380 Characters (and actions) Studio ideas, wk 2
ADVICE
AND ACTIVITIES FROM FORMER STUDIO LEADERS
(1) An option for handling lecture review:
Use ball or soft object (stuffed animal or squishie toy) for toss review: whoever catches object says one
thing that they’ve learned from the lecture; then do another round and make it more specific—like, one
thing you’ve learned about characters (really good for helping them to look at one another and getting
you out of review). Can do a few rounds. Then move to paper and have them identify.
(2) Understanding characters & choosing the right story:
Write one letter to 5 different people:
Your UVA tuition is going up:
Write to mom
Write to Daily Progress
Write to Financial Aid and so on
Use a scenario most appealing to your section—perhaps one they’ll encounter after college.
(3) Homework: bring in a news clipping or somesuch where rhetorical situation has encouraged writer
not to assign responsibility for actions.
(4a) Imagability in actions: (short exercise) Have them underline actions in a piece of writing and act
some of them out as was done in lecture. Which verbs can be acted? Which can’t, & why?
(4b) Photocopy a song lyric. Have each group rewrite a different verse or chorus two or three times,
changing its imagability by systematically increasing or decreasing the level of specificity.
(5) Most important in section it seems to me is to practice moving between populating & depopulating
(with characters) paragraphs & to know experientially how different rhetorical situations function.
WEEK 2, ADVICE FROM JON
Generic Lesson Plan, Studio #2:
AGENDA: Create friendly environment for student participation.
Move students closer to workable projects and proposals
Reinforce at least some of major principles from lecture #2 on characters and actions
SKELETON STRUCTURE:
I.
Prepare class to workshop student proposals
II.
III.
Workshop your pioneers’ proposals
Workshop other students’ project ideas, with eye toward their week #3 proposals
IV.
Some review, practice, and feedback incorporating lecture #2 principles. (This item might
involve more than one activity and—unlike items I-III – doesn’t need to be sequenced at a
particular point in the day’s lesson plan.)
Housekeeping (for studio #2, I’d suggest taking care of housekeeping at the beginning of the
2nd hour; depending on what the class is doing when you break, though, you’ll want to be
flexible about this).
V.
DETAILS:
I. Prep class for workshops.
Help class define the kind of atmosphere and feedback they’d like during workshopping.
Consider also the protocols for the featured writer (Should writer respond to each point? Wait
until end of workshop for writer to respond? Should writer articulate what she understands to
be the 2-3 take-away points?)
Practice workshopping on a proposal not written by class member. I’d recommend reviewing
one strong and one weak proposal from the set of four sample proposals. Ask students to find
a few strengths in the weak proposal, as well as a few items needing work in the stronger
proposal.
Help students distinguish between advice that is purely local (that is, advice that only helps
the writer revise sentence X, or tweak argument Y) and advice that can be generalized into a
transportable principle.
Help students think about the hierarchy of editorial advice. There’s little point offering minute
line-editing suggestions about a passage that needs extensive restructuring. Similarly, if a
writer’s “problem” doesn’t seem worth writing about, there’s no point quibbling with the local
evidence in paragraph #4.
II. Workshop student proposals
Do proposed documents seem likely to solve intended readers’ problem? Are readers, readers’
costs, and the writer’s response to the problem clearly identified?
Do proposals as documents solve studio leader’s problems? Help students think about your
needs and how the proposals might solve them:
• Need ample chance to review student arguments and problem-solving documents.
• Need projects to offer students a manageable challenge.
• Need evidence that writer is familiar enough with topic and problem to have reasonable
chance of producing successful document.
• If project is technical, need to produce some non-specialist documents (briefings,
glossary of terms, etc.) to allow classmates to serve as effective writing editors.
• Need specific list of deliverable documents.
• Need specific schedule for deliverable documents.
• Need proposed schedule to regularly produce chunks of text for workshopping.
• Need schedule to promote efficient drafting strategy. (Does writer plan to familiarize self
with examples of the genre or with the history of previous efforts to solve similar
problems? Does student propose writing a large final draft in week 14? Does writer
plan for revision? Does writer plan to test document design on sample readers? Do
sections of the final document(s) allow for parallel revision schedules, or does the
student plan to draft the entire document before revising any of its subsections?)
[It might be useful to have student write criteria on board as the class develops them. The list
can be useful to guide workshops of proposals and of project ideas. Note that your
students need not replicate the above list fully. Consider the class-derived list a draft; as
your students workshop proposals and project ideas, the conversation is likely to invite
them to consider extending or refining their draft criteria.]
III. Workshop student project ideas
This should be pretty straightforward, but take care to set the tone for your studio by having
students do most of the talking. Also, discourage them from directing the bulk of their
comments to you. The tone in the room will be warmer and more productive if you aren’t
always the hub through which comments need to pass.
IV. Reinforce some elements of lecture #2.
Review packet homework (page 87).
Optional exercises & activities:
• Unpack nominalized U.S. history (packet, p. 89)
•Translations. Bring in a few examples of accessible prose or verse (I like to use country
lyrics, modernist poems, and advertising slogans), and have students produce two or three
transformations to make lines progressively less readable. (See scale of readability on
page 45 to guide transformations.) Alternatively, have students start with syntactically
complicated prose and systematically revise to incrementally increase readability.
• Brainstorm list of important characters in student’s discipline or related to student’s
project (best done out of class).
• See also exercises suggested by former studio leaders at the top of this handout.
V. Housekeeping.
• Remind students to purchase vouchers from the UVa Bookstore this week. Vouchers can be
purchased from the Textbook office (2nd floor), 9:00-4:30, M-F. To receive packets this
semester, students should buy their voucher no later than this week, sign it, and bring it to you
either in studio or in lecture.
• In the studios following lectures 3-11, one or two students should lead the class in a studentdesigned exercise that helps the class understand, practice, complicate, or refine a point raised
by the most recent lecture. Depending on the size of your roster and whether students want to
do this individually or in pairs, each student might be responsible for 1-4 review exercises.
Please set up this review schedule in studio this week. (You might want to pick one of your
stars to lead the first review in studio #3.)
• At the end of the semester, prizes will be awarded for the student who has found and
documented the most needlessly unreadable syntax. To avoid the heartbreak of a weak field,
please build into your studio some structure ensuring that each student brings in at least two
sample of Pretty Putrid Prose. (You might rotate responsibility for one or two students to
bring in a sample to studio each week. Alternatively, you might ask for one sample in each
student’s mid-term portfolio and one in the final portfolio.)
While students may find their examples from the popular press or from textbooks, the search
is more useful if they thumb through academic or professional journals in their fields.
*Note -- you will probably regularly deal with some housekeeping items. However, don’t regularly
attend to this miscellany at the beginning of class meetings. Otherwise, students quickly realize that
they can show up late without missing any of the real business.
Because items III & IV are moveable, your in-class sequences may vary. For example, you
might end studio #2 by workshopping student project ideas, or you might use one of the
lecture review exercises to break up the otherwise long stretch of project idea workshops.
The only important thing about sequencing this week is that items I, II, & III should appear in
that order.
Rock steady.
--Jon