Week 5: Research and Revise

Tuesday:

20 min: Paragraph building with They Say, I Say

5 min: Research spiel

10 min: Intro Paper 1

20 min: Sentence Revising

10 min: Guide to my margin notes, both handwritten and in Word (gold star teacher moment)

5 min: Bring up Revision clause in syllabus, warn them that the average is about a 22/50, tell them not to have a nervous breakdown, they'll be fine, and don't attack me at the end of class. In fact, don't attack me at all. Read my notes. Take a walk. A long walk. Read them again. Begin revising, based on what I've said. Go to the Writing Center. Then come see me next week.

This was a really good day. The format was different in that they didn't get into groups, possibly for the first time ever so far (they get into groups on Day 1, too). This may also have been the first day (really?!) that we spend solid time on in-class writing (not freewrites) that had a clear purpose: based on the homework they'd just read, the exercise I designed should have been pretty familiar to them. The task was to build a paragraph based on the source they had brought to class (note: this was a Tuesday class, meaning we hadn't seen each other in five days. There is always a risk on Tuesdays that they will have totally forgotten something they were supposed to bring to class. Thursdays are fine. Tuesdays are risky. I could tell that several of them flaked and didn't make a big deal out of it; I just said, "Take out your writing notebooks and the source you found to bring in today. Some of you have these bookmarked on your laptops; if so, go ahead and take those out. Those of you who forgot to do this, go ahead and fumble around in your backpacks a little bit, pretending to look for it, and just stumble through for the next fifteen minutes."

The heuristic was to build a paragraph that included the essential information to thoroughly introduce a source, which they'll be doing for all of their main sources for the first paper. There were six sentences:

1) how you found your source and why you chose it (this was part of their homework; they [ostensibly] wrote this information on their wiki pages

2) Full rhetorical context: author, author title/ profession, title of article, where/ when published (the other part of their homework that they wrote on their wiki page)

3) Main point of the article

4) Direct quote, with appropriate tag, i.e., "According to Tannen, "blah blah" (215). Good moment to remind them of in-text citation FORMAT, one of my pet peeves.

5) Say it again in your own words. This is a big hurdle for many incoming students: not only moving past drive-by quotes (and, by the way, calling them "quotes"?! What is that?? It's not a quote, yo. It's an actual person who said something worthy enough of repeating. You're quoting a person, not using a "quote." Anyway--getting a handle on that is step 1. Saying it in your own words is another huge hurdle. "Even if it's redundant," I say, "say it again. Use one of the templates in They Say, I Say: "In other words, Tannen claims that blah..." This assures that your reader is getting what *you* are getting out of the source.

To be continued...