Stephen David Grover
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
Writing assignments often require students to perform a complex array of interrelated tasks all at once. For example, when composing a typical researched argument essay, students must keep their eyes on higher-order concerns like thesis, organization, and finding and evaluating evidence, while at the same time they must manage many smaller tasks related to voice, tone, diction, paragraph structure, documenting sources, formatting, punctuation, mechanics, and more. Added to this are issues of self-regulation, time management, and even computer hardware and software use as they work through their writing processes. All told, it’s a lot of balls to keep in the air while juggling, so I’m not surprised when the balls they’ve dropped are the ones I hoped they’d juggle more successfully. To bring my expectations more in line with students’ abilities, I find it helpful, whenever possible, to help students develop discrete skills in isolation—to have them juggle just one or two balls at once in a low-stakes situation that allows them to critically reflect on their skill development before employing the skill in a higher-stakes assessment. One area where this is particularly helpful is incorporating source material into writing. Some writers seem to learn to incorporate source material into their writing in an organic way—primarily through reading enough that they learn to mimic the patterns and techniques that they see (Roozen). However, it is not uncommon these days for students in high school English and first-year college composition classes to have read too little professional and academic material to have adequately developed this ability. Even if they have, additional development is needed as they learn to enter new discourse communities related to their majors and careers (Lombardi). Therefore, I use the following guide to help students learn to better incorporate source material into their writing. Students are presented with a menu of six common integration methods (summary, paraphrase, embedded quote, full quote, and block quote) as well as information about the use of attributive tags to signal the inclusion of source material and establish context and credibility. Students explore the advantages and disadvantages of each method in a set of low-stakes activities and discussions so that they can more conscientiously choose the best integration method in their own writing. The activities can easily be adapted for use at various levels and for writing in various discourse communities.