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Day 5

Page history last edited by Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD 8 years, 2 months ago

Navigation: Day 1>Day 2>Day 3>Day 4>Day 5

 

Essential question: How do introduction and conclusion paragraphs align with thesis statement in terms of hooking the audience and providing "food for thought" when closing one's argument?

 

Introduction and conclusion paragraphs

  •  An introduction paragraph smoothly transitions into a strong thesis statement: hook, context of the problem, and thesis statement. Move from the general to the specific.
  • A conclusion paragraph smoothly transitions into a "food for thought" moment: restate and reword thesis statement; significance, big picture, relevance, etc. of the argument, and closing statement. Move from the specific to the general.

 

Comma usage

  • Compound sentences: I like apples, and I like bananas.
  • Complex sentences
    • subordinating clauses: If I study, I will pass.
    • relative clauses
      • restrictive *My biological mother who has red hair plays the guitar. (ill-formed)
      • non-restrictive My biological mother, who has red hair, plays the guitar.
  • Serial (or Oxford) comma
  • Introductory phrases
  • Appositives Tom, a teacher, works at the UAA.
  • Sentence connector 

 

After nine is a good time to call.

Before the war was where they met.

In the office is were you'll find him.

 

Activity 

Instructions: Reflect on the last five days of this academic writing workshop and consider the main takeaways, or big ideas, that are most relevant to you and your own teaching and learning practice.  Construct a four-to-five sentence paragraph that best reflects these main takeaways.  When constructing your paragraph, consider any relevant ideas around what it means to develop a paragraph that follows unity and is coherent and cohesive. Upload your paragraph reflection below as a comment and UAA professors, also upload your paragraph to the Moodle forum.

 

Brainstorm...

  • Add key ideas here...

 

 

 

Teacher reflection

  • Do you focus more on the process or the product?  How would the learning design be affected if you switched your focus for the other?  For example, if you primarily focus on the process, how would the learning design change if you primarily focused on the product?
  • How do you assign grades to the process?  How do you assign grades to products?

 

Recorded Session

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments (8)

Carmen Loera said

at 12:23 pm on Jan 15, 2016

The most relevant aspect from the Academic Writing Workshop was to have the opportunity to share ideas about writing with my colleagues. The workshop was useful in that it allowed a common core of writing essentials to be reviewed by all participants, like that of the writing process. Any space we as teachers get to share, practice and be students again allows us to continue growing.

Tonio said

at 12:53 pm on Jan 15, 2016

Knowing how to write a paragraph requieres taking into consideration certain aspects. Theme and rheme are essential to construct a focused paragraph. Thus, if your paragraph is centered around your main idea, then the paragraph will be coherent. Coherence as well as cohesion are necessary elements in the construction of a paragraph. Cohesion helps the writer to articulare the paragraph in terms of grammar, and punctuation because without these latter elements the ideas that the writer wants to express will not suffice to convey them. These elements and some others helps in the construction of a paragraph which is coherent and centered in one specific topic.

Yanahalti said

at 12:58 pm on Jan 15, 2016

This workshop gave us the opportunity to express our ideas and learn more about the writing process. Writing should follow several steps that are necessary to create a clear and well stuructured text. All the steps that we as learners had to experience were enriching for our classes.

And remember Writing is c̶h̶a̶l̶l̶l̶a̶n̶g̶i̶n̶,̶ ̶d̶i̶f̶f̶f̶i̶c̶o̶u̶l̶t̶ HARD.

Geras said

at 1:01 pm on Jan 15, 2016

This Academic Writing workshop was challenging and indeed interesting as I had the opportunity to reinforce my knowledge towards the tools you have to take into account to develop an essay. The construction of an essay is something that requires time and concentration as you have to think very carefully about how the ideas are going to be connected, but most importantly you need to decide how they are going to be organized. Additionally, I found out ways to link the sentences by using the theme and rheme or changing the rheme to the theme. I am sure all of these key elements will help me improve my writing and at the same time I will support my students as they develop essays by sharing all what I learnt. Something meaningful about the course was this idea of sharing experiences towards how we cope with the writing skill in class and how we allow students to use it. I am interested in having so much practice with this skill as it is so beneficial to communicate.

Wendy M said

at 1:06 pm on Jan 15, 2016

Here's my DRAFT...

Academic writing is a complex process. One of the steps for writing an academic paper is the proper development and connection of ideas according to the established rules and patterns. There are several patterns from which a writer can choose. A particular pattern is the “theme and rheme” which mentions that there is a theme of the sentence and then a “rheme” that complements the “theme”. Ideas connect in a paragraph as long as the writer maintains the same “theme” or “rheme”. However, as simple as it may sound, developing the ability of mastering the “theme and rheme” pattern requires continuous practice; therefore, if a person wants to become a fluent academic writer, he needs to make practice a habit.

Luis said

at 1:18 pm on Jan 15, 2016

My reflection on the Academic Writing workshop
This five-day worshop was really helpful because I learned and reviewed different key aspects of Academic Writing. For instance, in paragraph writing, we must pay attention to the use of theme and rheme in order to make the information contained in the sentences easier to read. We must take into account that the theme is the topic being talked about and the rheme is what is being said about the topic. This way the reader will understand easier what we want to communicate in our piece of writing.
Paragraph unity was another relevant point discussed in the workshop. Paragraph unity means that the paragraph must be coherent. In order to write coherent pararaphs, the topic sentence, the supportive sentences, and the concluding sentence must refer to a single idea and relate to each other.
The advantage of having discussed these and other relevant points in this workshop will help me to improve my teaching and learning practice as a BA in ELT teacher.

Mariesther Lemus said

at 1:41 pm on Jan 15, 2016

The five-day workshop raised awareness on aspects to take into account for the learning and teaching of academic writing. Defining a thesis statement facilitates the writing process since it establishes the topic and main ideas of a text. The theme and rheme patterns as well as the MEAL plan lead a better organization of writing. Therefore, when editing or giving feedback on writing, teachers should pay attention to these aspects.

LOLIS said

at 8:52 am on Jan 18, 2016

This five-day academic writing workshop was really helpful for me to reinforce what I knew and learned many new ways to improve it. Academic writing is a complex process but in this workshop I learned how to start and organize from the beginning to have a succesful paragraph and then an essay. I noticed that I need to practice it because I`ve focused on my teaching more than developing and increasing my writing skill.

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