In-Class Activities

Spend time analyzing class readings

• Show students how to identify an essayist's thesis and organization, tone and style.

Organize class discussion and debates

Organize activities in which students present different interpretations of evidence

• Organize role-playing activities: ask students to pretend to be different kinds of audiences and critique readings/one another's papers from that point of view.
  
  
• Have a unit in which students are responsible for selecting a class reading and justifying the choice.
  Book Club
  
  
• Pause in the middle of class and have students write what they've learned.
  
  
• Allow some in-class writing to get students started on a concept.
  
  
• Arrange for some computer lab time in which students work on papers and you act as coach for individual writers.

Peer Groups:

• Create peer "cells" of 3-4 students at the beginning of the course, saving you time later. The cells can do collaborative research projects, exchange notes or missed material, and do peer review activities:

  - Consider abilities in grouping
  - Spend time training peers to respond
  - Devote specific peer activities to specific aspects of paper writing

Peer Editing Guidelines

Do activities that model computer composition:

Computer Composition Exercises

Close Reading: We put passages on overheads and close-read them as a class. The process of close-reading is modeled when we physically mark and query the passage. The students work with their close reading worksheet (see course reader) for specific questions. They then practice assembling assertions about passages into larger arguments. In the 2B I am teaching now, we close-read four passages from Beloved that had to do with the role of 124 (the house); we then assembled our assertions into a larger argument about the role of property in the novel.

Thesis: We play "the thesis game." After a hand-out on articulating a thesis, the students divide into teams. I read a "thesis" statement and they have to decide whether 1. it is a substantial thesis and 2. why. They get 1 point for the yes or no and 3 points for the why. In the competitive environment, students get critical indeed!

Paper Structure: Students work in small groups. They get three assertions about three different passages from a text (this semester we used The Woman Warrior). The topic is relatively unified-like the role of ghosts in the novel, or the role of the female body-and their job is to assemble the three points/passages and create transition sentences, plus an overall thesis. Each presented their "paper structure" to the rest of the class; we found that the same topics and passages yielded entirely different structures and arguments. The class helped each group with clarifying its logic when the group put its paper structure on the board.

I also present to students different metaphors for paper structure. (Please see materials attached.) Students become acquainted with the hammer paper, which repeats the same central point over and over and over; the teething ring paper, which gnaws around the same point over and over; the flower paper, which has a central thesis but petal points that could be organized in any which way, because the thesis is too general; and the "correct" train paper, which has one assertion per car that follows the last and sets up the next, in a linear manner. The train paper both stays on its track and arrives somewhere new.

Counter Argument: The class is divided into two teams. Each is assigned a position on the text. For example, I assigned one side of the room to assert the idea that the mother in The Woman Warrior is an empowering source of identification to the narrator; the other side I assigned the argument that the mother is completely restrictive and oppressive-that no formulation of a self is possible, given this mother. The teams then debated the meaning of individual passages, each forced to stick to their larger interpretation and answer the other team's response. For example, they looked at the passage in which the narrator finds her mother's medical degree: one side asserted the oppressive quality of the degree (its ancient smell, its chipped lettering, its heaviness signified by the metaphor of bats coming out of a cave) and the other side asserted the degree as a female accomplishment (signifying the new world-ish concept of female profession, even in the old world "wrappings"). This exercise taught each side to anticipate the counterargument and answer it with their own argument.

Interpretation: They read a text, see one adaptation and then as a class, they have to write their own brief adaptation. This shows them that both the text and the adaptation are interpretations, and that each issue must be thought through before it can be represented. This course that I'm currently teaching wrote their own version of Mulan after seeing the Disney Mulan and reading The Woman Warrior. As the class divided into two adaptations, we were able to respond to each adaptation. In their adaptation, for example, one section of the class emphasized the individual meditation of Mulan, emphasizing her journey to the white tiger.

Writing the Comparative Paper: In pairs they stage a dialogue between two novels. They choose a topic and then pretend each person is "the talking book," asserting its position on the topic. For example one person pretends to be In The Time of the Butterflies and one The Woman Warrior, for a dialogue on the meaning of the female body in sociopolitical context.

Comparing Style: Students are assigned the task of narrating a scene from their own lives in two styles (of two different authors). For example, one class had to write their experience of dinner as if they were E.B. White and then as if they were Louisa May Alcott. (See Samantha White's stunning example.)

Paragraph Structure: Students are taught to diagram the logic of sentences in a paragraph, ensuring that they move from an "unknown" concept to a "known" concept (this taken from Style: Toward Clarity and Grace). See example in sample hand-outs.

Prose: We play literary mad-libs. Students call out an author and text at random and I have sentences prepared that could describe any author/text. I read the final sentence aloud to show that the sentence is ultimately meaningless. The message: if you can mad-lib it, edit it out of your paper. (See hand-out for this exercise too.)

Together, we revise sentences according to the paradigmatic method; see Diane Matlock's hand-out, which I use. (Circle prepositional phrases, verbs of being, etc.)

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