More on the fall

I haven't started actual preparations for the fall yet, but I always do a lot mental prep before anything hits paper. Here's what I'm thinking for ENG 100 next fall.

Last fall, I taught several modes of writing over successive three week periods. That's essentially a ENG 101 strategy for me, so it worked . . . but it could've been better. I'm thinking that 100 level students need more focus on the parts of a paper, rather than the types of papers. So I've got a mental list going of areas to address. I figure I can take a couple days or a week to address each one.

1. Introductions. This is always a difficult part of writing, even for good students.

2. Thesis. Thesis seems like a straightforward concept to me, but no matter how many times I teach it, students still don't do it well.

3. Conclusions. A little easier than intros maybe, but still difficult.

4. Organization of points. Not sure yet how I'll go about teaching this. To me, it's a fairly intuitive process, and of course, it's different for every topic. Probably will talk about transitions in this section

5. Support and Development. Once you've got your main points, what do you say about them?

6. Paragraphing. This will probably include a discussion of topic sentences and build on the support/development part above: once you've got everything on paper, you have to make it cohesive in some way.

7. Formality. Many of my students suffer from "street English" and don't know how to compose academic writing.

8. Style. Similar to paragraphing, but on a sentence level. How do you write a strong sentence?

I'm also tempted to include word choice somewhere (maybe as part of "style"), but I'm not sure that it would go well. I have feeling students either would become annoying, pretentious, thesaurus toters or would simply misuse a lot of words that they don't really understand.

Of course, there would be some grammar in there. But my experience has been that, by college, it's almost too late for people to grasp grammar. No matter how many times I say, "Two complete sentences must be joined with a comma AND a conjunction," I still find troves of run ons and comma splices . . . and even fused sentences, which to me are so obvious and grating that I can't believe there are people who don't catch them (or understand what's wrong about them).

So there's 8 sections. 8 sections over 15 weeks . . . devoting one week to each section leaves 7 weeks for discussion of the paper assignments, topic/thesis/argument brainstorming, peer revising, conferences, and reading discussions. Hmmm, 8 sections might be too much.