10-second review: College freshmen wrote 26 themes of 250 words, a 1500- to 3000-word autobiography, and a 3,000-word research papers and several business and social letters.
Title: “A Study of Two Methods of Teaching English Composition to
Comment: “Retarded?” Whew! That was a long time ago. But the idea of the study is worth exploring. It shows that intense and frequent writing produced effective results. Must have been year-long course. Note the two lengthy papers—autobiography and research papers and also business letters. More and more, I am becoming convinced that long papers will help students to produce better writing.
But I also use 10-minute essays in which students each day at the beginning of class write for ten minutes on a topic of their choice. That night I “correct”—literally—their mistakes in sentence structure, punctuation, usage and style. By style, I mean needlessly repeated words, including “there,” “it,” “get,” “thing” and clear reference of the demonstrative pronouns, “this,” “that,” “these” and those.” RayS.
No comments:
Post a Comment