9th - 12th Writing, October 10

Lesson:
With all students present this week, we took a deeper look into the issues discussed last week, namely:

that clear, focused thinking is essential to writing a fluent essay,

that those clear thoughts should be stated in a correctly-worded thesis statement that then guides the essay, and

that the wording of the thesis statement should be in congruent, parallel terms.

Specifically, we discussed clarifying thoughts by narrowing the range of possibilities that could be explored about any given topic, then (for our purposes in the five-paragraph essay) choosing three primary points that can be developed in a clear and balanced way. Students who fail to limit their topic and thus try to pack too many ideas into their papers usually lose their way. Students who choose as their three main points ideas that are too dissimilar, overlapping, or disconnected find themselves working much too hard to try to make sense of things. Like the prep work done before painting, half the work of writing an essay is done before actual composition begins.

I reiterated the need to choose similar grammatical construction for items in series. This is an aspect of congruence or parallelism. In our case, the three major points of a five-paragraph essay may be listed in various ways, including simple nouns, noun phrases, gerunds, infinitives, various kinds of phrases, subordinate clauses, and more. Parallel structure requires that the same format be used for all three points whenever they are listed together. If the points of a thesis cannot be rephrased somewhat comfortably into compatible terms, the thesis likely is flawed in its basic concept. If so, that would be good to know before wasting days trying to force incompatible ideas to hang together.

I hope that this stress on fundamental organizational, even if heavy on grammatical terms, will provide a solid foundation for future academic writing.

For more explanation of how to treat items in a series, check here.

For a summary of gerunds, infinitives, and participles, which together are known as verbals, check here, along with the related links at the bottom of the OWL page.

Assignment:
Since the process of finding similarities and drawing distinctions is so central to learning and to writing, each student will compose another five-paragraph, block-style compare/contrast essay. Those who wrote a comparison last time will write a contrast essay this time, and vice versa.