11.4 Working through your drafts using track changes

I returned a draft to each of you with comments that used the review functions for MicrosoftWord.  In class we walked through some of the formatting and reviewing possibilities available of MSWord.


As you see in the below image, there are eight tabs (depending on which version you have), each of which will allow you to perform different functions and make different changes to your documents.

We talked a little about using the Format and Home tabs to set up templates for your documents, but mostly we talked about using Track Changes, at the Review tab.



Directions for how to use Track Changes can be found at: http://www.wikihow.com/Edit-a-Document-Using-Microsoft-Word's-Track-Changes-Feature.


You  read through the comments on your drafts, and I spoke to each of you to ensure that you had a plan for moving forward.  Each of you are in different places with your writing.  Some of you need to do some more brainstorming and develop some more material, some of you are ready to work on focus and organization (developing a stronger introduction and narrative thread - so that your memoir is "about" something the way "The Indian Dog," "Fallout" and "The Accident" were focused on a particular set of ideas), and some of you are ready to begin polishing the language/working on sentence patterns & grammar.  Each of you should work from where you are in the writing process.

We spent the second part of class reading through a very short memoir-like piece, N. Scott Momaday's "The Indian Dog," and noticing how the author developed his theme: how he set up his ideas in the introduction, how he developed them through portraying particular events (events that he CHOSE because they best illustrate and allowed him to explore his ideas) and how his ending drew his ideas to a conclusion.

For next week:
1. Write a short paragraph about what your memoir is about. Post this writing to your site as a MSWord attachment to the in-class writing link.  Title this document: OverviewMemoir.

2. Work on your memoir/biography, developing or revising whatever needs work. Attach your revised essay to your google.site by Sunday, November 10, at noon.  Your work should be carried out in track change so that I can see what you have added to the draft from 11.4  Title this writing: YourNameDraft11.10.  If I were to turn in this assignment, my draft would be named: ChanderDraft11.10

3. Post vocabulary, either from class or from your own reading, to your site.

Come to class prepare to discuss the focus of your memoir/biography, and ready to create a map of the stories you will use to develop this focus.

Thank you for the good class, and see you next week!