Posts Tagged: drafting

Developing a Workable Plan, Talking out Ideas, Building Momentum, Incubation versus Procrastination, Narrowing a Topic, Developing a Thesis Statement, Topic-Restriction-Illustration, Developing Support, Threading a Thesis, Following Conventions, Working Outline, Formal Outline, Topical Outline, Audience Analysis

• Building Momentum – Modified Freewriting: Ask students to open a Word document, turn their monitors off, and write for ten minutes. If they can’t get distracted by sentence-level details, they may find an initial momentum to help them start drafting.

• Rhetorics as Resources: The Academic Writer (Chapter 10), Writing: A Manual for the Digital Age (Chapter 4), Harbrace Guide to Writing (Chapter 3)

Starting in the Middle: Free-write on Subtopic

Sometimes it’s easier to start in the middle. Encourage students to freewrite about a subpoint or a piece of evidence, rather than trying to freewrite from a more traditional “beginning” point.

Round-Robin Activity

Conversational free-write: “I’m writing about…”

Pass to classmate. Classmate responds:

• “Your free-write leads me to ask the following questions…”
• “I would like to know more about…”
• “Have you considered…”

Continue to pass around the room for additional comments, questions, and feedback.

Discuss strategies for overcoming writer’s block and practice them in class

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)