WRITING TO THINK AND LEARN: THE BASICS
Judy Lightfoot
Writing informal papers
helps you think and learn; reading them helps me teach to your needs.
Write informally about new material. Besides
improving your fluency and other skills, you'll understand and remember material
better, clarify your cloudy ideas, and make useful connections. You'll also
be making something new from the material, turning what’s "merely academic"
into personally significant knowledge. Finally, your papers will track your
learning through a course of study, so give each writing a date and a topic
or title, and keep papers in order.
Informal papers tell me what you and the class need from me in order to learn
and understand. I read them like a class newsletter and don’t comment much,
but I note whether you do them and mark them as good, thoughtful and skillful
(+), perfunctory but reasonably skillful (ok), or weak (-).
Writers with a sense
of purpose solve most writing problems naturally, in the course of pursuing
a larger aim. So make every assignment your own, and make course purposes
your own. Don’t just “do a paper.”
Developing a strong, clear purpose can
help you write well. Advice and lists of skills can't, because they become
a tangle of taboos to novice writers and can feel patronizing or self-evident
to the experienced. But the following skills are basic to all writing in my
courses. If you need extra coaching or practice in any of them, let me know.
5 BASIC SKILLS FOR HOMEWORK
PAPERS AND IN-CLASS WRITINGS:
1. Hold a purpose in mind as you write.
a. The purpose of an informal personal
response topic is to let you explore your spontaneous first impressions, opinions,
or feelings about a reading or subject in free, open-ended ways.
b. The purpose of a more objective
or “academic” topic is to teach you course material by asking you to work
with it systematically. In doing so you’ll have feelings and opinions about
the material, but your aim here is to comprehend it.
2. Make
accurate, true statements that you can support.
a. Measure your ideas against
your own lived experience* (*which includes reading and thinking as well
as overt action).
b. Add the concessions and
qualifiers necessary to make a claim like "life is more educational than
school” less sweeping and thus perhaps true. And can you correct the self-evident
or circular reasoning in "every individual is different" and "poets shouldn't
use too many metaphors”?
3. Give
grounds for your thinking.
a. Reason (explain, define,
consider the merits of the opposite case) thoroughly enough to fulfill your
purpose.
b. Support your reasoning
with enough details.
c. Paraphrase or summarize
instead of always quoting verbatim (but carefully: using material out of context
can distort meaning or intent).
d. Give simple citations for
passages referenced -- e.g., (p. 253.
4. Say
what you mean. (And cut needless repetition and other deadwood.)
5. Move coherently
from point to point.
a. Explain how points are
connected instead of just putting a quote beside a story or an example beside
a claim..
b. Connect your ideas naturally
or logically. Ideas in a list make thoughts seem mechanical, not your own.