rough, of course, but you will have a chunk of material to revise, which is often easier to do than to write. RevisionThere is more to revising a draft than running spell check. In fact, the most important work you do on an article—work that could make the difference between something mediocre and something outstanding—may take place in the revision stage because it is in this stage that you can review what you have done, evaluate its success, and make improvements. When revising a draft, begin by looking at the big picture. That is, evaluate the success of your draft in the areas of content, clarity, style, and integrity. Try to answer the following questions: Content: Is the thesis or claim clear? Does it state something worth discussing? If you are reading someone else's essay, try to state the essay’s thesis or claim in your own words and ask the writer if you got it right. Does the essay contain relevant, credible, and sufficient evidence for its claim? Try to anticipate questions that readers might have about the material and then ask the writer or yourself these questions. In particular, ask these five questions again and again: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Demand exact figures and specific names. The more specific the evidence, the more compelling it is. Second, check the accuracy of the material. While editors lack the time to check every fact in everything they read, they can and should check anything that they think might be wrong, either because it does not match what they think is correct or because it just seems like the kind of thing someone would be likely to confuse. Clarity: As you read each paragraph, underline its topic sentence. Comment on the connections between each paragraph and the essay’s claim. Does each paragraph advance this claim? If not, why not? Is the order of paragraphs logical, or would a different structure be more effective? Comment on the organization of individual paragraphs. Is it organized according to "levels of generality"? Does the writer effectively use transitions to move you from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph? Do you understand the connections the writer is trying to make? Style: How has the writer packaged his or her ideas? If necessary, suggest ways the writer could engage the reader more effectively, perhaps by using more precise words, mixing long and short sentences, adding figurative language, or cutting unnecessary words. Integrity: Has the writer properly identified quotations and ideas from sources through attributive phrases, parenthetical citations, and a list of works cited? Has the writer used his or her own words and syntax when paraphrasing material from sources? Once you have made all of your substantial revisions and are satisfied with your draft’s content, clarity, style, and integrity, you are ready to proofread. Proofreading is a matter of seeing the little black marks on the page. It's harder than it sounds. Indeed, perhaps you have had this unsettling experience: You sweat over a paper, writing, revising, reading every paragraph three, four, maybe ten times. You confidently hand it over to your classmate or roommate and sit back to wait for the praise. Before your back hits the chair, the reader says, "You misspelled 'the' in the first sentence." How does it happen? The problem is that writers are too close to their work. They are so preoccupied by the evidence, transitions, paragraph organization, and style that they miss those pesky misspellings and comma problems that blaze like signal flares to other readers. The key to successful proofreading is actually seeing the words and punctuation—not the cogent argument, not the solid organization, not the stylistic flourishes, but the little black marks on the page. Here are some tips for seeing and correcting those marks.
ConclusionIn this lesson, we have reviewed some basic principles of effective rhetoric and identified some strategies for using the writing process to achieve these principles in our own writing. Keep this information in mind. It is the foundation on which we will build over the remainder of the semester. In particular, make sure you can plan a project, generate ideas, organize material through an outline, write effective thesis statements and topic sentences, improve an essay through revision, and use proofreading strategies to remove distracting errors in your writing. If you have trouble in any of these basic areas, you should see me right away. |