Basic Reading & Writing II

Lesson 4 - Writing Processes: Revision

Learning Objectives

 

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

  • Annotate their own texts and the texts of others to identify important content
  • Demonstrate an understanding of how their compositions and others are shaped by audience and purpose
  • Participate in collaborative work, responding effectively to their classmates’ work and learning how to supply effective peer review feedback
  • Apply strategies in their writing that demonstrate they have an understanding of multiple genre conventions
  • Approach writing assignments as a series of tasks that include inventing, drafting, researching, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and revising
    Demonstrate in their own writing the importance of making multiple revisions

Overview

In the previous lesson, we critically considered our writing process and practiced using some invention strategies: listing, brainstorming, and mapping as methods for choosing topics and developing, and extending ideas. At the end of your last lesson, you were asked to use another kind of invention strategy: reflection. Your assignment was to write a “Dear Professor Letter” and to consider what was important about your memorable event. The purpose in writing this letter was to help you identify an effect you want to leave on your audience. Understanding why a story is important to us and what “dominant impression” we want to leave on our readers helps us to move forward with our ideas.

In this lesson, you will turn your personal reflection into a short story. You’ll learn strategies for evoking emotion, specifically, how to incorporate description and dialogue in a way that makes your reader feel as though they are experiencing the moment with you. The goal is to evoke the kind of emotion that you felt at the time that the event took place. While the short story genre allows you to use a lot of description and dialogue and doesn’t require you to build an argument as you might in an essay, it does insist that you “Show, Not Tell.” This is perhaps one of the most important differences between the reflective memoir and the short story. Description and dialogue are the keys to showing.

During this lesson you will write a rough draft, peer review another student's story, and submit a final draft. Because there is limited time, there will be deadlines throughout the week. Pay close attention and make sure that your work is submitted by the due dates.

map

Activities