One of our basic goals for this course has been to learn and practice portable strategies for research-based writing, to accumulate tools and techniques that you can take with you from WRT 205 and apply in various writing situations in your personal, professional, and civic lives. With the semester rapidly drawing to a close, I’d like you to articulate some of those lessons here. There are two reasons for doing this now: looking long term, I’d like you to be able to name what you’ve learned as on your way out the door; in the short term, you’ll need access to some terminology to name the writerly choices you’re making in your current writing project.
In other words, it’s time to actually name and list the tools you’ve learned in this course that you are currently using in writing for this course. You’ll do this as a small group activity in class on Wednesday, 4/27, and will share your list as a comment on this post.
I’ll start: one of the big sets of lessons learned has been that we develop our own ideas by conversing with our sources–by receiving, relating, and responding to the ideas others put forth. When we grab onto those in our own work, we are forwarding, and making that move depends upon coming to terms with and fairly summarizing those thinkers’ words and ideas. So some of the concrete strategies include:
- critical summary (what a source says)
- defining a source (what it is and what it does)
- note-taking (capturing key ideas and your responses to them)
Then, of course, there are a whole bunch of other moves (many of them they say/I say strategies) that you use to actually write with other sources. I could keep listing those here, but I actually want YOU to do that, to tell me what are some of the specific strategies you’ve found most helpful in your own writing?
With your team, get started–brainstorm your list and share as a comment on this post. Feel free to consult the class notes on this blog, as well as your textbooks, and try to be as specific as possible in naming the strategies that we’ve been refining.