Annotations and the Scripted Interview
This lesson script is a class exercise that generally follows a broad introduction to the Annotated Bibliography and the Scripted Interview. I also have students submit these pieces of writing together because it’s helpful if they think of them as different sides of the same coin: the annotations comprise what the source is saying and the scripted interview takes on the manner in which authors articulate their points, especially in terms of tone, voice and types of evidence used.
PDF: AnnotationsandtheScriptedInterview
Fun with Quotes
Description: This classroom activity helps students work with quotes to build the essentials of a source based paragraph.
Peer Critique Of Annotated Bibliography
Description: This classroom or take-home assignment provides students with the opportunity to reflect on the process of building a bibliography through critiquing the work of others.
Reflective Writing While In Process
Description: This script is a reflective writing exercise that I give 101 and 201 students a class or two before their second formal assignment is due. I find that it gives students a chance to speak to a collaborator and then to the class in an informal way that’s generative, loose and low-stakes. Of course it’s also great to have students reflect upon an assignment not only after it’s been completed but while they are in the process of working on it. The interview component and note taking is also an added bonus.
Source-Based Paragraphs
Description: In this assignment, students take triple entry journal entries and turn them into source-based paragraphs. To do so, they mix-and-match an intro of a source, a quote/paraphrase, a citation,and a commentary on the quote paraphrase. These are the “moves” made in most source-based paragraphs. I once observed a class of our colleague Gilbert Morales who had the same type of paragraph building going, and he modeled it for the students by color coding the different moves on a sample paragraph shown on the overhead projector. The students could then be asked to do their source-based paragraphs at home and then to color code them. A second step asks the students to link these paragraphs together into a coherent argument simply by adding thorough transitions at the start or end of each paragraph to move the reader from one idea to another. There is no doubt that this is all schematic and very clunky. But once the writer learns to do this, they can then get creative and fluid with how to use sources well.
Word doc: Quote Exercise
The Collage Concept
Description: There are several different versions of this exercise. The one below is designed to have students illustrate an idea that comes from the course reading in a way that mimics the process of organizing research. Another way I used this exercise, which was quite successfully, was as a beginning of the semester ice-breaker. In that version, students brought in objects that reflected something about them and then in teams the students constructed collages literally made of experiences and objects meaningful to them. In both cases, the reflective writing assignments were similar.
Triple Entry Journal
Description: This assignment asks students to actually work with sources, meaning, they have to do some writing while they research. It is a little formulaic but basically it gives the novice researcher a way to work with sources that is more than just hunt for a quote or find a statistic. Done well, this can be used as a version of the annotated bibliography–an annotated bibliography in chart form. Students can then use the chart entries to build source based paragraphs. (Word doc: Source Based Quote Exercise). The whole process works very well with the text They Say I Say (pdf: full text)
Word doc: Triple Entry Journal Assignment
Using The Non-Fiction Narrative to Develop Research Questions
Description: This lesson script makes an effort to link what is typically the first assignment in English 101, the creative non-fiction essay, to the research essay. The first step in this approach is to get the students to think about their personal narratives through a more critical lens. The second step then is to introduce the students to sources that relate to a topic touched on in their personal narrative. The aim here is to help students begin to investigate a research question that has personal meaning to them, that they themselves intimated in another writing assignment, but at the same time, they may not have recognized because the context of the research essay and the non-fiction assignment are so different.
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