Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Writing Workshop with Dr. B.: "A Mind at Work"




For today's class, we are going to do something a little bit different. Rather than have you do the writing, Dr. B. is going to show you how she would outline and write an essay on complex characterization.  Your job for today is to watch the process that unfolds as she

1) reads through the prompt,
2) identifies the question that needs to be answered,
3) breaks down the passages she selects, and
4) answers the question.

In the comments section below, comment on anything you notice or find important in Dr. Brigman's technique.  Some questions you might consider are the following: how does she break down the question? How does she jump into the writing task? What can you do during class tomorrow and all of this week exam that will involve the same strategies?

You might also consider Amanda Vickery's advice, "a mind at work." What does Dr. B. do that shows you (and readers) her mind is "at work" while answering the question?

For help with Live Commenting as a workshop strategy, please see previous examples from Dr. B's period 2 English class here.

Update 5/24/17: Here is the rough draft of the essay Dr. B. did in class yesterday.


64 comments:

  1. Dr. Brigman is making an outline on a new word document with the question she is supposed to be answering in her essay.

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  2. Next, she is writing down her thoughts on the outline, starting with an opening sentence and saves the document so she doesn't loose it.

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  3. Dr. Brigman knows she needs to make an outline on her response to the question. Then she found the topic or the theme and starting filling in the outline. Staring with the opening sentence.

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  4. In her opening sentence, she included the quote about the sheep, sheep wolves and sheepdogs and is now explaining the quote and how it connects to Chris Kyle.

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  5. The first thing Dr B does is she writes out what she needs to start her essay, the second thing she does is when she writes the opening sentence after she wrote it she went over it to catch any grammar mistakes and misspellings

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  6. She starts explaining the theme and got a quote that explain the theme. She also brought the thesis up and put it after the opening sentence.

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  7. Another thing I noticed her doing is while she was writing it she read over it and noticed is when she was reading it over she needed to clarify what she was talking about.

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  8. Dr. Bringman finished her opening paragraph, and is writing down a few thoughts for her thesis statement, to come back to it later. Now, she is writing down notes on what her three body paragraphs are going to be about.

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  9. Also, she is writing down thoughts for her conclusion paragraph to wrap up the information in her essay.

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  10. Then she put the different topic into the different topic sentence paragraphs in the out line and then started the conclusion. Then put the conclusion into three different sections specific, Transition,Level three thinking.

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  11. After she got done writing her opening sentence she writes in her topic sentences what she is going to be writing about, she does that for all her topic sentences.

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  12. She went threw it again and fixed spelling and made sure it all flowed together.

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  13. After Dr. Brigman finishes her outline, she is reading it over and making sure it will help her enough to write her paper by making edits to it. Now she is finding her there quotes from the book to put into each one of her body paragraphs.

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  14. She also went threw the book and found a quote that would fit into her topic sentence.

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  15. looked at the time as a good writer

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  16. Dr. B never lets time get in her way and I think that is a very important thing

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  17. Dr. Brigman keeps reading her body paragraph one over and adding more details to make her paragraph better. She has moved on to body paragraph two, but will come back to her first one.

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  18. She moved on to the net paragraph and is going to go back to the other one later. wrote and implied meaning about the quote and explicit.

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  19. Has good detail good information

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  20. Bolding things she needs to fix.

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  21. Again while she is reading over her writing she catches any grammar/Spelling mistakes

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  22. She goes back and sees if she is answering the question and found out in her body paragraph two, she hasn't really answered it so she is going back and make sure that information is in there.

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  23. She goes back to make sure she is answering the question " How does Kyle change ove the course of American Sniper"

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  24. While she is writing it she BOLDS the things she needs to go back and fix

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  25. Skips ahead and starts woking on the next sentence to be able to get a better understanding of the last one she was woking on.

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  26. Dr. Brigman is now finding a quote for the second body paragraph, to make sure it answers the question, "how does Chris Kyle change over the course of American Sniper?"

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    1. Thats one thing that I noticed a lot while she is writing her paragraphs!!!

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  27. Dr. Brigman also keeps her book open and beside her so she can go back and look through the book to help her add more information to her essay about Kyle. I think that is a very important thing to do.

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  28. She bolds things that she needs to go back and add to.

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  29. You guys are amazing! Thank you for the awesome comments and specific observations about my writing process! I hope you learned a lot about the strategies you, too, can use when writing your essays. I can't wait to talk about this more tomorrow!

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  30. Next time I write an essay I am going to start with an outline. I am also going to come back to paragraphs in my writing if I can't think of it all at one time.

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  31. The first thing I would do is considering I already have an essay skeleton I would type up what the topics i would be writing about, and then I would go back in the book to see if theres anything else i can get more information on the topic.

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  32. While i'm writing my paper the first thing ill do is go over and edit it before I add more.

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  33. I'm going to make sure I go back and re read my paper out loud and make any edits that are needed. I am also going to make sure I have enough information to back up my answer to the question throughout the essay.

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    1. I like the last part of your comment! That is a very good piece of information to have.!

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  34. Deleting what you have previously told yourself to do (The Bold Words). Making sure everything sounds good, You should let the reader know what the paragraphs is about.

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  35. I'll also read over my paragraph and fix any errors that I had or add more detail.

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  36. I'll also check to make sure I have a topic sentence to make sure that it makes the rest of my argument make sense.

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  37. What I liked about how Dr. Brigman edited her paper is when she added more detail outside of the Kyle topic so it wasn't all about Chris Kyle.

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  38. Make sure you dont repeat a word too much.

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  39. First, Megan read her first paragraph out loud and she is now finding a quote for that paragraph to show evidence about how Chris Kyle changes.

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  40. After she wrote down her quote, Megan read it out loud and fixed her mistakes. Now she is writing an explicit explanation of the quote.

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  41. She read her paragraphs out loud and found grammar mistakes. Also she started doing explicit.

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  42. Just now, I was really happy to see Megan catch a typo in her quote from the book when she was reading body paragraph one out loud. Megan wrote, "trued" when she meant "tried." Great job catching that Megan!

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  43. Now, Megan is writing down in bold, "add implied meaning" and "add summary sentence"

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  44. Part 1: How he was protecting him brother
    Part 2: How the insurgents were fighting the marines (With Russian weapons and how they were dangerous)
    Transition: How ddi it impact Kyle how it changed him
    Part 3: how his emotions changed when Biggles died (Marc)

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    1. What is the connection between the "insurgents" who Kyle fights overseas and the bullies who picked on his brother?

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    2. In the beginning is where the "wolves" are the one beating the sheepdogs, But in this case Kyle is the sheepdog and the people over the seas are the "Wolves".

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  45. 1: How he started as a "cowboy" that worked on a ranch.

    2: How he killed people and earned the name "The Legend"

    3: He realized he's not super human

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  46. For my paper, my three topics for my paragraphs are:

    Paragraph 1: How close Chris Kyle and Taya are in the beginning of the book (I'm going to discuss how his relationship with Taya introduces his ideas of family)

    Paragraph 2: How Chris Kyle is part of a Navy SEALs family

    Paragraph 3: How Chris Kyle has changed after Marc's death

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  47. The first thing richelle does is she goes over what she's written and when she was talking about family I thought she was talking aout Kyle's mom and dad but come to find out that she was talking about Taya! So i asked "How would you know Kyle changed when he ws only with his family for a few chapters of the book" Again i though she was talking about his Mom and Dad. So I told her to clarify what family she was talking about!

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  48. Other thing I see her doing is she is making notes to herself in BOLD so the knows to come back to add/make it better! She is also going over it a few times to see if she catches any grammar mistakes.

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    1. I'm so glad you commented on this technique Megan! It really helps when developing a paper. It's almost like "past you" is talking to "future you" when you return to where you left off. Have you tried this some since we started using this technique?

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  49. She is reading the first paragraph to make sure she has an example of family. She is looking over her paragraph and fixing punctuation to make sure it flows good and also changing up the wording of what she already wrote and making it sound better and make sure its talking about her theme of it which is (Family). She also wrote her thesis and wrote about Kyle's military family and his actual family and showed talked about both of the family's and is going to write about how it impacted his views on family.

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  50. She is writing her definition of (family) is and explaining what a lot of other people think family is. Reading over what she wrote again and fixing mistakes and making the paragraph sound better.

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  51. The first thing Jeremy is doing with his paper is answering the question, "How has Chris Kyle changed?" He is also looking through sections of the book to help answer the question.

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  52. The fist thing Jeremy is doing is he is answering the question "How has Chris Kyle changed?"

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  53. Now, Jeremy is clarifying the key term "family".

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  54. One thing I see Jeremy doing is when he was going over his quote he found a grammar mistake he then went back to the book to and found the quote , Once he found the quote he used he read it over and then he looked at the quote which he wrote in his paper and fixed the misspelling of words!!

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  55. Jeremy is giving good answers for the questions he is getting by DB. Giving good explanations for the questions.

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  56. She started out by first reading he first two paragraphs. She fixed a few grammar mistakes and fixed part of the wording of her sentence. Fixing the paragraph to make sure it flows as if it was one sentence so it would sound like it makes sense. She added on to her paragraph. She tried to find a word the would sound good with the sentence she was making. She went back to the paragraph and fixed more grammar.

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