Blog Post #3: Dominic Lopez

 

                Some of the things I have been thinking about and wondering about this week are: 

- Chapter 8 of the book provides a meaningful explanation for the purpose of teaching students how to properly form and format their writing. Teaching students how to use certain forms of writing can be a hinderance to their growth in writing because students then only stick to that form of writing. Their writing style and writing content often suffer since they try to fit their topic and their writing voice on the topic into a set format. 

 However, it is still important to teach students forms of writing because it gives them ideas for how to write coherently and how to structure their ideas well. Their ideas will become more connected and written better. We can show students a good amount of different forms of writing so that they are able to write well for any topic and for any genre of writing instead of merely sticking to one format of writing every time they write, such as the five-paragraph essay model. 

- It’s interesting that the book brought up in chapter 8 how students often write sentences in their writing that seem to set up an idea but then they never address it again in the piece. I think it will be helpful to teach students to always follow up if they introduce an idea throughout the piece so that the piece flows from idea to payoff later on in the piece. Expanding on their assertions and teaching students to have a road map of the ideas they introduce to the ideas expanded and then their conclusions seem to be a good way of getting students to become more organized and clear in their writing. 

- I think that teaching students how to use transition phrases and words can get them used to laying out their ideas in paragraphs like it talks about in Chapter 9 of the book. In my own writing, I know that it is helpful knowing how to use words and phrases like “therefore,” “As a result,” “Furthermore,” “Additionally,” and so on when expanding on my ideas or transitioning from point to the next. It helps me structure how the paragraph is going to be written and seeing how my assertion is being argued and concluded. I don’t think they should rely on them too often though, as that can make for dry writing. But it will give them an idea of how to structure their sentences and paragraphs and how to start off with an idea and then expand on it until the conclusion of that idea. Once they know this, it will be easier for them to do this on their own in their writing and only using these phrases every so often instead of every sentence. 

- I like the idea discussed in Chapter 9 of the book of having students practice their speech skills with one another and the teacher so that they get used to introducing ideas, linking them, expanding on them, and then concluding them. I never thought of speech being useful for teaching writing, but it makes sense to start there since most people are more comfortable talking than they are writing. In conversation, students will be able to see that they already know how to argue a point and link supporting details to that argument because they do it every day in their speech with others. Then they can apply this process to effectively craft their paragraphs in their writing.