As a Teaching Assistant, I was unsatisfied with the minimal guidance about composition provided to students. On my own initiative, I sought out resources to aid in developing their writing skills. Below, I have listed the contents of four packets I assembled to hand out along with their four assignments. My intention was to help students break down the writing process into constituent steps and focus on improving one at a time, as well as to offer them a more concrete benchmark for how their work would be evaluated.
SUMMARY OF HANDOUTS
concise structural guidelines
This one-page overview of the crucial elements of academic writing, authored by Eugenie Brinkema and myself, is among the materials I created for students as a TA. It covers: outline, thesis, argument, conclusion, citations, and critical reading. [available by request]
1. organizing your ideas
- Critical Reading Towards Critical Writing (Deborah Knott, New College Writing Centre) [2 pages]
- Paragraph Development (UNC-CH Writing Center) [6 pages]
- Plagiarism (UNC-CH Writing Center) [5 pages]
2. constructing your argument
- Developing a Thesis (Maxine Rodburg and the Tutors of the Writing Center at Harvard) [2 pages]
- Introductions (UNC-CH Writing Center) [5 pages]
- Conclusions (UNC-CH Writing Center) [4 pages]
3. refining your mechanics
- William Safire's Rules for Writers (humor) [1 page]
- Style (UNC-CH Writing Center) [8 pages]
- Quotations (UNC-CH Writing Center) [9 pages]
4. revising your work
- Reorganizing Drafts (UNC-CH Writing Center) [5 pages]
- Editing and Proofreading (UNC-CH Writing Center) [5 pages]
representative essay
I solicited an exemplary paper as an illustration for students, and annotated it to assist them in understanding its structure, as well as where it succeeds and where it could be improved. [available by request]
