English 51
Wednesday, January 22, 2013
Melissa Gunby
Today’s Agenda
 The Writing Process (Chapter 1): Critical Reading and
Writing Summaries
 Sentence combining
 Discussion on Ender’s Game
The Writing Process
Chapter 1
Two Elements to the Writing Process
 Writing in college generally means writing in response to
something else you’ve read: research for an essay,
background on an experiment in biology lab, facts and figures
from your history textbook. So for that, we need to focus a
bit on how to process and work with all that information.
 Then comes the actual writing part, sorting through all the
ideas in your head and translating them into a solid essay.
Reading Actively and Efficiently
 What does it mean to “read actively”?
 Reading actively means finding the main points of whatever it
is that you’re reading and finding a way to record it so that
you can find it later.
 Some people call this annotation; taking notes in the margins
so you can quickly go back and find things.
Finding Main Ideas
 All writing has structure.
 Expository writing, the kind we’ll be doing in this class,
follows a very specific structure.
 Look at the handout I gave you (copied from page 5).
 The dark grey boxes represent general statements to introduce
the reader to what’s coming (topic sentences for paragraphs).
 The light areas serve to provide the specific information to
support these ideas.
 This structure helps us to locate main ideas more quickly, as
well as giving us a standard form to study and work from.
Why do we need topic sentences?
 Because without topic sentences, it’s really hard to figure out
what a paragraph is about.
 She was really annoyed, but she decided she had to go.
 Joanne received an invitation to her ex-boyfriend’s wedding.
She was really annoyed, but she decided she had to go.
 The spectators enjoy the sun or the evening, chat, drink beer
or soda, cheer or boo as the occasion demands, and hope for
a victory by the home team. The analysts keep score, watch
each pitch intently, note the strengths and weaknesses of the
players, and follow managerial strategy with microscopic
attention.
Small Group Work:
 I’m going to put up a paragraph on the following slide (pg 6).
 Working with the 2 or 3 people around you (no more than 4
to a group, please), find the Topic Sentence of the paragraph,
and locate the supporting details.
 Just make notes; we’ll discuss it as a class.
From “Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the
Sixties” by Joyce Maynard
We [students] were forever being organized into activities that, I
suspect, looked good on paper an din school board reports. New
programs took over and disappeared as approaches to child
education changed. One year we would go without makes, on the
theory that marks were a “poor motivating factor,” “an unnatural
pressure.”…Another year every activity became a competition,
with posters tacked up on the walls showing who was ahead that
week, our failures and our glories bared to all the lass. Our days
were filled with electrical gimmicks, film strips and movies and
overhead projectors and tapes and supplementary TV shows, an
din junior high, when we went audio-visual, a power failure would
have been reason enough to close down the school.
Practice!
If you have your book, with a partner or 3 (groups of 4 please), do
the exercises on page 7 and 8. If you don’t have your book, I have
handouts.
More Practice!
 Silently read the short essay on page 9-10 (or handout).
 If your birthday is in January, March, May, July, September,
or November, I want you to highlight or underline where you
think the main ideas are in each paragraph.
 If your birthday is in February, April, June, August, October,
or December, I want you to use the handout of the essay
diagram to diagram the essay (the dark boxes get topic
sentences.You can list details in the white spaces).
 When we’re done, we’ll compare.
Writing Summaries
 What is a summary?
 A summary is a restatement, in your own words, of another
longer document.
 Summaries must:
 Maintain and communicate the meaning of the original
document
 NOT contain your opinion or views on the original
 stick strictly to what the original writing had to say
 Contain ALL the main points the original author included
 Will usually not contain all the details, unless of importance.
Good Summaries Should Answer 3
Questions (pg 13)
 1. What is the subject of the original? What problem or
situation is the writing addressing?
 When writing a summary, you may want to make this
question/answer like an introduction to set up the rest of the
piece
 2. What are the main points of the original?
 The summary may nor may not follow the same order as the
original. Usually, a summary hits the most important points
first. Summaries of pro/con will generally list all the pros
together and all the cons together for clarity’s sake.
 3. What conclusions does the original reach?
Steps in Writing a Good Summary (pg
13-14)
 1. Read the whole piece. On a separate page, write your own






words of the main ideas.
2. Reread and underline/highlight the important ideas.
3. Write the introductory statement, explaining what the
original is about.
4. Decide on the order in which you want to present the
main points.
5. write the body of your summary, using your own words.
6. write your last part, which tells about the author’s
conclusions.
7. PROOFREAD!
Aside: Why it’s important to proofread
 Someone tell me what’s wrong with this sentence:
 I whore those shoes until they fell apart.
 Microsoft word (and other software) can only tell you if the
word is spelled correctly. It can’t tell you if you’ve chosen the
right word. Make sure to take the time to read through your
document before turning it in.
 I didn’t photocopy it, but on page 14-15 you can see an
example of a writer doing a summary, with annotations on
the text and then the summary following.
Grammar Review: Sentence
Combining
 The Reagan White House cooperated with the Bush
campaign to an unprecedented extent. It had the President
sign or veto bills. These bills were judged helpful to Bush. It
had him make appointments. It had him put off unpleasant
business until after the election.
 The Reagan White House cooperated with the Bush
campaign to an unprecedented extent – in having the
President sign or veto bills as deemed helpful to Bush, in
making appointments, in putting off unpleasant business until
after the election.
Why combine sentences
 Because if we don’t, readers get bored, and they give up.
Quick review!
 What is a noun, and what does it do?
 What is a verb, and what does it do?
 What is an adjective, and what does it do?
How to combine sentences
 One of the best ways is to use adjectives, or modifiers.
 1. The car drove down the road.
 2. The car was old.
 Solution: the old car drove down the road.
 By adding the modifier of “old” to the first sentence, we’ve
combined these two, and make the sentence itself more
interesting.
Using verb forms
 You can also use verbs to help describe things.
 1. a monster arose from a swamp.
 2. a monster was groaning.
 Solution: a groaning monster arose from the swamp.
 Though “groaning” is a verb, by adding the –ing ending, we turn
it into a word that describes what the monster is doing (this is
the gerund form and no, you don’t need to remember that).
Practice!
 I have some handouts for you.
 Working with a partner or small group. Do a couple of these,
and then we will compare notes to see how you did.
Class Discussion: Ender’s Game
Chapter 1
 I have questions I want to ask, but I want to start with what
your thoughts are on the book so far, and what questions you
have.
Homework!
 Ender’s Game chapter 2: vocab and reading journal
 Do exercises from Texts and Contexts pages 16-23 (typo on the
syllabus)
 Have a great weekend!