WR 220: Methods of Tutoring

Study Guide #6: Revising Texts:  Global and Surface Level Revisions"

Readings:
Clark, Chap. 6 “Revising Texts: Global and Surface Level Revision”

Clark

1) Explain the limits of the five-paragraph essay. Also, what has been your experience in relation to the five-paragraph essay?

2) Many students have been taught to outline before they begin writing. Yet many find this an impossible task, because how can they outline before they have figured out what they want to say? What were you taught about the outline in high school and how did it work for you?

3) On what page is the Function Outline form? How does it work? How is it different from the outline form as it is traditionally taught? Explain.

4)  On-campus students:  We will do this activity in class. 

Online students:  Complete #4.

Go back to the essay "The Role of Fairy Tales" on pp. 16-18.  As if you are the writer of this essay who wants to use the Function Outline to make sure that the thesis is clear, the topic sentences/paragraph foci are clear, and the organization is effective, complete the Function Outline form for this essay.  You can find this form to copy and paste into your Study Guide in the Resources for Writers section under Writing Guides: Function Outline Worksheet

So copy and paste the Function Outline below and complete, applyling it to this essay on pp. 16-18..

Then, after completing the outline, answer these questions:  Why is this a good model of an academic essay?  What are the specific features of this essay that make it a successful college essay that meets the expectations of the faculty community?

To help you answer this question, first review the "Working with Assignments:  A Genre Approach" on pp. 83-85. Be thorough in your response.  In other words, up to this point we have looked at essays that need a lot of work.  Let's now look at a postive model and explain why it works.  Please be thorough in your answer.

5)  Sentence Level Issues:  In the last section of this chapter, Clark discusses issues of "Working with Sentence Level Issues." 

As tutors, we are never editors.  Editors charge up to $100 an hour.  Our job is to help students see and learn to fix their own error patterns.  So if we see that the student writes a lot of run-ons (comma splices or fused sentences) or fragments, what good would it do to go through and mark everyone of these errors, or to fix them all ourselves?

Instead, we would help the student see that this is an error pattern find one or two, open up Hacker to the pages that explain this error, showing students how to use the index to find the information, therefore modeling how to use such a resource.  Then we would help the student apply that new information to their own errors.

Thus we are avoiding the "Storehouse" model that assumes that just giving the student the information will cure the problem.  Instead we help the student transfer the handbook info to their own writing by applying the info to the student's sentences in the essay, giving the rules a meaningful context.

So now go back through your own past work.  What error patterns do you see?  Select one.  Now look up the error in Hacker (the goal here is to make you become familiar with this resource) and write out the rule below.

Now write out a sentence from your own work with that error.  Then write out the revised sentence below it:

Orignal:

Revision:

6)  The Floating Thesis:

One great tool to share with students to help them revise is "The Floating Thesis."  Have students write out their thesis on an index card or separate piece of paper. Then have them float the thesis down next to each Body paragraph and ask: 

Have I made clear in a topic sentence and in the sentences in this paragraph the relationship between my thesis and this paragraph?

Is their a relationship? 

How can I revise to make the connection clearer to the reader?

Go back to the Fairy Tale essay. Explain what you discover by using "The Floating Thesis."

Online Students Reminder:

Face-to-Face Experience: WR 220 online students will need to arrange to do some face-to-face tutoring in some form to widen the scope of their tutoring experience. Online students can work with a student they know at any level in school who is writing for a course, or they can contact a nearby school or college to arrange to tutor face-to-face. You will need this experience in order to write Essay #3.

Discussion Board #6