Lecture Notes for The Writer's Handbook, 6th Edition
Page 1
Instructor’s Resource Manual and Answer Key for The Writer’s Handbook Sixth Edition Krista Hiser Kapi‘olani Community CollegePage 2
Page 3
v C ON TE N T S Pre f ac e x In t roduc i n g Th e Writer’s H andboo k t o Y ou r Class xii Sa m p l e Sy ll ab i xii Sa m p l e s y ll abu s f o r us e i n co m pos iti o n cou r s e w it h r he t o ri ca l f ocu s xii Sa m p l e s y ll abu s f o r us e i n w riti n g cou r s e w it h r esea r c h f ocu s xii Sa m p l e s y ll abu s f o r us e i n w riti ng - i n t en si v e co mm un i ca ti on s cou rs e f o r bu si ne s s m a j o r s xiv Par t 1 : P l ann i ng , D ra fti ng , an d R ev i s i n g C hap t e r 1 Th i n k a s a W rit er 15 Chapter 2 P l a n an d D r a f t 18 Chapter 3 C o m pos e Pa r ag r aph s 22 Chapter 4 R e w rit e , Ed it , an d P r oo fr ea d 24 Par t 2 : A na l yz i ng , R e fl ec ti ng , In f or m i ng , A rgu i n g Chapter 5 R ea d w it h a C riti ca l Ey e 28 Chapter 6 View with a Critical Eye 30 Chapter 7 Write an Analysis 32 Chapter 8 W rit e a n I n f o r m a ti v e Essa y 35 Chapter 9 W rit e a Pos iti o n A r gu m en t 38 Chapter 10 W rit e a P r oposa l A r gu m en t 41 Par t 3 : W r iti n g i n t h e D i sc i p li ne s Chapter 11 W rit e A bou t L it e r a t u r e an d t h e H u m an iti e s 43 Chapter 12 W rit e i n t h e Sc i ence s an d Soc i a l Sc i ence s 46 Chapter 13 C o m pos e f o r t h e W o r kp l ac e 48 Par t 4 : M u lti m ed i a an d O n li n e C o m pos i n g Chapter 14 C o mm un i ca t e i n M u lti m ed i a 50 Chapter 15 D es i g n P r esen t a ti on s 54 Chapter 16 C o m pos e i n O n li n e G en r e s 56 Par t 5 : P l ann i n g R esearc h an d F i nd i n g Source s C hap t e r 17 P l a n Y ou r R esea r c h 58Page 4
vi Chapter 18 F i n d Sou r ce s 61 Chapter 19 Eva l ua t e Sou r ce s 64 Chapter 20 P l a n F i e l d R esea r c h 66 Par t 6 : Incorpora ti n g an d D ocu m en ti n g Source s C hap t e r 21 U s e Sou r ce s E ff ec ti ve l y an d A vo i d P l ag i a ri s m 69 Chapter 22 W rit e an d R ev i s e t h e R esea r c h P r o j ec t 72 Chapter 23 M L A D ocu m en t a ti o n 74 Chapter 24 A P A D ocu m en t a ti o n 76 Chapter 25 CM S D ocu m en t a ti o n 78 Chapter 26 C S E D ocu m en t a ti o n 79 Par t 7 : E ff ec ti v e S t y l e an d L anguag e Chapter 27 W rit e w it h Po w e r 80 Chapter 28 W rit e C onc i se l y 82 Chapter 29 W rit e w it h E m phas i s 84 Chapter 30 F i n d t h e R i gh t W o r d s 86 Chapter 31 W rit e t o B e I nc l us i v e 88 Par t 8 : U nders t and i n g G ra mm a r Chapter 32 G r a mm a r B as i c s 90 Chapter 33 F r ag m en t s , R un - ons , an d C o mm a Sp li ce s 92 Chapter 34 Sub j ec t - V e r b A g r ee m en t 94 Chapter 35 V e r b s 95 Chapter 36 P r onoun s 97 Chapter 37 M od ifi e r s 98 Par t 9 : U nders t and i n g Punc t ua ti o n an d M echan i c s Chapter 38 C o mm as 100 Chapter 39 Se m i co l on s an d C o l on s 102 Chapter 40 H yphen s 103 Chapter 41 D ashe s an d Pa r en t hese s 105 Chapter 42 A pos tr ophe s 106 Chapter 43 Q uo t a ti o n M a r k s 107 Chapter 44 O t he r Punc t ua ti o n M a r k s 108 Chapter 45 W rit e w it h A ccu r a t e Spe lli n g 109 Chapter 46 C ap it a li za ti o n an d It a li c s 111 Chapter 47 A bb r ev i a ti ons , A c r ony m s , an d N u m be r s 112 Par t 10 : I f E ng li s h I s N o t Y ou r F i rs t L anguag e Chapter 48 W riti n g i n a Secon d (or Third, or Fourth) Languag e 113 Chapter 49 N ouns , A rti c l es , an d P r epos iti on s 115 Chapter 50 V e r b s 117 Chapter 51 Eng li s h Sen t enc e S tr uc t u r e 118 Answer Key 120Page 5
vii PART 8: Understanding Grammar Chapter 32 Grammar Basics 120 Exercise 32.1, Sentence Basics 120 Exercise 32.2, Word Classes: Pronouns 120 Exercise 32.3, Word Classes: Adjectives and Adverbs 120 Exercise 32.4, Word Classes: Prepositional Phrases 121 Exercise 32.5, Word Classes 121 Exercise 32.6, Clauses: Main Clause Patterns 121 Exercise 32.7, Sentence Types 122 Chapter 33 Fragments, Run - ons, and Comma Splices 123 Exercise 33.1 Fragments 123 Exercise 33.2, Fragments 123 Exercise 33.3, Run - on Sentences 123 Exercise 33.4 , Comma Splices 123 Chapter 34 Subject - Verb Agreement 124 Exercise 34.1, Singular and Plural Subjects 124 Exercise 34.2, Indefinite Pronouns as Subjects 124 Exercise 34.3, Collective Nouns as Subjects 124 Chapter 35 Verbs 125 Exercise 35.1, Basic Verb Forms 125 Exercise 35.2, Irregular Verbs 125 Exercise 35.3, Transitive and Intransitive 125 Exercise 35.4, Shifts in Tense 125 Exercise 35.5, Shifts in Mood 126 Chapter 36 Pronouns 126 Exercise 36.1, Pronoun Case 126 Exercise 36.2, Pronoun Case: Who, Whom, Whoever, Whomever 126 Exercise 36.3, Pronoun Uses 126 Exercise 36.4, Pronoun Agreement 127 Exercise 36.5, Pronouns 127 Exercise 36.6, Problems with Pronouns and Gender 127 Chapter 37 Modifiers 127 Exercise 37.1, Choose The Correct Modifier 127 Exercise 37.2, Double Negatives 128 Exercise 37.3, Choose The Correct Modifier: Adjectives and Adverbs 128 Exercise 37.4, Place Adverbs Carefully 128 Exercise 37.5, Revise Dangling Modifiers 129 PAR T 9 : U nder s t and i n g Punc t uat i o n an d M e c h a n i c s Chapter 38 Commas 129 Exercise 38.1, Commas with Introductory Elements 129 Exercise 38.2, Commas with Compound Clauses 129 Exercise 38.3, Commas with Nonrestrictive Modifiers 129 Exercise 38.4, Commas with Items in a Series 130Page 6
viii Exercise 38.5, Commas with Coordinate Adjectives 130 Exercise 38.6, Commas with Quotations 130 Exercise 38.7, Commas with Dates, Numbers, Titles, and Addresses 131 Exercise 38.8, Commas to Avoid Confusion 131 Chapter 39 Semicolons and Colons 132 Exercise 39.1, Semicolons 132 Exercise 39.2, Colons 132 Chapter 40 Hyphens 132 Exercise 40.1, Hyphens 132 Chapter 41 Dashes and Parentheses 133 Exercise 41.1, Dashes and Parentheses versus Commas 133 Exercise 41.2, Dashes and Parentheses to Set Off Information 133 Exercise 41.3, Other Punctuation with Parentheses 133 Chapter 42 Exercise 42.1, Possessives 134 Exercise 42.2, Plurals of Letters, Symbols, and Words Referred to as Words 134 Chapter 43 Quotation Marks 134 Exercise 43.1, Direct Quotations 134 Exercise 43.2, Other Punctuation with Quotation Marks 135 Chapter 44 Other Punctuation Marks 135 Exercise 44.1, Periods 135 Exercise 44.2, Question Marks 135 Exercise 44.3, Correcting Punctuation Mistakes 136 Chapter 45 Write with Accurate Spelling 136 Exercise 45.1, Know the Limitations of Spelling Checkers 136 Exercise 45.2, Distinguish Homonyms 136 Chapter 46 Capitalization and Italics 136 Exercise 46.1, Capitalization 136 Exercise 46.2, Italics 137 Chapter 47 Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Numbers 137 Exercise 47.1, Abbreviations 137 Exercise 47.2, Numbers 137 PAR T 10 : If E ng li s h Is No t You r F i r s t L a ngu a g e Chapter 48 Writing In A Second Language 138 Exercise 48.1 Understand English Idioms 138 Chapter 49 Nouns, Articles, and Prepositions 138 Exercise 49.1, Kinds of Nouns 138 Exercise 49.2, Count and Noncount Nouns 138 Exercise 49.3, Singular and Plural Forms 139 Exercise 49.4, Articles 139 Exercise 49.5, Prepositions 139 Exercise 49.6, Prepositions 140 Chapter 50 Verbs 140 Exercise 50.1, Be Verbs 140 Exercise 50.2, Modal Auxiliary Verbs 140 Exercise 50.3, Verbs and Infinitives 140 Exercise 50.4, Verbs and – ing Verbals 141 Exercise 50.5, Conditional Sentences 141Page 7
ix Chapter 51 English Sentence Structure 141 Exercise 51.1, Subjects 141 Exercise 51.2, Subjects 142 Exercise 51.3, English Word Order 142 Exercise 51.4, Placement of Modifiers 142 Exercise 51.5, Placement of Modifiers 142 Exercise 51.6, Dangling Modifiers 142Page 8
x P ref a c e The Writer’s Handbook is an invaluable classroom aid, as you will no doubt discover (or already know!). In preparing this manual, our goal has been to help you use The Writer’s Handbook effectively in teaching your course. More specificall y , we have aimed to provide you with three things: • a handy and easily consulted guide to the text; • a series of brief suggestions and observations about teaching the material covered in the text; • a rich compendium of discussion topics, activities, and assignments. This updated edition of the Instructor’s Resource Manual includes suggestions and assignments intended to prepare students for real - world writing. We also include a detailed section on how to introduce the handbook to your class to ensure they get the most use out of it. Several sample syllabi give you models for integrating the text with your coursework throughout the semester. We should emphasize that the manual does not attempt to provide a comprehensive summary of Professor Faigley’s texts; nor does it provide a one - size - fits - all set of instructions for teaching a writing course. Rather, it is a source of ideas and activities that you may adapt to your particular needs. We have organized our discussions of the individual chapters under the following headings: • Key points : Here we summarize the central points of the chapter. • Teaching suggestions : Here we offer notes, suggestions, and observations about the contents of the chapter. We’ve drawn these suggestions from our own experience with teaching and administering writing courses at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Hawaii - Hilo, and other schools. Approach them not as directives but as reflections. We hope they’ll help you determine how best to teach the material covered in the text to your students. • In - class activities : These activities can generally be completed in a single class period. Some require individual work. Others require collaboration. Some focus on real - world and disciplinary writing concerns. We’ve included a number of activities that require technology, as well. If computer or other technology access is limited in your classroom, you might complete some of these activities in an on - campus technology lab. Or, you might assign the activities as homework and then discuss students’ experiences when they return to class.Page 9
xi • Short assignments : The short assignments, like the in - class activities, are a mix of individual, collaborative, and disciplinary writing activities. We created these assignments for instructors to use as discrete homework assignments. However, many are flexible enough to complete in class, or in conjunction with other in - class activities and short assignments. Note that students will probably turn to the Internet as a first resort whenever they have homework, making most of these activities de facto technology assignments. Finally, a word of encouragement: Teaching writing is difficult and demanding work. It is also vitally important work. We hope that this manual makes your work easier, and that you’ll find, as we do, that teaching writing has genuine — and often surprising — rewards. Best of luck with your classes!Page 10
xii Introducing The Writer’s Handbook to Your Class Believe it or not, a handbook can be intimidating. Students may feel overwhelmed by all the information contained in The Writer’s Handbook — especially if they feel they have a lot of problem areas in their writing. Taking some time at the beginning of the semester to walk them through the parts of the handbook they’ll be using the most will help ensure that they do in fact consult it when they need to. E XPLOR E I T S O RGAN I Z AT I O N You can begin by showing students the multiple ways of finding information in the handbook. There are many different “ways in.” The Tabbed Sections, Table of Contents, Common Errors list, and Index are just some of the ways to access the information in The Writer’s Handbook . Acquaint yourself with these organizational aids, and learn which ones work best in which situations. For example, we’ve found that the index at the back of the book is often a good starting point for many grammar and usage questions. If you are trying to identify a particular type of comma problem, you might not be sure if it is a grammatical issue (Part 8), a mechanical problem (Part 9), or a question of style (Part 7). Simply looking up “commas” in the alphabetical index gives you a list of many situations involving commas, which may help you narrow down your search. H I GHL I GH T I T S U T I L I T Y A S A P ROBLE M - S OL VE R Ask students to jot down one or two problems they know they habitually have with their writing. (They don’t have to use “correct” grammatical terms; just describe the problem in their own words.) Then, go around the room and look some of these up, or have students work to find solutions or advice in the handbook in small groups. They will probably be heartened to learn they are not alone in having certain problems — and you’ll get a sense of what to help them with during the course. M ODE L I T S U SE One thing we cannot stress enough is how impressive it is to students to see their instructor use the handbook. For example, you might start the exercise above by telling them about a grammar problem from your own writing, and looking it up as they watch. Any time writing - related questions come up in class and conferences, show students how most educated people resolve them: pick up your handbook and find the answer. This is an extremely useful habit for anyone, but especially for college students. In one semester, you might manage to drill one or two grammar “rules” into your students’ heads — and they might even rememberPage 11
xiii those rules a month or a year later. But it’s much better to teach students the simple practice of looking up grammar rules they aren’t sure of. This is a skill that will last them a lifetime, and bear immediate results in the improvement of their writing. T I E TH E H ANDBOO K T O Y OU R C OURS E G OAL S AN D R EQ U I R E M ENTS What are the primary skills you hope your students will develop in your course? Argumentative ability? Source evaluation? Clean, powerful writing style? What skills does each assignment or unit stress? List these and talk about them with your students. Why are they important skills in college and beyond? This is a good time to preview the chapters in the handbook that directly address your course goals. Doing so early in the semester gives students a sense of how much work they have to do, how much they will learn in the coming weeks, and how much help the handbook can give them as they strive to meet your expectations. The first week of class is also an excellent time to apprise students of your expectations for formatting and correctness of the work they will turn in. Again, you can tie these requirements to specific sections of the handbook. We find it very useful to hand out a style sheet at the beginning of the semester, which students can consult for every paper they write. A style sheet might look something like this: Style Guidelines for English 1301 Professor Doe All rough and final drafts submitted for this class must meet the following standards: – 12 - point font; – double - spaced lines; – 1.25 - inch margins. All drafts must also be free of the following (consult the handbook for advice on each): • spelling and punctuation errors (Part 9) • run - on sentences or fragments (Chapter 33) • dangling or misplaced modifiers (Chapter 37) • subject - verb agreement errors (Chapter 34) You can list as many guidelines as you like, but it’s better to keep your list fairly short and include a general statement that encourages students to work toward a clean, error - free style. Remember, they are learning how to achieve this. If there are certain errors that bother you more than others, you could spend a few moments on one handbook chapter that covers a “pet peeve” of yours — run - on sentences, spelling errors, clarity — and go over the solutions to the problem in detail. When you go over your formatting guidelines for papers, you can also take a look at the stylePage 12
xiv chapters for MLA (Chapter 23) and APA (Chapter 24). Part 4 gives extensive guidelines for designing documents, visual texts, and other multimedia composing. E XPLA I N H O W T O U S E TH E H ANDBOO K T HROUGHOU T TH E W R I T I N G P ROCE S S Once students understand that they will be drafting and revising their papers in your class, tell them how you will refer to handbook sections in your comments on their drafts. Will you mention chapters or section numbers they should refer to for specific problems? Will you write an end comment pointing them to certain issues? Will you write section numbers in the margins next to errors you notice? Stress that they will be responsible for synthesizing your comments and the handbook’s advice to improve their papers. At the beginning of the semester, note the documentation style students will use in your class and review the corresponding chapter of the handbook (see Part 6). This section of the handbook also details four steps for planning research and finding sources. This is a good time to hand out maps to campus libraries, lists of available databases, URLs to resources for your discipline, and other information students can use to facilitate research for your class. You should discuss plagiarism in your first or second class, covering your institution’s definitions of plagiarism, collusion, and academic dishonesty, and detailing the possible consequences (ideally, you will have a statement about plagiarism in your syllabus as well). Then look over Chapter 21 in the handbook, so students can see there are ways to make sure they haven’t plagiarized. If you have students who turn in poorly planned, hastily written work (or students who turn in highly polished work with very little substance to it), direct them to Part 1: Planning, Drafting, and Revising. Students who need to improve their critical reading skills will profit from studying the material in Chapter 5: Read and View with a Critical Eye. And if tables, charts, or other visuals are part of your curriculum, you might want your students to take a look at Part 4, Designing and Presenting. Virtually all students will benefit from the material in Part 7, Effective Style and Language. We have found this section especially useful for students who have achieved a fairly sophisticated command of mechanics and grammar, but still produce stilted, wordy, or lifeless writing. Nonnative speakers of English will find Part 10, If English Is Not Your First Language, helpful in many ways. It covers general writing concerns for nonnative speakers, and also offers detailed information on aspects of English grammar and usage.Page 13
xv I f Yo u Ar e Teach i n g a Wr iti ng - In t ens i v e C l ass Many instructors in disciplines other than English and composition worry that they “don’t know enough grammar” to teach a writing - intensive course. When you use The Writer’s Handbook in your writing - intensive class, you don’t need to be an “expert.” Instead, you can refer your students to the handbook whenever necessary, or use it as a reference yourself when planning classes, responding to student writing, and designing assignments. When you teach with The Writer’s Handbook , you have a writing expert at your side whenever you need one — and so do your students. Many students feel that courses in writing and composition are a distraction from their “real” college careers. They may wonder what they will gain from this course if they got As in high school English or if they plan to work in fields that don’t involve much writing. Explain to your students that writing is pervasive in the world of work. A College Board survey of the Business Roundtable (“Writing: A Ticket to Work . . . Or a Ticket Out”) found that writing ability is critical for most salaried employees, and is an important consideration in hiring, firing, and promotion. No matter their course of study or career plans, your students need to know how to write effectivel y . Remember, too, that The Writer’s Handbook offers much more than grammar and usage information. Our integrated coverage of visual literacy skills and “eyes - on” presentation of four major documentation styles make The Writer’s Handbook especially useful for content courses at all levels, in all fields. Our extensive section on ESL writers can save you and the nonnative speakers in your classroom a lot of frustration.Page 14
xii . Samp le Sy ll abi Here are three model syllabi showing ways in which The Writer’s Handbook can be incorporated into your plan for the semester. All parts of the handbook, of course, should be referred to and used as needed to address students’ writing issues as they become evident. But The Writer’s Handbook is designed to fit neatly into some common course structures, such as the following. Samp le Sy ll abus fo r us e in compos iti o n cours e w ith rhe t orica l f ocu s W ee k Focu s A ss i gne d R ead i ng s 1 C ou r s e i n tr oduc ti o n C hap t e r 1 : Th i n k a s a W rit e r C hap t e r 5 & 6 : R ea d an d V i e w w it h a C riti ca l Ey e 2 Pape r 1 : R he t o ri ca l ana l ys i s C hap t e r 7 : Write an Analysis C hap t e r 2 : P l a n an d D r a f t 3 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 3 : C o m pos e Pa r ag r aph s 4 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 4 : R e w rit e , Ed it , an d P r oo fr ea d Pa rt s 7 – 9 , a s neede d 5 Pape r 2 : Eva l ua ti o n o f a n adve rti se m en t C hap t e r s 9 & 10 : W rit e A r gu m en t s C hap t e r 14 : C o mm un i ca t e i n M u lti m ed ia 6 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 27 : C o m pos e Pa r ag r aph s 7 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 28 : W rit e C onc i se l y C hap t e r 29 : W rit e w it h E m phas i s 8 Pape r 3 : Pos iti o n a r gu m en t w it h W eb s it e R ev i e w C hap t e r 9 : W rit e a Pos iti o n A r gu m en t C hap t e r 15 : D es i g n P r esen t a ti on s 9 R esea r ch C hap t e r 16 : P l a n Y ou r R esea r c h C hap t e r s 17 – 19 , a s neede d 10 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 20 : P l a n Y ou r R esea r c h 11 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 21 : F i n d Sou r ce s 12 Pape r 4 : P r oposa l a r gu m en t w it h p ri m a r y r esea r c h C hap t e r 10 : W rit e a P r oposa l A r gu m en t 13 R esea r c h C hap t e r 19 : P l a n F i e l d R e s ea r c h 14 D r a fti n g R ev i e w C hap t e r 22 : W rit e an d R ev i s e t h e R esea r c h P r o j ec t 15 R ev i s i o n w o r ksho p Pa rt s 7 – 9 , a s neede dPage 15
xiii . Samp le Sy ll abus fo r us e in wr i t i n g cours e w i t h researc h focu s W ee k Focus / A ss i gn m en t A ss i gne d R ead i ng s 1 C ou r s e i n tr oduc ti o n C hap t e r 1 : Th i n k a s a W rit e r C hap t e r 5 & 6 : R ea d an d V i e w w it h a C riti ca l Ey e 2 Pape r 1 : O bse r va ti o n Sec ti o n 12b : W rit e a n obse r va ti o n C hap t e r 19 : P l a n F i e l d R esea r c h 3 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 2 : P l a n an d D r a f t C hap t e r 3 : C o m pos e Pa r ag r aph s 4 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 4 : R e w rit e , Ed it , an d P r oo fr ea d Pa rt s 7 , 8 , an d 9 , a s neede d 5 Pape r 2 : I n f o r m a ti v e pape r C hap t e r 8 : W rit e a n I n f o r m a ti v e Essa y Sec ti o n 19b : C onduc t i n t e r v i e w s 6 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 27 : W rit e w it h Po w e r 7 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 28 : W rit e C onc i se l y 8 Pape r 3 : A na l y ti cal r esea r c h pape r C hap t e r 7 : W rit e a n A na l ys i s C hap t e r 16 : P l a n Y ou r R esea r c h 9 O u tli n i n g C hap t e r 22 : W rit e an d R ev i s e t h e R esea r c h P r o j ec t 10 A nno t a t e d b i b li og r aph y Pa r t 6 : I nco r po r a ti n g an d D ocu m en ti n g Sou r ce s 11 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 20 : U nde r s t an d an d A vo i d P l ag i a ri s m C hap t e r 23 , 24 , 25 , o r 2 6 12 Pee r r ev i e w an d r ev i s i o n R ev i e w Sec ti o n 4c : R espon d t o o t he r w rit e r s ’ d r a ft s 13 Pape r 4 : Fo r m a l p r esen t a ti o n of r esea r c h fi nd i ng s C hap t e r 14 : C o mm un i ca t e i n M u lti m ed i a C hap t e r 15 : D es i g n P r e s en t a ti on s 14 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r s 27 – 31 , a s neede d 15 Final presentationsPage 16
xiv . Samp le Sy ll abus fo r us e in wr i t i ng - i n t ens i v e commun i ca ti on s cours e f o r bus i nes s ma j or s W ee k Focu s A ss i gne d R ead i ng s 1 C ou r s e i n tr oduc ti o n C hap t e r 1 : Th i n k a s a W rit e r C hap t e r 5 & 6 : R ea d an d V i e w w it h a C riti ca l Ey e 2 A ss i gn m en t 1 : Pe rf o r m anc e R epo r t W I T W P r o j ec t : “T r ack i n g Sa l es , P r o fit s , an d C us t o m e r s , ” o n M y C o m pLab ™ 3 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 2 : P l a n an d D r a f t C hap t e r 3 : C o m pos e Pa r ag r aph s 4 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 4 : R e w rit e , Ed it , an d P r oo fr ea d Pa rt s 7 , 8 , an d 9 , a s neede d 5 Pape r 2 : A na l ys i s / cas e s t ud y C hap t e r 7 : W rit e a n A na l ys i s Sec ti o n 12c : W rit e a C as e S t ud y 6 R esea r c h C hap t e r 16 : P l a n Y ou r R esea r c h C hap t e r s 17 – 19 , a s neede d 7 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 14 : C o mm un i ca t e i n M u lti m ed i a 8 R ev isi o n C hap t e r 14c : D es i g n D ocu m en t s 9 Pape r 3 : P r oposa l a r gu m en t w it h p r esen t a ti on C hap t e r 10 : W rit e a P r oposa l A r gu m en t 10 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 15 : D es i g n P r esen t a ti on s 11 S t y l e w o r ksho p R ev i e w Pa rt s 7 , 8 , an d 9 , a s neede d 12 C l as s p r esen t a ti on s 13 Pape r 4 : Le tt e r an d r ésu m é Sec ti o n 12e : W rit e a Le tt e r o f A pp li ca ti o n Sec ti o n 12 f : W rit e a R ésu m é 14 R ev i s i o n w o r ksho p R ev i e w Pa r t 7 , a s neede d 15 G r ou p Ed iti n g R ev i e w Pa rt s 8 an d 9 , a s neede dPage 17
15 , I nc . PART 1 Planning, Drafting, and Revi s i ng CHAPTE R 1 Th i n k a s a Wr it e r K E Y P O I N T S • Writing in college may mean different things from one course to another; however, there are a number of important expectations for college writing that remain the same in any course. • The three essential components of any act of communication — the writer/speaker, the audience, and the message — can be represented by the rhetorical triangle. • The starting point for effective writing is to determine in advance what you want to accomplish: To reflect? To inform? To persuade? Your purpose will determine the tone and presentation of your message. • According to Aristotle, the three main tactics of persuasion are appeals based on the trustworthiness of the speaker (ethos); appeals to the emotions and values of the audience (pathos); and appeals to logic, reasoning, and evidence (logos). • Readers of college writing expect to learn something they didn’t know already. The goal of the college writer is to produce some new perspective or idea that connects known facts and contributes to an ongoing debate or investigation. • Generally, a writer develops an effective ethos by appearing knowledgeable about a subject. Clear, error - free writing enhances the writer’s credibility. T EACH I N G S UGGE S T I O NS • The ideas presented in this chapter seem simple, but students may find it surprisingly difficult to put them into consistent practice. They think of reading and writing as if they existed in a vacuum — saying, for instance, that a particular editorial is categorically “good” or “bad,” or that a particular form of writing is “too flowery” or “not direct enough.” Emphasize that, before judging a piece of writing, students should consider the author’s purpose and rhetorical context. What was he hoping to achieve? Who was his audience? How did he craft the piece to appeal to that audience? Also emphasize that students should ask similar questions about their ownPage 18
16 , I nc . writing. What’s my purpose? Who is my audience? How should I craft this piece so that it achieves my purpose in this particular context? • Students find ethos, pathos, and logos powerful tools for analysis. Once students feel comfortable with the terms, they will use them frequently, and not only in your course. When introducing the three appeals, emphasize Aristotle’s point: these are the three primary means of making one’s argument . Their use does not guarantee that an argument will be persuasive, and they can be used with varying degrees of skill. Likewise, no single appeal is the “most important,” and there is no one “mix” of appeals that is always best. An argument’s persuasiveness is not determined solely by its claims and reasons. The person making the argument is also important. Does she seem credible? Is the audience already familiar with her? Why do companies scramble to sign athletes like Michael Jordan and Serena Williams to endorse sports - related paraphernalia? Why do other companies have them endorse non - sports - related paraphernalia? The skill with which the writer or speaker addresses the values and emotions of the audience is also central to an argument’s effectiveness. • Ethical, pathetic, and logical appeals often overlap. An ethical appeal can also be a pathetic appeal, and vice versa. Statistical evidence, normally associated with an argument’s logical appeal, can also appeal strongly to the values or emotions of the audience (this is why it is so tempting to skew visuals to emphasize a point). When analyzing an author’s use of the rhetorical appeals, the point is not simply to identify each appeal as either ethical, pathetic, or logical, but to recognize the variety, interaction, and effect of all the appeals. However, in any given text, you might notice that an author tends to rely on one or several of the appeals more than the others. I N - C LA S S A CT I V I T I E S • Ask students to create brief outlines, from memory, of some common types of appeals. Most of them will be familiar with the ads used by charity and children’s relief agencies; for example: What appeals do such ads rely most on? What does a fundraising letter for an animal shelter generally feature? An ad for life insurance? What appeals do these acts of communication make, and how do they make them? • Students might find it interesting to think about a confusing writing assignment they had in the past as they go through the questions in “Identify your purposes for writing.” With the benefit of hindsight, can they tell what kind of writing they were doing? • Have students examine their own reading practices. Do their habits help or hinder their ability to assess a writer’s purpose? You might develop a brief questionnaire for students to fill out: When do they do most of their reading? Do they read with pen or pencil in hand? Do they read things straight through, skim, or read in spurts? Explain that experienced readers rarely read a lengthy text from page one straight to its end. Scholars, for instance, often read an article’s introduction, conclusion, and bibliography before reading the whole thing straight through. When presented with reports, CEOs read the executive summary, then flip to the conclusion. Emphasize that students have the power to skip around when they read. Getting an overview ofPage 19
17 , I nc . an article (by reading the opening and closing bits and all of the subheads, for instance) will help them read the piece critically and carefully. Finally, teach your students that by focusing on the central points of this chapter, they can become better readers. • Teaching with technology activity. Have students assess how well a particular Web site appeals to its intended audience by analyzing the site’s employment of pathetic, ethical, and logical appeals. S HOR T A SS I G N M E N T S • Have individual students find one or several texts on their own (e.g., editorials from the campus newspaper, online articles, personal Web pages) and assess how well they appeal to their intended audiences by analyzing the text’s employment of pathetic, ethical, and logical appeals. For each text, the student should identify the intended audience, the specific context in which the argument is being made, and the author’s purpose in making the argument. • Distribute a piece of persuasive writing and instruct students to read it carefully, then underline and identify in the margins every ethical, logical, and pathetic appeal that the author employs (remind them that some will probably overlap). Then, have students write a brief essay summarizing and evaluating the author’s use of each appeal. • Have students find an article in print or online that addresses a specific audience. Ask them to describe in one or two paragraphs (1) the kinds of readers that make up the audience and (2) the writer’s strategy in writing to this audience. Does the author make her article available to a range of readers? How? • Have students choose a newspaper or magazine, examine it, and write a profile of its audience based on its general content, advertisements, and design. • Have students rewrite a short piece of their own work, changing some aspect of the rhetorical triangle. Change the audience: instead of college students, write for junior high students. Change the purpose by making an informative piece into an entertaining piece. Change the ethos of the author by writing in a different tone or by using dialect or slang.Page 20
18 , I nc . CHAPTE R 2 P l a n an d Dra ft K E Y P O I N T S • Experienced writers establish their goals before beginning any writing project. • When completing any academic assignment, it’s crucial that students (1) respond to the assignment appropriately, and (2) select a topic that both fits the assignment and appeals to them. • Experienced writers use a number of different strategies for exploring topics, brainstorming, focusing their thinking, and drafting their work. Students should begin learning which strategies work best for them. • After generating ideas, an experienced writer selects the best of them to continue working with. She aims to produce a working thesis that is specific, manageable, and interesting. • The best writers know that nobody gets everything right the first time. Their goal is to write a good draft that they can go back and revise later. T EACH I N G S UGGE S T I O NS • The very first step in any academic writing project is reading the assignment carefully and understanding it. Help students break this process down into discrete steps. Students should learn to (1) recognize important words in the assignment, (2) discern the purpose of the assignment, (3) determine the material the assignment is meant to cover, (4) understand the details of the assignment, and (5) ask questions about any aspect of the assignment that they don’t understand. • Consider allowing students to select their own topics for their major assignments. Alternatively, allow them to select their topic in at least one of their major assignments. Encourage them to experiment with some of the invention exercises in Chapter 2. • Some of your students will have a fairly clear sense of how they work and learn best. (For example, some will already know that they are primarily visual or aural learners.) Encourage these students to use the prewriting exercises that work best for them. But also encourage them to try new methods, since many people work best with a combination of visual, aural, and tactile input. • Explain that the writing process is not linear but recursive. As students move forward through the stages of prewriting, drafting, and revising, they’ll also occasionally return to earlier steps in the process. • Many students have poor inventional resources. They assume that experienced writers don’tPage 21
19 , I nc . have to rely on such “tricks” as brainstorming and freewriting; that, for the lucky few, words and ideas just appear out of thin air. Sharing your own invention process for a piece of writing may give them a better sense of its value. • Encourage students to think about time management. How much time do they have to complete the assignment? How much time will they need to develop a topic? To write a first draft? To revise that draft? You want your pedagogy to seem practical and realistic. Encourage your students to be both responsible and efficient writers. • Some students won’t know what you mean by “rough draft.” You should define what a rough draft is — perhaps even working with students to produce a definition — in specific terms. Here are some possibilities: A rough draft is an early pass through the entire project. It is the result of substantial time and work. A rough draft has an introduction, a thesis statement, arguments and evidence supporting that thesis statement, and a conclusion. A rough draft isn’t perfect. But it is complete enough to give a reader a glimpse of the writer’s complete argument and evidence. A rough draft is readable. It’s double - spaced, with ample margins. If it’s handwritten, it is printed in ink and written on every other line. • Have a reasonable policy regarding group work, and explain it to your students so they know they will not end up doing more than their share of the work on a project. One option is to assign “Process Logs,” which each member of a group turns in directly to you two or three times during a group project. Students must record what work they have done, and when, and what the rest of the group’s contributions have been to date. Requiring these Process Logs does much to prevent unfair workload distribution. I N - C LA S S A CT I V I T I E S • Survey your students to see which invention strategies they have used in the past, and which ones have worked well for them. Ask them to describe what they like or don’t like about particular strategies. Also ask them if there are strategies described in the chapter that they have never tried. Encourage them to try at least one new invention strategy for their next assignment. • Choose an issue that is of concern on your campus and hold a group brainstorming session. Use the six “reporter’s questions” in section 2b to generate ideas around the topic. Write all the ideas on the board. List every idea, and model for students how to defer evaluation of ideas during this stage of the writing process. Keep the brainstorming going as long as students have ideas, andPage 22
20 , I nc . then push it a little farther. A good rule of thumb is, “Think of all the ideas you can, and then think of at least three more.” • Collaborative activity . After completing the brainstorming activity above, break students into pairs or small groups and have them develop up to three focused topics from the ideas generated by the class. • Most students need to practice writing, revising, and evaluating thesis statements. Show students a range of thesis statements — from student papers, from academic articles, from newspapers and magazines. You can also have students work up thesis statements from the focused topics they generated in the collaborative activity above. • Collaborative activity . Use the Staying on Track box “Evaluate your working thesis” to focus students’ theses before they begin drafting. You can have them draft a working thesis and exchange with their peers. Ask them to respond to their peer’s thesis along the same lines as the examples in the box. In what ways is the thesis too specific or not specific enough? How much research does it seem likely to require? How interesting is it? What might improve it? Have students discuss the comments they receive, revise their working thesis, and then switch with new partners to see if they get better responses. • If you can, have a professional writer visit your class. Have her describe her own prewriting practices. How does she brainstorm? How does she focus her topic and draft her work? How does she manage her time? S HOR T A SS I G N M E N T S • Keeping a “Time Log” for the complete writing process of one paper is one way to help students learn to manage their writing time. Help them work backwards from the deadline to set proximal goals for different steps in their writing process. This can be especially helpful for research projects. • Disciplinary writing assignment. Give students five or six short essay questions from different academic disciplines and, for each, have students write a paragraph describing (1) the kind of work the question is asking students to do, and (2) how they would answer it if they encountered it on an exam. Alternately, ask them to describe writing they have done that was prompted by key words such as those listed in 2a. What does “analyze” mean in an English class? Does it mean the same thing in a chemistry class? “Define” has very specific, very different meanings in rhetoric and in psychology. Have them write a paragraph or two about their experience with these kinds of words. Note that, in addition to different disciplinary meanings, these terms can be understood very differently by different instructors. Encourage your students to always check with the instructor whenever they are in doubt about the writing task required of them. This is part of assessing one’s audience as a writer. • Teaching with technology assignment . Assign two freewriting activities. Require students to complete one of the activities using a computer and the other using pen and paper. Then, havePage 23
21 , I nc . students share their experiences. Which of the two technologies did they find more effective for freewriting? Did one offer any clear advantages or disadvantages? • Teaching with technology assignment. Provide students with a big subject to consider (e.g., sea level rise , cloning, gun control). Have students use different keywords for an internet search, to narrow the focus of the subject until they have a topic that is manageable in a five - page academic essay. • Collaborative assignment. After students have researched their topics, have them compare the topics they chose (see assignment above). Have students assess one another’s topics. Is each topic manageable? Are some still too large? Have some become too narrow? You can use the questions in the Staying on Track box “Evaluate your working thesis.” • Disciplinary writing assignment. The hypothesis of an experiment may seem like a starting point, but in fact it is the result of a great deal of preliminary exploration. Have each student choose a famous scientific experiment — Ben Franklin’s kite and key, Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine, Galileo’s falling bodies experiment, for example — and try to reconstruct the hypothesis that gave rise to the experiment. This is a good exercise in “focusing” a topic. They might then reverse the process, constructing a hypothesis of their own for an experiment based on their observation of the world around them.Page 24
22 , I nc . CHAPTE R 3 Compos e Paragraph s K E Y P O I N T S • Paragraph structure helps readers navigate through texts. It is generally expected that a paragraph will address a single topic and that a sequence of paragraphs will set out a line of thought that readers can easily follow. • The topic sentence of a paragraph can be either explicitly or implicitly stated. There is no “rule” that a topic sentence must be placed at the beginning of a paragraph. • You can construct coherent paragraphs by strategically reiterating key terms and phrases and using clear transitional terms. Similar methods allow you to link ideas across paragraphs. • Beginning and ending paragraphs perform special tasks. Beginning paragraphs must convince readers to keep reading. Ending paragraphs remind readers where they have been and invite them to carry your ideas forward. T EACH I N G S UG GE S T I O N S • Much of the need for paragraph structure can be explained by using one of Aristotle’s terms: ethos . Most audiences expect a paragraph to have a clear purpose and to deal with one central point or several closely related points. A writer who leads readers to expect something from a paragraph, and then doesn’t deliver, will lose credibility — and probably his audience. • Emphasize that it is much easier to compose effective paragraphs after extensive prewriting work. After drafting a working thesis and a working outline, you have a clearer sense of what most of the paragraphs in your essay should do. • Transitions and decisions about paragraph length require some finesse, and are highly context - specific. Have students consider these decisions in others’ writing, but hone their skills by revising their own writing. For example, have them review their rough draft alongside the Staying on Track box “Use transitional terms.” Do the transitional terms they have used accurately signal the relationships between their ideas? I N - C LA S S A CT I V I T I E S • Assign a feature article in a magazine that showcases skillful writing, such as Harper’s, The Atlantic , or The New Yorker. Have students identify the various ways the author achieves paragraph unity and signals transitions. Use the Staying on Track box “Use transitional terms” to identify the relationships between ideas that each transition signals.Page 25
23 , I nc . • Your students will likely have been taught a number of “rules” about introductory and concluding paragraphs. For example: Conclusions should restate the thesis, but with “something new.” An introduction has to be three sentences, with the final sentence serving as the thesis. All introductions should orient readers and prepare them for what’s to come in the essay. Everything in the essay should be forecast in the introduction. Some of these “rules” may be useful advice, while others may unnecessarily restrict students’ writing. In a class discussion, list all such rules and discuss them one by one. Are they helpful? Do they make writing easier? In what kinds of writing situations are they likely to work best? Do your students frequently see evidence that real - world writers follow these rules? • Disciplinary Writing Activity. Ask students which paragraph structures they think are common to specific disciplines, and what work each type of paragraph might perform in disciplinary writing. Where might a descriptive paragraph be found in a lab report? Why do engineers rely heavily on process structure? Are comparison paragraphs more common in sociologists’ writing or in that of computer scientists? • Have students read a piece of persuasive writing, underlining all the transitional words and phrases that the author uses to signal relationships between sentences and paragraphs. Are there places where the author might have added transitional words and phrases? Are there places where important connections weren’t clearly emphasized or articulated? S HOR T A SS I G N M E N T S • Give students a paragraph that has had all transitional words and phrases removed. Ask them to supply any transitional material needed to produce a strong, coherent paragraph. When students return to class, let them compare their paragraphs with the original, and discuss the nuances of different transitional words and phrases. • Copy a persuasive essay from a magazine but hide the introduction. Have students read the article and write an original introduction appropriate to the author’s aims, subject, and rhetorical context. You can also do this activity with an article’s conclusion. • Have students find an article or essay with an opener or closer that they particularly admire. Have students write a paragraph explaining why they think the opener or closer is effective. Have several students present their work to the class. Or, you could instead have them find and analyze an ineffective opening.Page 26
24 , I nc . CHAPTE R 4 Rewrite , Edit , an d Proo f rea d K E Y P O I N T S • When rewriting, don’t sweat the small stuff at the beginning. Don’t edit or proofread until you’ve addressed the essay’s focus, its argument, and whether it meets the requirements of the assignment. • When reading a peer’s draft, read three times: first to understand what the writer was trying to accomplish, then to make notes on content, organization, and tone, and lastly to pay attention to style and sentence - level problems. Students can use the same strategies for reading their own work. T EACH I N G S UG GE S T I O NS • Studies have shown that students and instructors often have quite different understandings of — and expectations for — the revision process. You might model and discuss in specific detail what you expect students to do when rewriting, editing, and proofreading a draft. • Here’s how we generally define rewriting, editing, and proofreading with our students: Rewriting addresses large - scale issues, including general focus, purpose, content, audience, and organization. Editing addresses smaller - scale issues, including word choice, style, tone, and the effectiveness of the essay’s transitions. Proofreading concerns the appearance of a document. When you proofread, you check for errors in punctuation, spelling, and usage. You also check for typos and errors in formatting. • We strive to practice what we preach when we respond to student writing. For example, don’t focus on errors of proofreading and editing in a rough draft. Rather, consider big - picture, large - scale issues, assuming you have already explained that the final draft needs to be a polished, complete work. Some questions to consider when reading and responding to a rough draft include: Does this draft address all requirements of the assignment? Does this draft have a central, focused thesis appropriate to the assignment?Page 27
25 , I nc . Is the draft correctly proportioned? That is, are the ideas developed in relation to their importance? Does the draft follow through on its promises? Does it support all the claims that it makes in its thesis? Is the draft effectively organized? Does the draft require more research, better discussion of central points, or better use of evidence and examples? Is the draft correctly formatted? Is the grammar, syntax, or spelling so flawed as to impede readers’ understanding of the author’s ideas? It’s best not to respond to everything that needs revision or improvement, unless you’re working with a very experienced writer (and preparing their work for publication or public presentation). Rather, with most student drafts, you’ll want to note the two or three most pressing issues and emphasize them in your response. • It’s also important that you talk openly with your students about your responses to their work. Explain to them what your goals are in responding to each of their assignments. When reading a topic proposal, do you look for the same things that you would while reading a final draft? Also, make sure students understand how to use your comments. For instance, should they address only those parts of the essay that you’ve commented on? • When responding to final drafts, we generally comment on the quality and strategy of the student’s argument, their work on the essay, and their own sense of its success (which they have described in a brief self - assessment). Whenever possible, we try to make connections to the next essay assignment, or, at the end of the term, to the student’s development as a writer over the past several months. We make sure that our comments are organized and prioritized. Rather than noting everything about the essay — good and bad — we emphasize the most important things. We make sure to note as many positive things as we can about the essay. We also make sure to connect our comments — as much as possible — to the grading criteria listed on the assignment sheet. Of course, students know that a final draft is a final draft: This is the essay that gets the grade. Even so, try to encourage students to think beyond their final drafts, and to see their work in this class as something that evolves long after they complete their assignments. • Review the proofreading marks in the Writing Smart box “Standard proofreading symbols.” If you use different or additional marks when you comment on grammar and mechanics, explain those marks to your students. • Encourage students to use all the resources at their disposal when rewriting. Does your school have a writing lab or tutoring center where students can meet individually with trainedPage 28
26 , I nc . consultants? If so, make sure students know about the services it provides. Also, explain your school’s plagiarism and collusion policies. In most cases, these policies are specifically designed to allow students in writing classes to help one another outside of class. I N - C LA S S A CT I V I T I E S • Disciplinary writing activity. Bring in an unfinished piece of your own writing for class discussion. Have students use the suggestions in sections 4a or 4c to write a brief response to your draft. After students have finished, discuss the draft and the various suggestions that students have made. • Discuss how it feels to have your writing “edited” by someone else. Do your students still remember getting papers back in high school with the teacher’s red - ink remarks scrawled all over them? How did they respond? Did the visual presence of someone else’s ideas on their piece of writing make it easier or harder to revise, or to produce a draft the next time they tried to write? • Teaching with technology activity. If possible, demonstrate alternative methods of commenting on other people’s writing. Applications such as Google Docs allow readers to add comments. Audio commentary can even be added to text files, so the writer can listen to comments while following along in the text on the computer screen. • Collaborative activity. Have students bring to class a rough draft of an essay they are working on, either for your class or another (check your institution’s rules on unauthorized collusion if using essays from another class). Have each student trade essays with a partner, and use the suggestions in sections 4c and 4e to assess the partner’s draft. Have students discuss the kinds of revision each needs to do before turning in a final draft of their project. • If you have a student paper from an earlier term, ask the author’s permission to make copies of it for your current class (you may remove the author’s name if so requested). Have students give a grade to the essay according to the grading criteria you created for the assignment. Students can then discuss and compare the grades they assigned. Is there consensus in the class, or did students have widely differing opinions about the quality of the essay? This activity might lead to discussion about your own strategies for responding to student work, and about how students should understand and respond to your comments. • To guide discussion of more general revision issues, like logic, structure, and grammar, look for any poorly written essay at an online “paper mill” (a search for “free essays” will turn up many such sites). These sites are full of anonymous essays demonstrating a wide range of writing flaws. S HOR T A SS I G N M E N T S • Some teachers have students turn in a revision record along with a final draft of an essay. In a revision record, students record the work they did in rethinking, rewriting, editing, andPage 29
27 , I nc . proofreading their first drafts. This exercise is helpful for a number of reasons. First, revision records often help students get a better sense of their own habits of rewriting, editing, and proofreading. This assignment can also improve the quality of the revision process. Students have said that they revised more deliberately because of the revision record assignment. Knowing that they had to record the work they did, they went about it with more care. Finally, revision records are helpful to you when evaluating student work, and they provide an effective starting point in student conferences. • Collaborative assignment. Have students take a partner’s essay home, read it, and then write a persuasive letter arguing for certain changes in it. Emphasize that each letter should be developed with its audience and purpose clearly in mind. The primary audience is, of course, the author of the paper; this is a person who presumably wants to make his or her paper as good as it can be, but who also needs clear reasons for making the changes the student thinks are necessary. Thus, the letter’s purpose is to persuade the author to make revisions, such as reorganizing the essay, supplying more or better evidence for his/her claims, adopting a more appropriate writing style, or revising sentence - level rhetoric for clarity and coherence. Advise students that their letters should be as specific as possible. They should indicate which paragraph(s) they’re commenting on, quote their partner’s essay whenever necessary, and offer explicit advice on rewording and reorganization. • Disciplinary writing assignment. Revision should take precedence over proofreading, but proofreading is still important — especially for published writing. Have students bring in examples of grammar, spelling, and other mechanical errors from published sources such as newspapers, books, journals, and Web sites. You might even organize a contest, assigning points based on the seriousness of the error (does it affect reader comprehension?) and the status of the source (the New York Times editorial board should probably be more chagrined by a spelling error than the editor of a campus newspaper). Discuss the pressures and constraints of various media that might contribute to such errors. Headline writers, for example, face tremendous challenges in their writing.Page 30
28 , I nc . PART 2 Analyzing, Reflecting, Informing, Argu i ng CHAPTE R 5 Rea d wit h a Critica l Ey e K E Y P O I N T S • Your understanding of a text will improve if you respond actively as you read. Active reading means annotating as you read, mapping the content, and writing summaries. Critical reading means asking questions as you read. • Good strategies for critical reading and viewing usually involve questions about the work, such as “Where did it come from?” “What does it say?” “Can I trust the author?” and “How does a text work?” • Reading critically will help you recognize fallacies — faulty logic, emotional appeals, or misleading images that do not actually provide evidence supporting the claim being made. Knowing specific types of fallacies, such as “slippery slope” “non sequitur” and “straw man” makes them easier to spot. T EACH I N G S UGGE S T I O NS • We’ve found that many college students don’t automatically think of texts as being written in response to other texts, authors, and ideas. Unless an author specifically mentions another text, students aren’t inclined to think of that author as participating in an ongoing conversation. Similarly, when they begin writing their own essays, they often fail to realize that they are entering into an ongoing conversation, no matter their topic. Investigating where a text comes from is thus an especially important part of the critical reading process. • Practice metacognition with your students, checking in on steps in the process of critical reading and writing. Reiterate the steps that inform critical response to reading: gaining understanding, interpreting, analyzing, evaluating, and synthesis. • Recognizing fallacies of logic is an essential skill in the workplace and throughout life. Help your students see how ubiquitous fallacies are in the appeals that confront them daily, and advise them to practice their critical reading and viewing skills by looking for fallacies.Page 31
29 , I nc . I N - C LA S S A CT I V I T I E S • Practice critical reading in class frequently. Consider bringing a copy of the campus paper to class every day. Read letters to the editor, articles, and editorials with your students, working to identify the author’s purpose in writing, her central idea or claim, and the quality of the evidence she provides. You may have considerable disagreement over each of these issues at first, but students should soon learn to identify the purpose, argument, and effectiveness of brief pieces. (You can use the steps for critical reading that we list in this chapter as a guide.) • Collaborative activity. Have students, in pairs or groups, write a letter to the editor of the local paper in which they deliberately employ five different verbal fallacies. Alternatively, as a class, you could compose a letter in response to a recent article or letter that employs such a fallacy. Ask students to consider what sort of information the author would need to provide to avoid the fallacy. Why do they think the fallacy was used instead? • They say everyone’s a critic, and your students are probably no exception to this rule. Fluency — the ability to write or speak ideas one after another, with one giving rise to the next — often surges when you give people something to complain about. Try asking your class to describe a television commercial or radio spot they particularly dislike. After they have run through the more visceral reasons for their dislike, steer them toward the critical reading and viewing skills outlined in this chapter. Consider how these more nuanced approaches to criticism support (or undercut) students’ initial responses. S HOR T A SS I G N M E N T S • Have students read several different kinds of texts — editorials, short academic articles, advertisements, personal essays, and so forth — and follow the steps that we list for critical reading in this chapter. Then ask them to write a brief response to the text. If you assign a number of brief readings over the course of several weeks, you can familiarize your students with a range of genres and their conventions. • Have your students do similar exercises with different kinds of visual texts — photos from the front page of the newspaper, photos from illustrated magazines such as National Geographic , Web sites, charts and graphs, television and magazine advertisements, and so forth. • Have your students go on a scavenger hunt for verbal fallacies. One instructor we know has her students tape half an hour of a local talk radio program, then write a transcript of it, and analyze the arguments made by the host and callers. Usually, the transcripts contain excellent examples of verbal fallacies. .Instructor’s Resource Manual and Answer Key for The Writer’s Handbook Sixth Edition Krista Hiser Kapi‘olani Community College v C ON TE N T S Pre f ac e x In t roduc i n g Th e Writer’s H andboo k t o Y ou r Class xii Sa m p l e Sy ll ab i xii Sa m p l e s y ll abu s f o r us e i n co m pos iti o n cou r s e w it h r he t o ri ca l f ocu s xii Sa m p l e s y ll abu s f o r us e i n w riti n g cou r s e w it h r esea r c h f ocu s xii Sa m p l e s y ll abu s f o r us e i n w riti ng - i n t en si v e co mm un i ca ti on s cou rs e f o r bu si ne s s m a j o r s xiv Par t 1 : P l ann i ng , D ra fti ng , an d R ev i s i n g C hap t e r 1 Th i n k a s a W rit er 15 Chapter 2 P l a n an d D r a f t 18 Chapter 3 C o m pos e Pa r ag r aph s 22 Chapter 4 R e w rit e , Ed it , an d P r oo fr ea d 24 Par t 2 : A na l yz i ng , R e fl ec ti ng , In f or m i ng , A rgu i n g Chapter 5 R ea d w it h a C riti ca l Ey e 28 Chapter 6 View with a Critical Eye 30 Chapter 7 Write an Analysis 32 Chapter 8 W rit e a n I n f o r m a ti v e Essa y 35 Chapter 9 W rit e a Pos iti o n A r gu m en t 38 Chapter 10 W rit e a P r oposa l A r gu m en t 41 Par t 3 : W r iti n g i n t h e D i sc i p li ne s Chapter 11 W rit e A bou t L it e r a t u r e an d t h e H u m an iti e s 43 Chapter 12 W rit e i n t h e Sc i ence s an d Soc i a l Sc i ence s 46 Chapter 13 C o m pos e f o r t h e W o r kp l ac e 48 Par t 4 : M u lti m ed i a an d O n li n e C o m pos i n g Chapter 14 C o mm un i ca t e i n M u lti m ed i a 50 Chapter 15 D es i g n P r esen t a ti on s 54 Chapter 16 C o m pos e i n O n li n e G en r e s 56 Par t 5 : P l ann i n g R esearc h an d F i nd i n g Source s C hap t e r 17 P l a n Y ou r R esea r c h 58 vi Chapter 18 F i n d Sou r ce s 61 Chapter 19 Eva l ua t e Sou r ce s 64 Chapter 20 P l a n F i e l d R esea r c h 66 Par t 6 : Incorpora ti n g an d D ocu m en ti n g Source s C hap t e r 21 U s e Sou r ce s E ff ec ti ve l y an d A vo i d P l ag i a ri s m 69 Chapter 22 W rit e an d R ev i s e t h e R esea r c h P r o j ec t 72 Chapter 23 M L A D ocu m en t a ti o n 74 Chapter 24 A P A D ocu m en t a ti o n 76 Chapter 25 CM S D ocu m en t a ti o n 78 Chapter 26 C S E D ocu m en t a ti o n 79 Par t 7 : E ff ec ti v e S t y l e an d L anguag e Chapter 27 W rit e w it h Po w e r 80 Chapter 28 W rit e C onc i se l y 82 Chapter 29 W rit e w it h E m phas i s 84 Chapter 30 F i n d t h e R i gh t W o r d s 86 Chapter 31 W rit e t o B e I nc l us i v e 88 Par t 8 : U nders t and i n g G ra mm a r Chapter 32 G r a mm a r B as i c s 90 Chapter 33 F r ag m en t s , R un - ons , an d C o mm a Sp li ce s 92 Chapter 34 Sub j ec t - V e r b A g r ee m en t 94 Chapter 35 V e r b s 95 Chapter 36 P r onoun s 97 Chapter 37 M od ifi e r s 98 Par t 9 : U nders t and i n g Punc t ua ti o n an d M echan i c s Chapter 38 C o mm as 100 Chapter 39 Se m i co l on s an d C o l on s 102 Chapter 40 H yphen s 103 Chapter 41 D ashe s an d Pa r en t hese s 105 Chapter 42 A pos tr ophe s 106 Chapter 43 Q uo t a ti o n M a r k s 107 Chapter 44 O t he r Punc t ua ti o n M a r k s 108 Chapter 45 W rit e w it h A ccu r a t e Spe lli n g 109 Chapter 46 C ap it a li za ti o n an d It a li c s 111 Chapter 47 A bb r ev i a ti ons , A c r ony m s , an d N u m be r s 112 Par t 10 : I f E ng li s h I s N o t Y ou r F i rs t L anguag e Chapter 48 W riti n g i n a Secon d (or Third, or Fourth) Languag e 113 Chapter 49 N ouns , A rti c l es , an d P r epos iti on s 115 Chapter 50 V e r b s 117 Chapter 51 Eng li s h Sen t enc e S tr uc t u r e 118 Answer Key 120 vii PART 8: Understanding Grammar Chapter 32 Grammar Basics 120 Exercise 32.1, Sentence Basics 120 Exercise 32.2, Word Classes: Pronouns 120 Exercise 32.3, Word Classes: Adjectives and Adverbs 120 Exercise 32.4, Word Classes: Prepositional Phrases 121 Exercise 32.5, Word Classes 121 Exercise 32.6, Clauses: Main Clause Patterns 121 Exercise 32.7, Sentence Types 122 Chapter 33 Fragments, Run - ons, and Comma Splices 123 Exercise 33.1 Fragments 123 Exercise 33.2, Fragments 123 Exercise 33.3, Run - on Sentences 123 Exercise 33.4 , Comma Splices 123 Chapter 34 Subject - Verb Agreement 124 Exercise 34.1, Singular and Plural Subjects 124 Exercise 34.2, Indefinite Pronouns as Subjects 124 Exercise 34.3, Collective Nouns as Subjects 124 Chapter 35 Verbs 125 Exercise 35.1, Basic Verb Forms 125 Exercise 35.2, Irregular Verbs 125 Exercise 35.3, Transitive and Intransitive 125 Exercise 35.4, Shifts in Tense 125 Exercise 35.5, Shifts in Mood 126 Chapter 36 Pronouns 126 Exercise 36.1, Pronoun Case 126 Exercise 36.2, Pronoun Case: Who, Whom, Whoever, Whomever 126 Exercise 36.3, Pronoun Uses 126 Exercise 36.4, Pronoun Agreement 127 Exercise 36.5, Pronouns 127 Exercise 36.6, Problems with Pronouns and Gender 127 Chapter 37 Modifiers 127 Exercise 37.1, Choose The Correct Modifier 127 Exercise 37.2, Double Negatives 128 Exercise 37.3, Choose The Correct Modifier: Adjectives and Adverbs 128 Exercise 37.4, Place Adverbs Carefully 128 Exercise 37.5, Revise Dangling Modifiers 129 PAR T 9 : U nder s t and i n g Punc t uat i o n an d M e c h a n i c s Chapter 38 Commas 129 Exercise 38.1, Commas with Introductory Elements 129 Exercise 38.2, Commas with Compound Clauses 129 Exercise 38.3, Commas with Nonrestrictive Modifiers 129 Exercise 38.4, Commas with Items in a Series 130 viii Exercise 38.5, Commas with Coordinate Adjectives 130 Exercise 38.6, Commas with Quotations 130 Exercise 38.7, Commas with Dates, Numbers, Titles, and Addresses 131 Exercise 38.8, Commas to Avoid Confusion 131 Chapter 39 Semicolons and Colons 132 Exercise 39.1, Semicolons 132 Exercise 39.2, Colons 132 Chapter 40 Hyphens 132 Exercise 40.1, Hyphens 132 Chapter 41 Dashes and Parentheses 133 Exercise 41.1, Dashes and Parentheses versus Commas 133 Exercise 41.2, Dashes and Parentheses to Set Off Information 133 Exercise 41.3, Other Punctuation with Parentheses 133 Chapter 42 Exercise 42.1, Possessives 134 Exercise 42.2, Plurals of Letters, Symbols, and Words Referred to as Words 134 Chapter 43 Quotation Marks 134 Exercise 43.1, Direct Quotations 134 Exercise 43.2, Other Punctuation with Quotation Marks 135 Chapter 44 Other Punctuation Marks 135 Exercise 44.1, Periods 135 Exercise 44.2, Question Marks 135 Exercise 44.3, Correcting Punctuation Mistakes 136 Chapter 45 Write with Accurate Spelling 136 Exercise 45.1, Know the Limitations of Spelling Checkers 136 Exercise 45.2, Distinguish Homonyms 136 Chapter 46 Capitalization and Italics 136 Exercise 46.1, Capitalization 136 Exercise 46.2, Italics 137 Chapter 47 Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Numbers 137 Exercise 47.1, Abbreviations 137 Exercise 47.2, Numbers 137 PAR T 10 : If E ng li s h Is No t You r F i r s t L a ngu a g e Chapter 48 Writing In A Second Language 138 Exercise 48.1 Understand English Idioms 138 Chapter 49 Nouns, Articles, and Prepositions 138 Exercise 49.1, Kinds of Nouns 138 Exercise 49.2, Count and Noncount Nouns 138 Exercise 49.3, Singular and Plural Forms 139 Exercise 49.4, Articles 139 Exercise 49.5, Prepositions 139 Exercise 49.6, Prepositions 140 Chapter 50 Verbs 140 Exercise 50.1, Be Verbs 140 Exercise 50.2, Modal Auxiliary Verbs 140 Exercise 50.3, Verbs and Infinitives 140 Exercise 50.4, Verbs and – ing Verbals 141 Exercise 50.5, Conditional Sentences 141 ix Chapter 51 English Sentence Structure 141 Exercise 51.1, Subjects 141 Exercise 51.2, Subjects 142 Exercise 51.3, English Word Order 142 Exercise 51.4, Placement of Modifiers 142 Exercise 51.5, Placement of Modifiers 142 Exercise 51.6, Dangling Modifiers 142 x P ref a c e The Writer’s Handbook is an invaluable classroom aid, as you will no doubt discover (or already know!). In preparing this manual, our goal has been to help you use The Writer’s Handbook effectively in teaching your course. More specificall y , we have aimed to provide you with three things: • a handy and easily consulted guide to the text; • a series of brief suggestions and observations about teaching the material covered in the text; • a rich compendium of discussion topics, activities, and assignments. This updated edition of the Instructor’s Resource Manual includes suggestions and assignments intended to prepare students for real - world writing. We also include a detailed section on how to introduce the handbook to your class to ensure they get the most use out of it. Several sample syllabi give you models for integrating the text with your coursework throughout the semester. We should emphasize that the manual does not attempt to provide a comprehensive summary of Professor Faigley’s texts; nor does it provide a one - size - fits - all set of instructions for teaching a writing course. Rather, it is a source of ideas and activities that you may adapt to your particular needs. We have organized our discussions of the individual chapters under the following headings: • Key points : Here we summarize the central points of the chapter. • Teaching suggestions : Here we offer notes, suggestions, and observations about the contents of the chapter. We’ve drawn these suggestions from our own experience with teaching and administering writing courses at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Hawaii - Hilo, and other schools. Approach them not as directives but as reflections. We hope they’ll help you determine how best to teach the material covered in the text to your students. • In - class activities : These activities can generally be completed in a single class period. Some require individual work. Others require collaboration. Some focus on real - world and disciplinary writing concerns. We’ve included a number of activities that require technology, as well. If computer or other technology access is limited in your classroom, you might complete some of these activities in an on - campus technology lab. Or, you might assign the activities as homework and then discuss students’ experiences when they return to class. xi • Short assignments : The short assignments, like the in - class activities, are a mix of individual, collaborative, and disciplinary writing activities. We created these assignments for instructors to use as discrete homework assignments. However, many are flexible enough to complete in class, or in conjunction with other in - class activities and short assignments. Note that students will probably turn to the Internet as a first resort whenever they have homework, making most of these activities de facto technology assignments. Finally, a word of encouragement: Teaching writing is difficult and demanding work. It is also vitally important work. We hope that this manual makes your work easier, and that you’ll find, as we do, that teaching writing has genuine — and often surprising — rewards. Best of luck with your classes! xii Introducing The Writer’s Handbook to Your Class Believe it or not, a handbook can be intimidating. Students may feel overwhelmed by all the information contained in The Writer’s Handbook — especially if they feel they have a lot of problem areas in their writing. Taking some time at the beginning of the semester to walk them through the parts of the handbook they’ll be using the most will help ensure that they do in fact consult it when they need to. E XPLOR E I T S O RGAN I Z AT I O N You can begin by showing students the multiple ways of finding information in the handbook. There are many different “ways in.” The Tabbed Sections, Table of Contents, Common Errors list, and Index are just some of the ways to access the information in The Writer’s Handbook . Acquaint yourself with these organizational aids, and learn which ones work best in which situations. For example, we’ve found that the index at the back of the book is often a good starting point for many grammar and usage questions. If you are trying to identify a particular type of comma problem, you might not be sure if it is a grammatical issue (Part 8), a mechanical problem (Part 9), or a question of style (Part 7). Simply looking up “commas” in the alphabetical index gives you a list of many situations involving commas, which may help you narrow down your search. H I GHL I GH T I T S U T I L I T Y A S A P ROBLE M - S OL VE R Ask students to jot down one or two problems they know they habitually have with their writing. (They don’t have to use “correct” grammatical terms; just describe the problem in their own words.) Then, go around the room and look some of these up, or have students work to find solutions or advice in the handbook in small groups. They will probably be heartened to learn they are not alone in having certain problems — and you’ll get a sense of what to help them with during the course. M ODE L I T S U SE One thing we cannot stress enough is how impressive it is to students to see their instructor use the handbook. For example, you might start the exercise above by telling them about a grammar problem from your own writing, and looking it up as they watch. Any time writing - related questions come up in class and conferences, show students how most educated people resolve them: pick up your handbook and find the answer. This is an extremely useful habit for anyone, but especially for college students. In one semester, you might manage to drill one or two grammar “rules” into your students’ heads — and they might even remember xiii those rules a month or a year later. But it’s much better to teach students the simple practice of looking up grammar rules they aren’t sure of. This is a skill that will last them a lifetime, and bear immediate results in the improvement of their writing. T I E TH E H ANDBOO K T O Y OU R C OURS E G OAL S AN D R EQ U I R E M ENTS What are the primary skills you hope your students will develop in your course? Argumentative ability? Source evaluation? Clean, powerful writing style? What skills does each assignment or unit stress? List these and talk about them with your students. Why are they important skills in college and beyond? This is a good time to preview the chapters in the handbook that directly address your course goals. Doing so early in the semester gives students a sense of how much work they have to do, how much they will learn in the coming weeks, and how much help the handbook can give them as they strive to meet your expectations. The first week of class is also an excellent time to apprise students of your expectations for formatting and correctness of the work they will turn in. Again, you can tie these requirements to specific sections of the handbook. We find it very useful to hand out a style sheet at the beginning of the semester, which students can consult for every paper they write. A style sheet might look something like this: Style Guidelines for English 1301 Professor Doe All rough and final drafts submitted for this class must meet the following standards: – 12 - point font; – double - spaced lines; – 1.25 - inch margins. All drafts must also be free of the following (consult the handbook for advice on each): • spelling and punctuation errors (Part 9) • run - on sentences or fragments (Chapter 33) • dangling or misplaced modifiers (Chapter 37) • subject - verb agreement errors (Chapter 34) You can list as many guidelines as you like, but it’s better to keep your list fairly short and include a general statement that encourages students to work toward a clean, error - free style. Remember, they are learning how to achieve this. If there are certain errors that bother you more than others, you could spend a few moments on one handbook chapter that covers a “pet peeve” of yours — run - on sentences, spelling errors, clarity — and go over the solutions to the problem in detail. When you go over your formatting guidelines for papers, you can also take a look at the style xiv chapters for MLA (Chapter 23) and APA (Chapter 24). Part 4 gives extensive guidelines for designing documents, visual texts, and other multimedia composing. E XPLA I N H O W T O U S E TH E H ANDBOO K T HROUGHOU T TH E W R I T I N G P ROCE S S Once students understand that they will be drafting and revising their papers in your class, tell them how you will refer to handbook sections in your comments on their drafts. Will you mention chapters or section numbers they should refer to for specific problems? Will you write an end comment pointing them to certain issues? Will you write section numbers in the margins next to errors you notice? Stress that they will be responsible for synthesizing your comments and the handbook’s advice to improve their papers. At the beginning of the semester, note the documentation style students will use in your class and review the corresponding chapter of the handbook (see Part 6). This section of the handbook also details four steps for planning research and finding sources. This is a good time to hand out maps to campus libraries, lists of available databases, URLs to resources for your discipline, and other information students can use to facilitate research for your class. You should discuss plagiarism in your first or second class, covering your institution’s definitions of plagiarism, collusion, and academic dishonesty, and detailing the possible consequences (ideally, you will have a statement about plagiarism in your syllabus as well). Then look over Chapter 21 in the handbook, so students can see there are ways to make sure they haven’t plagiarized. If you have students who turn in poorly planned, hastily written work (or students who turn in highly polished work with very little substance to it), direct them to Part 1: Planning, Drafting, and Revising. Students who need to improve their critical reading skills will profit from studying the material in Chapter 5: Read and View with a Critical Eye. And if tables, charts, or other visuals are part of your curriculum, you might want your students to take a look at Part 4, Designing and Presenting. Virtually all students will benefit from the material in Part 7, Effective Style and Language. We have found this section especially useful for students who have achieved a fairly sophisticated command of mechanics and grammar, but still produce stilted, wordy, or lifeless writing. Nonnative speakers of English will find Part 10, If English Is Not Your First Language, helpful in many ways. It covers general writing concerns for nonnative speakers, and also offers detailed information on aspects of English grammar and usage. xv I f Yo u Ar e Teach i n g a Wr iti ng - In t ens i v e C l ass Many instructors in disciplines other than English and composition worry that they “don’t know enough grammar” to teach a writing - intensive course. When you use The Writer’s Handbook in your writing - intensive class, you don’t need to be an “expert.” Instead, you can refer your students to the handbook whenever necessary, or use it as a reference yourself when planning classes, responding to student writing, and designing assignments. When you teach with The Writer’s Handbook , you have a writing expert at your side whenever you need one — and so do your students. Many students feel that courses in writing and composition are a distraction from their “real” college careers. They may wonder what they will gain from this course if they got As in high school English or if they plan to work in fields that don’t involve much writing. Explain to your students that writing is pervasive in the world of work. A College Board survey of the Business Roundtable (“Writing: A Ticket to Work . . . Or a Ticket Out”) found that writing ability is critical for most salaried employees, and is an important consideration in hiring, firing, and promotion. No matter their course of study or career plans, your students need to know how to write effectivel y . Remember, too, that The Writer’s Handbook offers much more than grammar and usage information. Our integrated coverage of visual literacy skills and “eyes - on” presentation of four major documentation styles make The Writer’s Handbook especially useful for content courses at all levels, in all fields. Our extensive section on ESL writers can save you and the nonnative speakers in your classroom a lot of frustration. xii . Samp le Sy ll abi Here are three model syllabi showing ways in which The Writer’s Handbook can be incorporated into your plan for the semester. All parts of the handbook, of course, should be referred to and used as needed to address students’ writing issues as they become evident. But The Writer’s Handbook is designed to fit neatly into some common course structures, such as the following. Samp le Sy ll abus fo r us e in compos iti o n cours e w ith rhe t orica l f ocu s W ee k Focu s A ss i gne d R ead i ng s 1 C ou r s e i n tr oduc ti o n C hap t e r 1 : Th i n k a s a W rit e r C hap t e r 5 & 6 : R ea d an d V i e w w it h a C riti ca l Ey e 2 Pape r 1 : R he t o ri ca l ana l ys i s C hap t e r 7 : Write an Analysis C hap t e r 2 : P l a n an d D r a f t 3 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 3 : C o m pos e Pa r ag r aph s 4 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 4 : R e w rit e , Ed it , an d P r oo fr ea d Pa rt s 7 – 9 , a s neede d 5 Pape r 2 : Eva l ua ti o n o f a n adve rti se m en t C hap t e r s 9 & 10 : W rit e A r gu m en t s C hap t e r 14 : C o mm un i ca t e i n M u lti m ed ia 6 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 27 : C o m pos e Pa r ag r aph s 7 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 28 : W rit e C onc i se l y C hap t e r 29 : W rit e w it h E m phas i s 8 Pape r 3 : Pos iti o n a r gu m en t w it h W eb s it e R ev i e w C hap t e r 9 : W rit e a Pos iti o n A r gu m en t C hap t e r 15 : D es i g n P r esen t a ti on s 9 R esea r ch C hap t e r 16 : P l a n Y ou r R esea r c h C hap t e r s 17 – 19 , a s neede d 10 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 20 : P l a n Y ou r R esea r c h 11 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 21 : F i n d Sou r ce s 12 Pape r 4 : P r oposa l a r gu m en t w it h p ri m a r y r esea r c h C hap t e r 10 : W rit e a P r oposa l A r gu m en t 13 R esea r c h C hap t e r 19 : P l a n F i e l d R e s ea r c h 14 D r a fti n g R ev i e w C hap t e r 22 : W rit e an d R ev i s e t h e R esea r c h P r o j ec t 15 R ev i s i o n w o r ksho p Pa rt s 7 – 9 , a s neede d xiii . Samp le Sy ll abus fo r us e in wr i t i n g cours e w i t h researc h focu s W ee k Focus / A ss i gn m en t A ss i gne d R ead i ng s 1 C ou r s e i n tr oduc ti o n C hap t e r 1 : Th i n k a s a W rit e r C hap t e r 5 & 6 : R ea d an d V i e w w it h a C riti ca l Ey e 2 Pape r 1 : O bse r va ti o n Sec ti o n 12b : W rit e a n obse r va ti o n C hap t e r 19 : P l a n F i e l d R esea r c h 3 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 2 : P l a n an d D r a f t C hap t e r 3 : C o m pos e Pa r ag r aph s 4 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 4 : R e w rit e , Ed it , an d P r oo fr ea d Pa rt s 7 , 8 , an d 9 , a s neede d 5 Pape r 2 : I n f o r m a ti v e pape r C hap t e r 8 : W rit e a n I n f o r m a ti v e Essa y Sec ti o n 19b : C onduc t i n t e r v i e w s 6 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 27 : W rit e w it h Po w e r 7 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 28 : W rit e C onc i se l y 8 Pape r 3 : A na l y ti cal r esea r c h pape r C hap t e r 7 : W rit e a n A na l ys i s C hap t e r 16 : P l a n Y ou r R esea r c h 9 O u tli n i n g C hap t e r 22 : W rit e an d R ev i s e t h e R esea r c h P r o j ec t 10 A nno t a t e d b i b li og r aph y Pa r t 6 : I nco r po r a ti n g an d D ocu m en ti n g Sou r ce s 11 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 20 : U nde r s t an d an d A vo i d P l ag i a ri s m C hap t e r 23 , 24 , 25 , o r 2 6 12 Pee r r ev i e w an d r ev i s i o n R ev i e w Sec ti o n 4c : R espon d t o o t he r w rit e r s ’ d r a ft s 13 Pape r 4 : Fo r m a l p r esen t a ti o n of r esea r c h fi nd i ng s C hap t e r 14 : C o mm un i ca t e i n M u lti m ed i a C hap t e r 15 : D es i g n P r e s en t a ti on s 14 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r s 27 – 31 , a s neede d 15 Final presentations xiv . Samp le Sy ll abus fo r us e in wr i t i ng - i n t ens i v e commun i ca ti on s cours e f o r bus i nes s ma j or s W ee k Focu s A ss i gne d R ead i ng s 1 C ou r s e i n tr oduc ti o n C hap t e r 1 : Th i n k a s a W rit e r C hap t e r 5 & 6 : R ea d an d V i e w w it h a C riti ca l Ey e 2 A ss i gn m en t 1 : Pe rf o r m anc e R epo r t W I T W P r o j ec t : “T r ack i n g Sa l es , P r o fit s , an d C us t o m e r s , ” o n M y C o m pLab ™ 3 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 2 : P l a n an d D r a f t C hap t e r 3 : C o m pos e Pa r ag r aph s 4 R ev i s i o n C hap t e r 4 : R e w rit e , Ed it , an d P r oo fr ea d Pa rt s 7 , 8 , an d 9 , a s neede d 5 Pape r 2 : A na l ys i s / cas e s t ud y C hap t e r 7 : W rit e a n A na l ys i s Sec ti o n 12c : W rit e a C as e S t ud y 6 R esea r c h C hap t e r 16 : P l a n Y ou r R esea r c h C hap t e r s 17 – 19 , a s neede d 7 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 14 : C o mm un i ca t e i n M u lti m ed i a 8 R ev isi o n C hap t e r 14c : D es i g n D ocu m en t s 9 Pape r 3 : P r oposa l a r gu m en t w it h p r esen t a ti on C hap t e r 10 : W rit e a P r oposa l A r gu m en t 10 D r a fti n g C hap t e r 15 : D es i g n P r esen t a ti on s 11 S t y l e w o r ksho p R ev i e w Pa rt s 7 , 8 , an d 9 , a s neede d 12 C l as s p r esen t a ti on s 13 Pape r 4 : Le tt e r an d r ésu m é Sec ti o n 12e : W rit e a Le tt e r o f A pp li ca ti o n Sec ti o n 12 f : W rit e a R ésu m é 14 R ev i s i o n w o r ksho p R ev i e w Pa r t 7 , a s neede d 15 G r ou p Ed iti n g R ev i e w Pa rt s 8 an d 9 , a s neede d 15 , I nc . PART 1 Planning, Drafting, and Revi s i ng CHAPTE R 1 Th i n k a s a Wr it e r K E Y P O I N T S • Writing in college may mean different things from one course to another; however, there are a number of important expectations for college writing that remain the same in any course. • The three essential components of any act of communication — the writer/speaker, the audience, and the message — can be represented by the rhetorical triangle. • The starting point for effective writing is to determine in advance what you want to accomplish: To reflect? To inform? To persuade? Your purpose will determine the tone and presentation of your message. • According to Aristotle, the three main tactics of persuasion are appeals based on the trustworthiness of the speaker (ethos); appeals to the emotions and values of the audience (pathos); and appeals to logic, reasoning, and evidence (logos). • Readers of college writing expect to learn something they didn’t know already. The goal of the college writer is to produce some new perspective or idea that connects known facts and contributes to an ongoing debate or investigation. • Generally, a writer develops an effective ethos by appearing knowledgeable about a subject. Clear, error - free writing enhances the writer’s credibility. T EACH I N G S UGGE S T I O NS • The ideas presented in this chapter seem simple, but students may find it surprisingly difficult to put them into consistent practice. They think of reading and writing as if they existed in a vacuum — saying, for instance, that a particular editorial is categorically “good” or “bad,” or that a particular form of writing is “too flowery” or “not direct enough.” Emphasize that, before judging a piece of writing, students should consider the author’s purpose and rhetorical context. What was he hoping to achieve? Who was his audience? How did he craft the piece to appeal to that audience? Also emphasize that students should ask similar questions about their own 16 , I nc . writing. What’s my purpose? Who is my audience? How should I craft this piece so that it achieves my purpose in this particular context? • Students find ethos, pathos, and logos powerful tools for analysis. Once students feel comfortable with the terms, they will use them frequently, and not only in your course. When introducing the three appeals, emphasize Aristotle’s point: these are the three primary means of making one’s argument . Their use does not guarantee that an argument will be persuasive, and they can be used with varying degrees of skill. Likewise, no single appeal is the “most important,” and there is no one “mix” of appeals that is always best. An argument’s persuasiveness is not determined solely by its claims and reasons. The person making the argument is also important. Does she seem credible? Is the audience already familiar with her? Why do companies scramble to sign athletes like Michael Jordan and Serena Williams to endorse sports - related paraphernalia? Why do other companies have them endorse non - sports - related paraphernalia? The skill with which the writer or speaker addresses the values and emotions of the audience is also central to an argument’s effectiveness. • Ethical, pathetic, and logical appeals often overlap. An ethical appeal can also be a pathetic appeal, and vice versa. Statistical evidence, normally associated with an argument’s logical appeal, can also appeal strongly to the values or emotions of the audience (this is why it is so tempting to skew visuals to emphasize a point). When analyzing an author’s use of the rhetorical appeals, the point is not simply to identify each appeal as either ethical, pathetic, or logical, but to recognize the variety, interaction, and effect of all the appeals. However, in any given text, you might notice that an author tends to rely on one or several of the appeals more than the others. I N - C LA S S A CT I V I T I E S • Ask students to create brief outlines, from memory, of some common types of appeals. Most of them will be familiar with the ads used by charity and children’s relief agencies; for example: What appeals do such ads rely most on? What does a fundraising letter for an animal shelter generally feature? An ad for life insurance? What appeals do these acts of communication make, and how do they make them? • Students might find it interesting to think about a confusing writing assignment they had in the past as they go through the questions in “Identify your purposes for writing.” With the benefit of hindsight, can they tell what kind of writing they were doing? • Have students examine their own reading practices. Do their habits help or hinder their ability to assess a writer’s purpose? You might develop a brief questionnaire for students to fill out: When do they do most of their reading? Do they read with pen or pencil in hand? Do they read things straight through, skim, or read in spurts? Explain that experienced readers rarely read a lengthy text from page one straight to its end. Scholars, for instance, often read an article’s introduction, conclusion, and bibliography before reading the whole thing straight through. When presented with reports, CEOs read the executive summary, then flip to the conclusion. Emphasize that students have the power to skip around when they read. Getting an overview of 17 , I nc . an article (by reading the opening and closing bits and all of the subheads, for instance) will help them read the piece critically and carefully. Finally, teach your students that by focusing on the central points of this chapter, they can become better readers. • Teaching with technology activity. Have students assess how well a particular Web site appeals to its intended audience by analyzing the site’s employment of pathetic, ethical, and logical appeals. S HOR T A SS I G N M E N T S • Have individual students find one or several texts on their own (e.g., editorials from the campus newspaper, online articles, personal Web pages) and assess how well they appeal to their intended audiences by analyzing the text’s employment of pathetic, ethical, and logical appeals. For each text, the student should identify the intended audience, the specific context in which the argument is being made, and the author’s purpose in making the argument. • Distribute a piece of persuasive writing and instruct students to read it carefully, then underline and identify in the margins every ethical, logical, and pathetic appeal that the author employs (remind them that some will probably overlap). Then, have students write a brief essay summarizing and evaluating the author’s use of each appeal. • Have students find an article in print or online that addresses a specific audience. Ask them to describe in one or two paragraphs (1) the kinds of readers that make up the audience and (2) the writer’s strategy in writing to this audience. Does the author make her article available to a range of readers? How? • Have students choose a newspaper or magazine, examine it, and write a profile of its audience based on its general content, advertisements, and design. • Have students rewrite a short piece of their own work, changing some aspect of the rhetorical triangle. Change the audience: instead of college students, write for junior high students. Change the purpose by making an informative piece into an entertaining piece. Change the ethos of the author by writing in a different tone or by using dialect or slang. 18 , I nc . CHAPTE R 2 P l a n an d Dra ft K E Y P O I N T S • Experienced writers establish their goals before beginning any writing project. • When completing any academic assignment, it’s crucial that students (1) respond to the assignment appropriately, and (2) select a topic that both fits the assignment and appeals to them. • Experienced writers use a number of different strategies for exploring topics, brainstorming, focusing their thinking, and drafting their work. Students should begin learning which strategies work best for them. • After generating ideas, an experienced writer selects the best of them to continue working with. She aims to produce a working thesis that is specific, manageable, and interesting. • The best writers know that nobody gets everything right the first time. Their goal is to write a good draft that they can go back and revise later. T EACH I N G S UGGE S T I O NS • The very first step in any academic writing project is reading the assignment carefully and understanding it. Help students break this process down into discrete steps. Students should learn to (1) recognize important words in the assignment, (2) discern the purpose of the assignment, (3) determine the material the assignment is meant to cover, (4) understand the details of the assignment, and (5) ask questions about any aspect of the assignment that they don’t understand. • Consider allowing students to select their own topics for their major assignments. Alternatively, allow them to select their topic in at least one of their major assignments. Encourage them to experiment with some of the invention exercises in Chapter 2. • Some of your students will have a fairly clear sense of how they work and learn best. (For example, some will already know that they are primarily visual or aural learners.) Encourage these students to use the prewriting exercises that work best for them. But also encourage them to try new methods, since many people work best with a combination of visual, aural, and tactile input. • Explain that the writing process is not linear but recursive. As students move forward through the stages of prewriting, drafting, and revising, they’ll also occasionally return to earlier steps in the process. • Many students have poor inventional resources. They assume that experienced writers don’t 19 , I nc . have to rely on such “tricks” as brainstorming and freewriting; that, for the lucky few, words and ideas just appear out of thin air. Sharing your own invention process for a piece of writing may give them a better sense of its value. • Encourage students to think about time management. How much time do they have to complete the assignment? How much time will they need to develop a topic? To write a first draft? To revise that draft? You want your pedagogy to seem practical and realistic. Encourage your students to be both responsible and efficient writers. • Some students won’t know what you mean by “rough draft.” You should define what a rough draft is — perhaps even working with students to produce a definition — in specific terms. Here are some possibilities: A rough draft is an early pass through the entire project. It is the result of substantial time and work. A rough draft has an introduction, a thesis statement, arguments and evidence supporting that thesis statement, and a conclusion. A rough draft isn’t perfect. But it is complete enough to give a reader a glimpse of the writer’s complete argument and evidence. A rough draft is readable. It’s double - spaced, with ample margins. If it’s handwritten, it is printed in ink and written on every other line. • Have a reasonable policy regarding group work, and explain it to your students so they know they will not end up doing more than their share of the work on a project. One option is to assign “Process Logs,” which each member of a group turns in directly to you two or three times during a group project. Students must record what work they have done, and when, and what the rest of the group’s contributions have been to date. Requiring these Process Logs does much to prevent unfair workload distribution. I N - C LA S S A CT I V I T I E S • Survey your students to see which invention strategies they have used in the past, and which ones have worked well for them. Ask them to describe what they like or don’t like about particular strategies. Also ask them if there are strategies described in the chapter that they have never tried. Encourage them to try at least one new invention strategy for their next assignment. • Choose an issue that is of concern on your campus and hold a group brainstorming session. Use the six “reporter’s questions” in section 2b to generate ideas around the topic. Write all the ideas on the board. List every idea, and model for students how to defer evaluation of ideas during this stage of the writing process. Keep the brainstorming going as long as students have ideas, and 20 , I nc . then push it a little farther. A good rule of thumb is, “Think of all the ideas you can, and then think of at least three more.” • Collaborative activity . After completing the brainstorming activity above, break students into pairs or small groups and have them develop up to three focused topics from the ideas generated by the class. • Most students need to practice writing, revising, and evaluating thesis statements. Show students a range of thesis statements — from student papers, from academic articles, from newspapers and magazines. You can also have students work up thesis statements from the focused topics they generated in the collaborative activity above. • Collaborative activity . Use the Staying on Track box “Evaluate your working thesis” to focus students’ theses before they begin drafting. You can have them draft a working thesis and exchange with their peers. Ask them to respond to their peer’s thesis along the same lines as the examples in the box. In what ways is the thesis too specific or not specific enough? How much research does it seem likely to require? How interesting is it? What might improve it? Have students discuss the comments they receive, revise their working thesis, and then switch with new partners to see if they get better responses. • If you can, have a professional writer visit your class. Have her describe her own prewriting practices. How does she brainstorm? How does she focus her topic and draft her work? How does she manage her time? S HOR T A SS I G N M E N T S • Keeping a “Time Log” for the complete writing process of one paper is one way to help students learn to manage their writing time. Help them work backwards from the deadline to set proximal goals for different steps in their writing process. This can be especially helpful for research projects. • Disciplinary writing assignment. Give students five or six short essay questions from different academic disciplines and, for each, have students write a paragraph describing (1) the kind of work the question is asking students to do, and (2) how they would answer it if they encountered it on an exam. Alternately, ask them to describe writing they have done that was prompted by key words such as those listed in 2a. What does “analyze” mean in an English class? Does it mean the same thing in a chemistry class? “Define” has very specific, very different meanings in rhetoric and in psychology. Have them write a paragraph or two about their experience with these kinds of words. Note that, in addition to different disciplinary meanings, these terms can be understood very differently by different instructors. Encourage your students to always check with the instructor whenever they are in doubt about the writing task required of them. This is part of assessing one’s audience as a writer. • Teaching with technology assignment . Assign two freewriting activities. Require students to complete one of the activities using a computer and the other using pen and paper. Then, have 21 , I nc . students share their experiences. Which of the two technologies did they find more effective for freewriting? Did one offer any clear advantages or disadvantages? • Teaching with technology assignment. Provide students with a big subject to consider (e.g., sea level rise , cloning, gun control). Have students use different keywords for an internet search, to narrow the focus of the subject until they have a topic that is manageable in a five - page academic essay. • Collaborative assignment. After students have researched their topics, have them compare the topics they chose (see assignment above). Have students assess one another’s topics. Is each topic manageable? Are some still too large? Have some become too narrow? You can use the questions in the Staying on Track box “Evaluate your working thesis.” • Disciplinary writing assignment. The hypothesis of an experiment may seem like a starting point, but in fact it is the result of a great deal of preliminary exploration. Have each student choose a famous scientific experiment — Ben Franklin’s kite and key, Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine, Galileo’s falling bodies experiment, for example — and try to reconstruct the hypothesis that gave rise to the experiment. This is a good exercise in “focusing” a topic. They might then reverse the process, constructing a hypothesis of their own for an experiment based on their observation of the world around them. 22 , I nc . CHAPTE R 3 Compos e Paragraph s K E Y P O I N T S • Paragraph structure helps readers navigate through texts. It is generally expected that a paragraph will address a single topic and that a sequence of paragraphs will set out a line of thought that readers can easily follow. • The topic sentence of a paragraph can be either explicitly or implicitly stated. There is no “rule” that a topic sentence must be placed at the beginning of a paragraph. • You can construct coherent paragraphs by strategically reiterating key terms and phrases and using clear transitional terms. Similar methods allow you to link ideas across paragraphs. • Beginning and ending paragraphs perform special tasks. Beginning paragraphs must convince readers to keep reading. Ending paragraphs remind readers where they have been and invite them to carry your ideas forward. T EACH I N G S UG GE S T I O N S • Much of the need for paragraph structure can be explained by using one of Aristotle’s terms: ethos . Most audiences expect a paragraph to have a clear purpose and to deal with one central point or several closely related points. A writer who leads readers to expect something from a paragraph, and then doesn’t deliver, will lose credibility — and probably his audience. • Emphasize that it is much easier to compose effective paragraphs after extensive prewriting work. After drafting a working thesis and a working outline, you have a clearer sense of what most of the paragraphs in your essay should do. • Transitions and decisions about paragraph length require some finesse, and are highly context - specific. Have students consider these decisions in others’ writing, but hone their skills by revising their own writing. For example, have them review their rough draft alongside the Staying on Track box “Use transitional terms.” Do the transitional terms they have used accurately signal the relationships between their ideas? I N - C LA S S A CT I V I T I E S • Assign a feature article in a magazine that showcases skillful writing, such as Harper’s, The Atlantic , or The New Yorker. Have students identify the various ways the author achieves paragraph unity and signals transitions. Use the Staying on Track box “Use transitional terms” to identify the relationships between ideas that each transition signals. 23 , I nc . • Your students will likely have been taught a number of “rules” about introductory and concluding paragraphs. For example: Conclusions should restate the thesis, but with “something new.” An introduction has to be three sentences, with the final sentence serving as the thesis. All introductions should orient readers and prepare them for what’s to come in the essay. Everything in the essay should be forecast in the introduction. Some of these “rules” may be useful advice, while others may unnecessarily restrict students’ writing. In a class discussion, list all such rules and discuss them one by one. Are they helpful? Do they make writing easier? In what kinds of writing situations are they likely to work best? Do your students frequently see evidence that real - world writers follow these rules? • Disciplinary Writing Activity. Ask students which paragraph structures they think are common to specific disciplines, and what work each type of paragraph might perform in disciplinary writing. Where might a descriptive paragraph be found in a lab report? Why do engineers rely heavily on process structure? Are comparison paragraphs more common in sociologists’ writing or in that of computer scientists? • Have students read a piece of persuasive writing, underlining all the transitional words and phrases that the author uses to signal relationships between sentences and paragraphs. Are there places where the author might have added transitional words and phrases? Are there places where important connections weren’t clearly emphasized or articulated? S HOR T A SS I G N M E N T S • Give students a paragraph that has had all transitional words and phrases removed. Ask them to supply any transitional material needed to produce a strong, coherent paragraph. When students return to class, let them compare their paragraphs with the original, and discuss the nuances of different transitional words and phrases. • Copy a persuasive essay from a magazine but hide the introduction. Have students read the article and write an original introduction appropriate to the author’s aims, subject, and rhetorical context. You can also do this activity with an article’s conclusion. • Have students find an article or essay with an opener or closer that they particularly admire. Have students write a paragraph explaining why they think the opener or closer is effective. Have several students present their work to the class. Or, you could instead have them find and analyze an ineffective opening. 24 , I nc . CHAPTE R 4 Rewrite , Edit , an d Proo f rea d K E Y P O I N T S • When rewriting, don’t sweat the small stuff at the beginning. Don’t edit or proofread until you’ve addressed the essay’s focus, its argument, and whether it meets the requirements of the assignment. • When reading a peer’s draft, read three times: first to understand what the writer was trying to accomplish, then to make notes on content, organization, and tone, and lastly to pay attention to style and sentence - level problems. Students can use the same strategies for reading their own work. T EACH I N G S UG GE S T I O NS • Studies have shown that students and instructors often have quite different understandings of — and expectations for — the revision process. You might model and discuss in specific detail what you expect students to do when rewriting, editing, and proofreading a draft. • Here’s how we generally define rewriting, editing, and proofreading with our students: Rewriting addresses large - scale issues, including general focus, purpose, content, audience, and organization. Editing addresses smaller - scale issues, including word choice, style, tone, and the effectiveness of the essay’s transitions. Proofreading concerns the appearance of a document. When you proofread, you check for errors in punctuation, spelling, and usage. You also check for typos and errors in formatting. • We strive to practice what we preach when we respond to student writing. For example, don’t focus on errors of proofreading and editing in a rough draft. Rather, consider big - picture, large - scale issues, assuming you have already explained that the final draft needs to be a polished, complete work. Some questions to consider when reading and responding to a rough draft include: Does this draft address all requirements of the assignment? Does this draft have a central, focused thesis appropriate to the assignment? 25 , I nc . Is the draft correctly proportioned? That is, are the ideas developed in relation to their importance? Does the draft follow through on its promises? Does it support all the claims that it makes in its thesis? Is the draft effectively organized? Does the draft require more research, better discussion of central points, or better use of evidence and examples? Is the draft correctly formatted? Is the grammar, syntax, or spelling so flawed as to impede readers’ understanding of the author’s ideas? It’s best not to respond to everything that needs revision or improvement, unless you’re working with a very experienced writer (and preparing their work for publication or public presentation). Rather, with most student drafts, you’ll want to note the two or three most pressing issues and emphasize them in your response. • It’s also important that you talk openly with your students about your responses to their work. Explain to them what your goals are in responding to each of their assignments. When reading a topic proposal, do you look for the same things that you would while reading a final draft? Also, make sure students understand how to use your comments. For instance, should they address only those parts of the essay that you’ve commented on? • When responding to final drafts, we generally comment on the quality and strategy of the student’s argument, their work on the essay, and their own sense of its success (which they have described in a brief self - assessment). Whenever possible, we try to make connections to the next essay assignment, or, at the end of the term, to the student’s development as a writer over the past several months. We make sure that our comments are organized and prioritized. Rather than noting everything about the essay — good and bad — we emphasize the most important things. We make sure to note as many positive things as we can about the essay. We also make sure to connect our comments — as much as possible — to the grading criteria listed on the assignment sheet. Of course, students know that a final draft is a final draft: This is the essay that gets the grade. Even so, try to encourage students to think beyond their final drafts, and to see their work in this class as something that evolves long after they complete their assignments. • Review the proofreading marks in the Writing Smart box “Standard proofreading symbols.” If you use different or additional marks when you comment on grammar and mechanics, explain those marks to your students. • Encourage students to use all the resources at their disposal when rewriting. Does your school have a writing lab or tutoring center where students can meet individually with trained 26 , I nc . consultants? If so, make sure students know about the services it provides. Also, explain your school’s plagiarism and collusion policies. In most cases, these policies are specifically designed to allow students in writing classes to help one another outside of class. I N - C LA S S A CT I V I T I E S • Disciplinary writing activity. Bring in an unfinished piece of your own writing for class discussion. Have students use the suggestions in sections 4a or 4c to write a brief response to your draft. After students have finished, discuss the draft and the various suggestions that students have made. • Discuss how it feels to have your writing “edited” by someone else. Do your students still remember getting papers back in high school with the teacher’s red - ink remarks scrawled all over them? How did they respond? Did the visual presence of someone else’s ideas on their piece of writing make it easier or harder to revise, or to produce a draft the next time they tried to write? • Teaching with technology activity. If possible, demonstrate alternative methods of commenting on other people’s writing. Applications such as Google Docs allow readers to add comments. Audio commentary can even be added to text files, so the writer can listen to comments while following along in the text on the computer screen. • Collaborative activity. Have students bring to class a rough draft of an essay they are working on, either for your class or another (check your institution’s rules on unauthorized collusion if using essays from another class). Have each student trade essays with a partner, and use the suggestions in sections 4c and 4e to assess the partner’s draft. Have students discuss the kinds of revision each needs to do before turning in a final draft of their project. • If you have a student paper from an earlier term, ask the author’s permission to make copies of it for your current class (you may remove the author’s name if so requested). Have students give a grade to the essay according to the grading criteria you created for the assignment. Students can then discuss and compare the grades they assigned. Is there consensus in the class, or did students have widely differing opinions about the quality of the essay? This activity might lead to discussion about your own strategies for responding to student work, and about how students should understand and respond to your comments. • To guide discussion of more general revision issues, like logic, structure, and grammar, look for any poorly written essay at an online “paper mill” (a search for “free essays” will turn up many such sites). These sites are full of anonymous essays demonstrating a wide range of writing flaws. S HOR T A SS I G N M E N T S • Some teachers have students turn in a revision record along with a final draft of an essay. In a revision record, students record the work they did in rethinking, rewriting, editing, and 27 , I nc . proofreading their first drafts. This exercise is helpful for a number of reasons. First, revision records often help students get a better sense of their own habits of rewriting, editing, and proofreading. This assignment can also improve the quality of the revision process. Students have said that they revised more deliberately because of the revision record assignment. Knowing that they had to record the work they did, they went about it with more care. Finally, revision records are helpful to you when evaluating student work, and they provide an effective starting point in student conferences. • Collaborative assignment. Have students take a partner’s essay home, read it, and then write a persuasive letter arguing for certain changes in it. Emphasize that each letter should be developed with its audience and purpose clearly in mind. The primary audience is, of course, the author of the paper; this is a person who presumably wants to make his or her paper as good as it can be, but who also needs clear reasons for making the changes the student thinks are necessary. Thus, the letter’s purpose is to persuade the author to make revisions, such as reorganizing the essay, supplying more or better evidence for his/her claims, adopting a more appropriate writing style, or revising sentence - level rhetoric for clarity and coherence. Advise students that their letters should be as specific as possible. They should indicate which paragraph(s) they’re commenting on, quote their partner’s essay whenever necessary, and offer explicit advice on rewording and reorganization. • Disciplinary writing assignment. Revision should take precedence over proofreading, but proofreading is still important — especially for published writing. Have students bring in examples of grammar, spelling, and other mechanical errors from published sources such as newspapers, books, journals, and Web sites. You might even organize a contest, assigning points based on the seriousness of the error (does it affect reader comprehension?) and the status of the source (the New York Times editorial board should probably be more chagrined by a spelling error than the editor of a campus newspaper). Discuss the pressures and constraints of various media that might contribute to such errors. Headline writers, for example, face tremendous challenges in their writing. 28 , I nc . PART 2 Analyzing, Reflecting, Informing, Argu i ng CHAPTE R 5 Rea d wit h a Critica l Ey e K E Y P O I N T S • Your understanding of a text will improve if you respond actively as you read. Active reading means annotating as you read, mapping the content, and writing summaries. Critical reading means asking questions as you read. • Good strategies for critical reading and viewing usually involve questions about the work, such as “Where did it come from?” “What does it say?” “Can I trust the author?” and “How does a text work?” • Reading critically will help you recognize fallacies — faulty logic, emotional appeals, or misleading images that do not actually provide evidence supporting the claim being made. Knowing specific types of fallacies, such as “slippery slope” “non sequitur” and “straw man” makes them easier to spot. T EACH I N G S UGGE S T I O NS • We’ve found that many college students don’t automatically think of texts as being written in response to other texts, authors, and ideas. Unless an author specifically mentions another text, students aren’t inclined to think of that author as participating in an ongoing conversation. Similarly, when they begin writing their own essays, they often fail to realize that they are entering into an ongoing conversation, no matter their topic. Investigating where a text comes from is thus an especially important part of the critical reading process. • Practice metacognition with your students, checking in on steps in the process of critical reading and writing. Reiterate the steps that inform critical response to reading: gaining understanding, interpreting, analyzing, evaluating, and synthesis. • Recognizing fallacies of logic is an essential skill in the workplace and throughout life. Help your students see how ubiquitous fallacies are in the appeals that confront them daily, and advise them to practice their critical reading and viewing skills by looking for fallacies. 29 , I nc . I N - C LA S S A CT I V I T I E S • Practice critical reading in class frequently. Consider bringing a copy of the campus paper to class every day. Read letters to the editor, articles, and editorials with your students, working to identify the author’s purpose in writing, her central idea or claim, and the quality of the evidence she provides. You may have considerable disagreement over each of these issues at first, but students should soon learn to identify the purpose, argument, and effectiveness of brief pieces. (You can use the steps for critical reading that we list in this chapter as a guide.) • Collaborative activity. Have students, in pairs or groups, write a letter to the editor of the local paper in which they deliberately employ five different verbal fallacies. Alternatively, as a class, you could compose a letter in response to a recent article or letter that employs such a fallacy. Ask students to consider what sort of information the author would need to provide to avoid the fallacy. Why do they think the fallacy was used instead? • They say everyone’s a critic, and your students are probably no exception to this rule. Fluency — the ability to write or speak ideas one after another, with one giving rise to the next — often surges when you give people something to complain about. Try asking your class to describe a television commercial or radio spot they particularly dislike. After they have run through the more visceral reasons for their dislike, steer them toward the critical reading and viewing skills outlined in this chapter. Consider how these more nuanced approaches to criticism support (or undercut) students’ initial responses. S HOR T A SS I G N M E N T S • Have students read several different kinds of texts — editorials, short academic articles, advertisements, personal essays, and so forth — and follow the steps that we list for critical reading in this chapter. Then ask them to write a brief response to the text. If you assign a number of brief readings over the course of several weeks, you can familiarize your students with a range of genres and their conventions. • Have your students do similar exercises with different kinds of visual texts — photos from the front page of the newspaper, photos from illustrated magazines such as National Geographic , Web sites, charts and graphs, television and magazine advertisements, and so forth. • Have your students go on a scavenger hunt for verbal fallacies. One instructor we know has her students tape half an hour of a local talk radio program, then write a transcript of it, and analyze the arguments made by the host and callers. Usually, the transcripts contain excellent examples of verbal fallacies. .