Today’s Plan:
- Syllabus Update
- My Screw Up: Draft One Turn In
- Pressing Questions
- Feedback Exercise (6:25-6:50)
- Discuss Readings on Peer Review (with an eye toward workshopping) (6:50-7:25)
- Time Permitting: My Presentation (kind of a sample paper day paper) (7:25-7:45)
- Break (7:45-8:00)
- Syllabus Review (8:00-9:00)
- Wednesday, Sept 13
- Friday, Sept 15
- Monday, Sept 18
- Readings for next class
My Screw Up
By now you have probably realized that I screwed up when I set up the medium draft turn ins. For the final pieces, it made sense to set the turn-in options to URL only, because we want students to supply us with a link to their medium.com essay. BUT I accidentally set the draft turn-in to URL only too, which has been a gigantic pain in the butt for my class. Let me make sure you know how to adjust this.
Student Concerns
How to report issues with students. Or maybe the UNCO counseling center?
Syllabus Review
We’ve just about hit the time of year when teaching this class gets a lot easier. The proposal is the hardest assignment; the essay drafts are a lot easier for the students to conceptualize, and, if they are reading sufficiently, to draft and revise. Also, our class sessions should fall into a regular rhythm: Monday we lecture, discuss, and do short writing activities in class. Wednesday we work in the computer lab, revising writing or working on focused activities (via Canvas quizzes). Friday we workshop.
Wednesday Sept 13th
Looking at the syllabus, last semester I used Wednesday to answer student questions about the weekly writing reports. WE ARE NOT DOING THOSE! Hallelujah, they are a pain in the ass. But, we are asking students to post on medium.com. I would have them spend time in class on Wednesday transitioning their essay from Word or Google Docs to medium. BUT I WOULDN’T HAVE THEM PUBLISH YET. Give them time to play with the interface:
- Make sure they know how to put in a link
- Look at other medium essays for formatting–the use of images, headings, “pull out quotes” (the + tool)
- Make sure they all know the magic power of “CTRL +Z” (digital natives are unicorns)
- Talk about “tags” and the publish button (when they are ready this weekend. AGAIN STRESS THAT THEY SHOULDN’T PUBLISH UNTIL AFTER THEY REVISE. Some of them will undoubtedly mess this up and publish their articles right there in class as you are warning them not to
- Make sure they know how to find their drafts when they go back to medium
I would venture that this should take the last 20 minutes of class or so. So, how will you spend the first 30 minutes of class? I offer three possibilities.
First, you might do the next lesson, on characters, in the Williams and Bizup book. I hope you have already done the lesson on active verbs that we did last week, if not, get ur done.
Second, you might have a collection of sentences from the draft that are quality targets for class revision. Maybe their are clear passive constructions, a la Williams and Bizup, that could be revised for clarity or impact. Maybe, after the plagiarism presentation, you can pull a few transitions into evidence that need to be bolstered (if you haven’t done my magic sentence thing or my signal thing, this might be a good time). I think Scott’s PowerPoint did a nice job showing them what *not* to do, but I try to spend a lot of class time (as you will see in coming weeks) showing them, again and again and again, what they should do to attribute sources and differentiate their own ideas from those they are reading.
Third, I have a very short activity on Precise Language (below) that I like to show them before the workshop begins on Friday. You could do this on Wednesday, and ask have a few examples from their work ready to go.
Friday Sept 15th
Workshop day. We should talk a bit about workshop strategies tonight, things you have in your bag if the conversation lags. Let’s look at what is in the 594 Workshop space from orientation, and let’s brainstorm other ideas.
I workshopped with my class last Thursday (we only got through one essay), and it went well. Here is the brief preface I offered before that workshop. I think you want to help them provide quality feedback by asking them to look for specific things.
In addition to the major structural issues I outline in that preface, I also put them on the hunt for boring language. I want them to start identifying places where they can use precise words to strengthen, clarify, and energize their writing. I point them towards Roane State’s Writing Center piece. It is really good. Har, har, har. It provides them with one key word to avoid: “good,” and a list of alternatives that help grow more meaning. I try to generate a list of similar words to avoid: bad, things (I’ll see sentences like “this article said three important things”), important (don’t tell me something is important, show me why it is important), very (generally unnecessary), etc.
Finally, I share Diana Urban’s list of 43 words you should cut from your writing, and stress the usefulness of the “find” tool once you figure out which of these are causing you problems.
I can do this pretty quickly, in about 12 minutes or so, leaving me time to workshop all three pieces. Again, if you want to save 15 minutes for each paper, then you can save some of this material for another class.
Monday, Sept 18th
THIS IS MY FAVORITE CLASS. It requires some prep on your part.
Step One: Right after you get the first set of articles, open a new google doc (or whatever). Go through and copy and paste the first sentence of every article into that new document. The set up is complete.
Step two: at the beginning of class, do some of this. Not familiar with Heidegger? Then delete that part. The most important part is the piece by footnoteMaven. Read this with them.
Step three: read the first sentences document you put together. Have them vote (like the title activity last week) on the best. I have them each choose two. Reward those people.
Step four: give them class time to rewrite their first sentences.
Step five: have them read the new version to the class.
Step six: celebrate the fact that, if nothing else, the first sentences to the essays should be a lot more fun next time around.
Thinking ahead to Wednesday the 20th–the syllabus has them revising sentences from the first slew of published essays. That’s fine. I am also going to want us each to dedicate 15 minutes to having them read two essays from other classes. So, we have two things to do next week: 1) put together a master list of who is writing about what (we can do this in the practicum–just make a google doc with links to our medium authors and their first pieces Tuesday night, I’m calling it the medium.com writer’s index) and 2) make sure we are comfortable teaching how to comment in medium. I’m excited for this!
Reading for Next Class
- Murray, “Teach Writing as a Process, Not a Product”
- Olson, “Toward a Post-Process Composition: Abandoning the Rhetoric of Assertion”
- Lynch, “The Cultivation of Naivete”
