Writing an overview of your memoir/biography.
We started class by looking at the moves writers make when the write a summary. A summary shortens and condenses the material in the original text. By condenses, I mean that it puts what the text means or shows, or gives the main idea, rather than stating all of "what happened" in a story, or all of the main ideas in an essay. We tried to find a story that all of us were familiar with, but we were not successful, so we used "The Indian Dog," which we read last week (See previous post).
Our list of what summaries do (and do not do) was as follows.
Summaries:
are shorter than the original text
focus on "what the text means/is about" or the main ideas
often start with a general statement of what the text shows/is about/means
use the body (middle) of their writing to state to ideas/meanings that contribute to the text's overall interpretation
often end with a re-statement of the texts overall meaning
do not include all of the "what happened" of the text (re-tell the story)
You then wrote a list of the ideas that were central to the stories you were writing as a memoir or biography. Once you identified the central ideas/feelings/meanings=> you wrote a short paragraph to sum up what your piece was "about."
You then titled you work Summary11.11 (or something like that) and posted it to your in-class writing page on the google.site. I will read these summaries and give you some feedback for next week's class. We talked about how writing a summary of your work (especially a long work like this one) can help you identify the focus. Have a clear, detailed understanding of your main points/ideas helps writers to write more coherent, more focused essays. As you continue to work on your memoir/biography, referring to your summary will help you decide:
- which stories you might want to add to your writing so far (=> events, descriptions, feelings, reflections which develop the focus stated in your summary);
- what parts of the essay which should be edited out or deleted (=>stories/descriptions/information which does not develop the focus stated in your summary); and
- the best order for your memoir/biography (=> an order which develops the focus stated in your summary).
Vocabulary resources on the internet.
We then spent about 10 minutes looking around for sites that might provide practice, information, or other resources for developing vocabulary. Most of you indicated that dictionary.com provided the most effective help for you.
Sentence patterns.
We concluded class with one-on-one conferences to identify ( and post to your site) the sentence patterns that you will use to polish and revise your writing. Researchers have found that writers do not make "mistakes" randomly. Usually, they make mistakes in systematic ways. That is, they make the same mistake over and over. This suggests that an important strategy for making your writing stronger (with fewer nonstandard sentence constructions) is to identify your patterns for error. For those of you who have turned in more than 5 pages of writing, I have used the side comments to point out some patterns you can use to "correct" your writing. Each of you have different sets of patternes - mostly because you speak different languages and each home language pre-disposes multilingual writers to build particular kinds of nonstandard sentences - usually sentences that reflect patterns from their home language. Some of the patterns we noticed as I walked around the classroom reflect your home languages, and some of the patterns are typical issues all writers struggle with as they move from speech to writing. This second kind of problems is because the conventions are writing are DIFFERENT from the conventions for speaking, so learning to write in English, is almost like learning another language.
Here is a list of some of the patterns to think about with respect to your work:
fused/combined sentences
writing complete sentences (sentence fragments)
remaining in the narrative past when telling relating stories (another way to state this is that, in general, writers need to remain in the same tense within the same sentence)
subject verb agreement
knowing when to use articles with nouns (and when not to)
paragraphing
conventions for writing dialog
writing parallel sentences
use of prepositions (many uses are associated with idioms)
The best approach is to identify ONE PATTERN, and proofread your entire paper for that pattern, noting all the different ways you use the pattern correctly and incorrectly. This will give you time (and enough examples) to notice the ways you approach this pattern, and learn how to create a range of sentences where you use it correctly.
I asked you to identify the patterns you were working on, and to post them to your site.
For next week:
Each of you are at different places in your writing so your assignments will vary. Here is the list.
For everyone:
Post vocabulary words to your google site. These should be the words you are learning, looking for as you work on your memoir (and your readings for other courses). Include the words and their definitions.
Come to class prepared to ask questions about vocabulary you need and can't find, or about words that have shades of meaning that are difficult.
Work on your memoir/biography as listed below. Use track changes, and post your revised draft to google.sites.
For those of you who have less than 6 pages of writing.
Develop three or more pages of writing. Don't worry about correct language. Try to develop stories/descriptions/reflections that will develop the focus you identified in your summary.
For those of you with more than 6 pages of writing
Continue to develop your memoir/biography. See if you can write to the "end". Develop materials which reflect the focus from your summary.
Begin to look for sentence patterns. When you identify a pattern in your writing that you will work on, identify the error on your google. site (as we discussed in class) and begin working on that pattern in your essay (see post above on .
Good work and see you next week!
