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Writing Exercises

19:43 / 24.08.06

I just started teaching a class yclept "Intro to Academic Writing" and feel like I need some decent in-class writing exercises.

Something that will get first-year college students used to thinking with words.

Something that will get them putting words on a page in a particular order.

Got any ideas or resources?

All Acting Regiment

10:58 / 25.08.06

You could ask them to try and describe something very visual, like say, a David Bowie outfit, as if to a blind person- or to describe an everyday object, like an apple, in any way except in terms of itself- so they couldn't say apple.

12:56 / 25.08.06

Hmm. Guess the object could be interesting.

A big part of the class is based around the idea of organizing ideas, revising drafts, that kind of thing, too. Not just putting words on paper, but getting them in a clear, meaningful order.

Whisky Priestess

15:00 / 25.08.06

Get them to rewrite famous bits of lit in a different style, while trying to retain the meaning: sonnet to limerick, prose-poem to rhymed verse, etc.

Or maybe show them a short story by Hemingway - recommend "A Very Short Story" (or just a page, even) and one by Angela Carter (e.g. "The Kiss") and get them to rewrite each author's story/page in the other's style. It's effectively parody, but parody is fun, plus it will get them thinking about how different writers use vocabulary, grammar, punctuation etc. and to what effect.

Hint: Old English alliterative verse translated into gangsta rap can be quite successful.

Whisky Priestess

15:01 / 25.08.06

Oh. Academic writing.

Always read the question ...

03:27 / 26.08.06

Alas, yes.

I like that short story idea, though. Not that I could use it, but you never know.

09:42 / 27.08.06

Have no experience with College students, but there are lots of resources around for teaching this kind of stuff to ESL learners; this for instance. A lot of the ESL exams (IELTS etc) have academic writing components. If you google 'esl academic writing exercise' or similar, you'll get ideas... You may be looking for something a bit more stretching though.

17:10 / 28.08.06

Actually, that's a really nice resource -- things like that I can easily stretch myself.

20:30 / 28.08.06

I don't know how far you want to stretch, but there's an essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called (I think) 'Teaching Experimental Critical Writing'. She explains the motivation and syllabus for her course of the same name, including the different weeks' in-class exercises. I don't remember any off-hand, but it's well worth checking out.

22:08 / 28.08.06

you could give them an abstract from a paper in some arcane field and have the re-write it to be accessible to a ten year old.

the tell them to always write their own abstracts that way anyway...

actually, i think legba's and whiskey's ideas were good even if it is academic writing. gets to the inventive ways of describing in vivid terms what it is they think they know. makes it a hell of a lot easier for readers to follow them.

good luck - and have fun. you'll be surprised what you learn from teaching (having taught basic photography for a while...)

23:18 / 28.08.06

How general is the course - like, all first year students or just humanities or arts or a specific faculty or school?

I'm thinking about things students I taught invariably did badly, and one that springs to mind is introductions. It might be good to take a few clear, short essays, hand out copies with the introductions missing, and then get the students in groups to decide how they would start them. This would get them used to the idea that the intro is something you write after the body, when you actually know the content of the essay. (It would discourage the ridiculous intros that start with 'Since the dawn of man...')

Much as the students will hate it, you should also include some referencing exercises. Give them, like, a book and an essay and a movie and get them to work up the references in various styles - footnote, in-text reference, and bibliographic entry.

The other big problem in a lot of my students work was with making generalisation or assertions that they didn't - couldn't - substantiate. I think it would be good to have a class on this - what kind of claims you need to reference, what you can assume the reader understands, what is merely an assertion and should be avoided. I don't know what kind of exercise - maybe just work up a whole lot of examples of each kind and talk about them with the class one by one.

I assume you're already doing something about how to break down a question into keywords and stuff?

16:25 / 31.08.06

Jackie Susann, you have lived up to your namesake and more.

16:27 / 31.08.06

Oh, and yeah, these are liberal arts students -- fresh out of high school, taking a class that teaches them how to write Proper College Papers.

I assume you're already doing something about how to break down a question into keywords and stuff?

Make no assumptions. I mean, I'm doing stuff with "productive questions," but I don't know about keywords.

And I'm having trouble locating that essay, although the Sedgwick class gets referenced a lot.

21:48 / 31.08.06

The essay's called 'Teaching "Experimental Critical Writing"' and it's included in The ends of performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, published by New York UP.

When I was teaching we were supposed to help the students keep their answers relevant by teaching them to break down questions to keywords. This involved writing sample questions up on the board, and asking which were the keywords and phrases. You'd underline those, and when you'd got enough to work with, and all the important ones, work through what they'd have to do to respond to that part of the question. I generally did that by breaking the class into groups and asking each to brainstorm a particular part of the question, for say five minutes, then getting each group to work with the group next to them and talk about how those part of the question would work together in the overall essay. You keep pairing up the groups until you've come back to a full class discussion, by which time they should - theoretically - be talking about how to structure a paper that adequately responds to the question as a whole.

15:34 / 01.09.06

What kinds of things were you using as questions?

20:19 / 01.09.06

The previous year's essay questions for the same subject. I guess its harder if you're doing liberal arts in general. But the main thing was that there were, like, separate parts to the question. Something like, 'Foucault says in History of Sexuality that 'power comes from below'. Discuss Foucault's ideas in relation to the gender relations in a reality TV show.' That's off the top of my head, but that kinda thing. Actually that one is kinda too simple for an exercise with a bunch of groups - but the idea you'd be trying to get across is that they have to address ALL parts of the question - in this case, they wouldn't be answering if they just wrote about Foucault's theory of power, or just about gender politics in Big Brother.

15:58 / 04.09.06

Jackie, you rock.

Thanks.