Day 7: Drafting/Revision Exercises
Here are some tasks to help you figure out what to do with your idea generation materials and early drafts. In your breakout rooms, use this number generator to determine which task you are randomly…
Category: Lessons
Day 7: Instructions for Peer Review
Remember, an engaged form of peer review asks you to read like a reader, not an editor or professor. Consider working in a Google Doc for ease of commenting through marginalia and end notes, and…
Day 6: Fun with Paragraphs
As we work on drafting essays, we’re also developing our basic writing skills, so here are some paragraphing tips to make this more explicit. Dunleavy’s Medium article explains aspects of organizing paragraphs as well. The…
Day 5: Conversation Between Artifacts
One way to understand how to create conversation between texts is to look at visual texts: consider where they converge and differ, and how we make sense of them in juxtaposition, and how the similarities…
Day 4: Effectively Doing Peer Review
In which I ask myself and y’all about the kinds of feedback you’re used to, and what you assume about feedback, structured as a series of myths I see taking shape in some of your…
Day 3: Warrants and Inferences
An excellent Twitter thread about a short sentence authored by Hemingway, and what we’re prone to assume, and why (click the date for the thread): “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Hemingway’s infamous six-word is…
Day 3: Close Reading Practice
When you close read essays, particularly more complicated work, and especially when you plan to “borrow” structures from that work, you may want to review Carillo’s (2017) text on close reading. She reminds us to…
Day 3: Formulating Claims
There’s no single formula for writing a college essay, but the Critical Response Essay tends to be a little more formulaic. Separate from the Critical Response Essay, a general template for critical thinking might look…
Day 2: How to Write a Precis
A precis (pronounced pray-see) is a concise summary of the important points of an article. It’s the next stage of what we did previously, which was simply identify the author’s primary claim. The paragraph(s) you…
Day 2: “You read the Bible, Ringo?”
While watching this excerpt from Pulp Fiction, consider how each line of dialogue models an aspect of critical writing—mainly the ability to reflect and rethink in a continual process of reevaluation. Using the handout posted…