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March 16, 2006
Listening to What I Teach
I had two meetings with students this morning, despite it being Spring Break here. One is working through last semester's work with me, while the other is a senior who has asked me to be a reader on her Honors Thesis. I'm learning an awful lot from working with these two very different students.
With the first, I am learning how to teach writing. And by that, I mean that I am having to research basic writing texts, to rediscover how to explain a paragraph and its function, the relationship of the sentence to the paragraph, and the paragraph to the larger essay, to revisit the idea of a topic sentence outline and its value, to learn how to discuss and explain topic sentences, supporting sentences, and the differences between example, explanation, and expansion. Most college composition teachers probably have a whole bibliography of texts they consider useful, but right now my money in on A Writer's Workshop, 2nd ed., by Bob Brannan. After combing all my handbooks, my shelf staples (such as Patterns for College Writing and Literature for Composition) and a whole stack of other anthologies I've glanced through but never called on, this one book proved to be the most straightforward and comprehensive. I needed that, for this teaching situation, but I also find myself remembering cool stuff that would help my own writing, if only I would remember and use it.
Which brings me to student number two and her thesis. She's working very hard to keep it under a hundred pages. One hundred. I can't imagine writing something that long on a single subject, and yet as I look at my growing pile of "projects to do when (fill in the blank) event is over, I realize that there are a few book length projects there. Hmmmm.... so today, as I'm talking about the next level of revisions for this thesis, I hear ideas come out of my mouth I didn't know I owned; ideas that tell me how to write the length of paper I've never attempted. Things like:
- the first thing is to get it all down (which she has done).
- for the next revision, read the entire thing to see if it functions as a whole
- identify clearly the big fat claim you want to make with this project (always the part I have the most trouble with myself).
- identify the smaller supporting claims you want to make
- figure out how (or if) the information you have in each section supports those claims.
- eliminate the parts that don't further your claims.
- look for repetitions, transitions, missing information in and between sections
- Get the introduction and conclusion written
- Get the full text to where you're happy with it, and then we'll do the final edit for length, concision, and clarity.
Wow. It sounds so simple when I say it like that. Sounds so much like what I was taught in my first comp class - so much that hasn't managed to guide my writing for reasons unknown. Maybe it's really true that you truly learn something when you learn it to teach it to another.
Posted by cageyer at March 16, 2006 01:27 PM