Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education
Date of this Version
1985
Document Type
Article
Citation
To Improve the Academy, published by The Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education, volume 4, 1985.
Abstract
I teach literature-which also means teaching how to write critical, analytical papers. Until I developed the assignment that will be presented in this paper, I was almost defeated by the quality of writing that students assumed to be acceptable, expecially for their first essays in the course. The papers were disorganized and without a clear focus (or thesis); the writing style was grammatically poor and filled with vague, incoherent sentences and what passed as paragraphs; and there was no sense of evidence to support the statements being made. Since I had not initially established a common vocabulary for my expectations and their writing deficiencies, my endless corrections and comments on their papers had little meaning to the students who therefore learned nothing for all my time. Even individual conferences to discuss each paper were less than satisfactory in their results, though personal contact and rewrites of course led to some improvements. Then I tried the idea presented here, an assignment that addresses all the problems mentioned above, and more, and can help students write better papers in almost every course across the curriculum.
Comments
License: CC BY-NC-ND