Posts Tagged: direct instruction

Scaffolding Development

• Starting Point: I am writing about __________, and I am going to argue, show or prove __________.
• Revising for voice: Rewrite the sentence to match your personal writing style.
• Revising for conventions: Rewrite the sentence to match disciplinary conventions.

Testing for Strength

• Do I answer the question (posed by the assignment guidelines, my own research proposal, etc.)?
• Have I taken a debatable position?
• Is my thesis statement too vague? What makes my topic “good,” “successful,” or “disappointing”?
• Does my thesis address readers’ “how” and “why” questions?
• Do my thesis and the body of my paper match?

Promote new/alternate research strategies: K-W-L –> Delay thesis development

• K: What do I know?
• W: What do I want to know?
• L: What have I learned?

Build in recursive writing process activities

• 5-Minute Writes
  • Research activity –> Summary activity (i.e., summarize one source) –> Synthesis activity (i.e., synthesize information from a few sources) –> Thesis activity (simple statement through revisions)
  • What have I learned, and how does my new knowledge affect my thesis?

• Peer Response
  • Thesis tests: So what? How? Why?
  • Do the thesis and the body text match?
  • Separate sessions for higher order concerns (thesis, content, organization) and lower order concerns (grammar, punctuation)

Since conventions can vary widely among rhetorical communities, students (novice members of, or temporary visitors to, these communities) benefit from direct instruction in writing for varied audiences and purposes. They frequently struggle with reading model texts that employ unfamiliar writing styles, so as instructors, we need to incorporate support beyond simply providing sample texts.

Even as more advanced writers who are used to tackling academic discourse, when we encounter texts from another discipline, we often have to revise our reading strategies and slow our reading pace as we adjust to a different writing style. Yet our reading strategies (and struggles) often are invisible to our students.

To support students’ development as writers, if we give them samples of “good” writing, we also should give them strategies for reading these often varied texts. In addition, we can implement several direct instruction techniques to support developing writers.