The content in writing resources originally was created for the writer's complex website by cathy copley, larry greenberg, elaine handley, susan oaks and contributors. At the writing center, we work one on one with thousands of student writers and find that giving them targeted writing tasks or exercises encourages them to problem solve, generate, and communicate more fully on the page. You’ll find targeted exercises here and ways to adapt them for use in your course or with particular students. We can help students most by teaching them how to see and make choices when working with ideas. We can introduce students to a process of generating and sorting ideas by teaching them how to use exercises to build ideas.

With an understanding of how to discover and arrange ideas, they will have more success in getting their ideas onto the page in clear prose. Through critical thinking exercises, students move from a vague or felt sense about course material to a place where they can make explicit the choices about how words represent their ideas and how they might best arrange them. While some students may not recognize some of these activities as writing, they may see that doing this work will help them do the thinking that leads to easier, stronger papers.

Ap English Literature And Composition Prose Essay

In order to write a paper for a class, students need ways to move from the received knowledge of the course material to some separate, more synthesized or analyzed understanding of the course material. For some students this begins to happen internally or through what we call thinking, unvoiced mulling, sorting, comparing, speculating, applying, etc. That leads them to new perspectives, understanding, questions, reactions about the course material. This thinking is often furthered through class discussion and some students automatically, internally move from these initial sortings of ideas into complex, logical interpretations of material at this point.

But, for more students, their thinking will remain an unorganized, vague set of ideas referring to the subject. Many will have trouble moving beyond this vague sense or simple reaction toward ideas that are more processed, complex, or what we often call deep. We can foster that move to a deeper understanding by providing opportunities to externalize and fix their ideas on paper so that they may both see their ideas and then begin to see the relationships between them. The following activities will help students both generate and clarify initial responses to course material: free writing find a clock, watch, or timer to help you keep track of time. It can be a specific detail or a broad concept whatever you are interested in exploring at the moment.

Mba Essay Writing Tips

If you get stuck and don’t know what to say next, write i’m stuck and don’t know what to say next… or try asking yourself what else? until another idea comes to you. Your goal is to generate as much as you can about the topic in a short period of time and to get used to the feeling of articulating ideas on the page. You can repeat this exercise several times, using the same or a variety of topics connecting to your subject. Read what you have written to see if you have discovered anything about your subject or found a line of questioning you’d like to pursue. clustering/webbing find a clock, watch, or timer to help you keep track of time. Put a word you’d like to explore in the center of a piece of paper and put a circle around it. As fast as you can, free associate or jot down anywhere on the page as many words as you can think of associated with your center word.

Don’t discount any word or phrase that comes to you, just put it down on the page. Read around on the page and see if you have discovered anything or can see connections between any ideas. listing on a piece of paper list all the ideas you can think of connected to subjects you are considering exploring. cubing this technique helps you look at your subject from six different points of view imagine the 6 sides of a cube and you get the idea. Take your topic or idea and 1 describe it, 2 compare it, 3 associate it with something else you know, 4 analyze it meaning break it into parts , 5 apply it to a situation you are familiar with, 6 argue for or against it. Write at a paragraph, page, or more about each of the six points of view on your subject.

journalistic questions write these questions down the left hand margin of a piece of paper: who? what? where? when? how? and why? think about your topic in terms of each question. what? so what? now what? to begin to explore an idea first ask yourself, what do i want to explore? and write about that topic for a page or more. Finally ask yourself, now what? to begin to think about what else you might consider or where you might go next with an idea.

defining terms although this suggestion is simple and may seem obvious, it is often overlooked. Find others’ articulations of the terms in your course readings, the dictionary, or through conversations and compare the definitions to your own. Seek input from your instructor if you can’t get a working definition of a term for yourself.

summarizing positions sometimes it’s helpful to simply describe what you know as a way to solidify your own understanding of something before you try to analyze or synthesize new ideas. You can summarize readings by individual articles or you can combine what you think are like perspectives into a summary of a position. metaphor writing metaphors or similes are comparisons sometimes using the words like or as.