Look over the below Course Goals and Unit Subgoals to think through more “small picture” aspects of writing at the level of the word and sentence:
- Read and analyze texts critically: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g., essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose.
- Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.
- Experiment with the rhetorical power of tapping into the full range of your rhetorical expertise (i.e., your rhetorical practices in all of the contexts in which you use rhetoric)
- Learn the differences between genres at the level of words, sentences, paragraphing, document design, mode, etc.
- Change stylistic features of your writing to accommodate your audience
- Write with other voices (e.g., paraphrasing, direct quotes, summary, footnotes, endnotes, managing claims and evidence with other voices, qualifying claims, counterarguments)
Thinking back to many of the style exercises we did in the first few Learning Modules can especially be valuable to do, in addition to thinking through these goals.
Speaking of, in one of the Learning Modules, you were asked to calculate sentence average and variation of sentence length as well as classify and count sentence types for two paragraphs in your writing.
I want you to skim through all of your writing with the course and unit goals in mind, Learning Module activities on style (especially Learning Module 2, Learning Module 3, Learning Module 4, Learning Module 5–these modules considered things like punctuation, word choice, coherence, translingualism, and register), and various lesson plans in the first half of the semester that focused on style in order to begin to notice things you notice that you got better at as the semester went on at the word and sentence level.
After doing this skimming and note-taking, focus especially on at least 2 paragraphs. One from an early part of the semester and one from a latter part of the semester or one paragraph from a first draft and one paragraph from a second draft.
You have three tasks:
- Using the instructions from this Learning Module page, calculate sentence average and variation of sentence length of both paragraphs.
- Using the instructions from this Learning Module page, classify and count sentence types for two paragraphs in your writing of both paragraphs.
- Write about any growth you notice in terms of rhetorical effects of sentence variety AND one other element of style we talked about (e.g., punctuation, word choice, register, coherence) in about 100-200 words. Also include information about differences in sentence length and type that you found doing your calculations. Think about what you are working on and want to continue to work on at the word and sentence level.
Remember: nothing has to be “perfect” here…you can write about things that improved but you still would like to keep improving! That is honestly how most of this stuff is: frustratingly always-in-progress. But, life is kind of always in process and sort of never finished, so, yeah.
After commenting below, click on the button to continue the module:
