Today’s Plan:
- Work Logs
- Let’s Talk Writing: Paragraph Structure
Work Logs
Starting this week, you’ll see a Work Log assignment in Canvas. These will be due on Friday.
A work log is a 3-4 sentence description of the labor you invested in your project that week. It details how many hours you spent, and what you did during that time. These do not need to be extensive, especially if I can see the work in your workspace. For instance, you might say “this week I spent and hour and a half writing an annotation and another 1/2 hour developing the survey questions.” Clear cut. I’ll pop in your workspace, take a look, (hopefully) leave some feedback. We’re done.
You might also write something like: “I also spend a half hour searching for more relevant articles on Google Scholar. I skimmed a few of the articles and decided to read one. Finally, I spent a half an hour writing up my methodology section. Cool, I’ll look for some writing in the workspace and check the methodology section. We’re done.
You might write something like: “I spent an hour editing sentences, using the Williams and Bizup stuff that we practiced in class. Then I spent an hour working on topic sentences.” Cool. Assuming you link to a Google Doc draft of your paper, I’ll pop in, check the version history, and provide some sentence-level feedback on your revision/editing process.
You might write something like: “I met with my partner/team and we had an hour-long conversation about [something]. I then spent an hour working on my analysis of [something].”
You might, for the next two weeks, write something like: “I spent two hours playing my game and wrote up some notes here.” Cool. Games take time to play and that is work. Some of you will be doing that for awhile. But I also want writing beyond note-taking. Starting in early November (two weeks from now), I’ll want a balance between playing/note-taking and paper drafting. Given our use of the social/science paper structure (more on that in a minute), you can write some parts of the paper even before you complete your analysis (lit review, methodology, drafting discussion material).
As you can see from these examples, I expect you to invest two hours a week into our writing projects outside of class. I use work logs here because everyone writes in different ways. I cannot rigidly demand that you do X amount of research or draft Y amount of pages. I can tell you that around November 7th I will ask you to have completed your primary research project (whether gameplay or visual analysis or focus groups or whatever) and that you’ll be expected to have a full draft of your paper the Monday before Thanksgiving. Rewarding the incremental progress you make via Work Logs should help keep you productively on track, however you chose to approach those goals.
Let’s Talk Writing: Paragraph Structure
I want to revisit a lecture from earlier in the course and discuss paragraph structure. Here’s what I presented in that previous class:
- Does each paragraph open with a topic sentence that lays out the claim of that paragraph?
- Does it transition into and contextualize evidence?
- Does it supply evidence (quote, reason, anecdote, etc).
- Does it summarize and then analyze evidence? [Note summarize and analyze are two different things!]
- Does the closing sentence of the paragraph “end” the thought by referring the specific claim of the paragraph back to the overall argument of the paper?
And in that class I focused on how to incorporate evidence:
- How well do you transition into a quote?
- Do you know how to contextualize a quote [that is, briefly tell the reader where the quote falls in view of the original author’s argument].
- After a quote, how deftly can you summarize the quote–putting it into your own words in a way that “opens” it up for the reader without sounding too repetitive. This is a skill, a real hard one.
- AND then, how well do you add something to that quote/evidence that does something with it?
Today I want to focus on the first principle of a paragraph: its topic sentence. Academic writing calls for the topic sentence to be the first sentence more than just about any other genre. That’s because academic writing is structured argumentative writing: the purpose of an academic paper is to make a claim and support it with evidence. In this class I really emphasize the “scientific” structure of a social or hard science paper (introduction, lit review, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion) because I believe using such a “global” structure makes it easier on developing writers: every section of the paper has a clear goal and, as a reader, I have a clear expectation of how each section advances the argument.
Topic sentences are such an ingrained part of academic writing for the same reason: they make it easier on a reader to follow an argument. The first sentence of the paragraph makes clear how that paragraph furthers the argument. It makes clear what that paragraph offers.
I expect writers to struggle with topic sentences in early drafts, because (again) we often don’t know what we think when we are writing our first draft. Thought is emergent. It happens as we write. So I don’t introduce topic sentences today with the hopes that you will be able to write them as you draft your paper. Rather, I want you to incorporate today’s lesson into your revision process–so that you give a paper a read and identify what every paragraph is, could, or should be doing. This might lead you to recognize that a paragraph has more than one claim/purpose and think about how to revise it. Or you might realize that you have a paragraph that’s a series of claims with no evidence. This is pretty standard in drafts! We start writing, and a bunch of ideas come out. And that is awesome! It is also a mess that we have to fix! Praise be to shitty first drafts.
