University Writing Program
Fall 2005
Donald Meisenheimer, CAI Coordinator
dkmeisenheimer@ucdavis.edu
Reviewing Leads on the Overhead
Summary
Students write an essay about someone they know, making sure to incorporate
various elements examined in class, including a Lead, a Description, a Dialog, a
List, and a Metaphor/Simile. When they arrive in class, they separate these
elements from the complete rough draft and drop them off in separate dropoff
subfolders labeled accordingly. The instructor then opens the Lead dropoff
subfolder and puts one student-submitted Lead after another on the overhead
screen. Along with the students, the instructor makes suggestions for
improvement. With all the Leads left open on the overhead screen but moved to
one side, the class keeps track of the winning submissions. If time permits, the
instructor then proceeds to another dropoff subfolder, such as Description, and
repeats the process.
Target Courses
I observed this lesson in a UWP 101 Advanced Composition course, although it
has wide application in other UWP courses. It would work well for any writing
assignment which includes a hook, trigger, or lead sentence or paragraph. It
would also work well for elements or writing sub-tasks in documents other than
essays (in engineering or science texts, for example).
Amount of Time Required
The lesson took the full 80 minutes of class time to look at two or three essay
elements. For the Leads, the class closely examined a dozen in about forty-five
minutes; less time was necessary for ensuing essay elements.
Software You’ll Use
Word, and the classroom Dropoff Folder.
Prep
Students write an essay about someone they know, making sure to incorporate
various elements examined in class, including a Lead, a Description, a Dialog, a
List, and a Metaphor/Simile. Before class, the instructor makes dropoff
subfolders for these categories. Students arrive with their rough drafts read to
submit.
LESSON PLAN
Background
In a previous class, students have examined various essay elements in class, including a
Lead, a Description, a Dialog, a List, and a Metaphor/Simile. For the Lead, they have
reviewed “Sample Leads by Susan Orlean.” They arrive in class with the rough draft of
an essay about someone they know, a draft which incorporates these various essay
elements.
Step 1: Students Drop Off Sections of Their Drafts in the Appropriate Dropoff
Subfolders
Learning the following trick will help you view how many students have submitted their
pieces very quickly. On the overhead projector, the instructor opens the list of all
classroom folders, scrolls down to his class in particular, but instead of opening it, he
leaves it on the “tree” and clicks on the + to view all the subfolders available inside. In
this case, they include Lead, Description, Dialog, List, and Metaphor/Simile.
He now asks students to open the Word versions of their current drafts on their computers
and identify the various essay elements. (Students might have bolded these elements
while writing their essays so they can locate them easily.) For the next five minutes or
so, students copy and paste these elements into new Word documents, naming and saving
them, then dropping them off in the appropriate dropoff subfolder.
“Copy the lead,” the instructor says, “paste it into a file, give it a name, drop it off.” He
circulates around the class helping students do so. “If you don’t want your name on the
overhead screen,” he says, “then don’t paste it in.”
Since the “tree” is open, the instructor can quickly open any dropoff subfolder on the tree
and view how many documents have been submitted so far.
With about fifteen or so submissions, the instructor says, “A couple more minutes and
then I’ll settle for what I have.”
Step 2: The Instructor Solicits Class Input Evaluating the Submitted Leads
The instructor opens the dropoff subfolder title Leads and then opens the first Word
document submitted. He usually enlarges the document to 150% or even 200% so we
can read the type on screen.
As in most of the cases that follow, the lead is typically a short paragraph, which enables
the instructor to read the paragraph aloud and make a few quick, obvious editorial
changes. For example, he might cut a there-is construction and rephrase it, bold problem
words like this without a following noun, cut any unnecessary words such as adverbs and
very’s, separate any sentences that seem to belong to another paragraph. In many of the
submissions, he’s able to point out what will probably be pervasive problems in the very
first sentence.
Gradually, however, the instructor moves the discussion away from editorial work to
deeper criticism of the lead. In many cases, the student is obviously imitating Susan
Orleans’ lead strategies. The instructor notes as much, and usually makes a few initial
positive statements about the lead before soliciting input from the class. What does the
lead leave out?
“My only confusion is this,” he says, and zooms in on a problem area which either he or
the class can sometimes fix. “Is there a way of making this specific?” he asks the class,
and pushes them to come up with concrete examples that can serve as proof backing up a
statement in the lead. Where a paragraph seems too general, he notes that an anecdote
would help make the lead more specific. Sometimes he is able to supply an anecdote
from his own personal experience as an example.
Contradictions in a given lead, even in tone, also offer opportunities for discussion. He
might at times bolds what is obviously an untrue a claim, a “lies,” so he can interrogate it
skeptically. In some cases, he might bold the best couple sentences or claims and delete
the rest of the lead, allowing the class to focus on the usable material. Repeatedly, the
instructor returns to the main topic of this particular essay, which is supposed to focus on
a person the writer knows: “As a reader, what do I know about this person after reading
the lead?” Often he bolds the best sentence in the lead, or the sentence he wants to see
elaborated, the sentence that most intrigues.
Once he has finished with a lead, the instructor asks, “Does anybody want to argue with
this as the winner?” If not, he closes it and moves on to the next lead. If he or someone
in the class likes the lead, however, he says, “Let’s keep that one alive at least,” and
leaves it open but shoves it aside on the overhead screen. He can then jump back to a
superior lead to contrast it with an inferior one.
In the class I observed, students stayed interested in part because it was their writing
being criticized on the overhead screen.
Step 3: The Instructor Picks a Winner and Continues to Another Dropoff Subfolder
Once the instructor has made his way through the list of submitted leads, he might have
four or five finalists still open on the overhead screen. With the class’s input, he selects a
winner, then moves on to another subfolder.
Leads from Susan Orlean
Meet the Shaggs
Things I Wonder (2:12)
Depending on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or
the worst. Frank Zappa is said to have proclaimed the Shaggs were “better than the
Beatles.” More recently, though, a music fan who claimed to be in “the fetal position,
writhing in pain,” declared on the Internet that the Shaggs were “hauntingly bad,” and
added, “I would walk across the desert for forty days and forty nights not to ever have to
listen to anything Shagg-related ever again.” Such a divergence of opinion confuses the
mind. Listening to the Shagg’s album Philsoophy of the World will further confound.
The music is winsome but raggedly discordant pop. Something is sort of wrong with the
tempo, and the melodies. . . .
Show Dog
If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale. Biff is perfect. He’s friendly,
good looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools.
He’s not afraid of commitment. He wants children—actually he already ahs children and
ants a lot more. He works hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how
to have fun.
What Biff likes most is food and sex.
The Maui Surfer Girls
The Maui surfer girls love one another’s hair. It is awesome hair, long and
bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles,
like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it-yanking it up info ponytails,
or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as
carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits.
Not long ago I was on the beach in Maui watching the surfer girls surf, and when they
came out of the water they sat in a row facing the ocean and each girl took the hair of the
girl in front of her and combed it with her fingers and criscrossed it into braids. The Maui
surfer girls even love thing of hair that I dreaded when I was their age, fourteen or
so-they love wild, knotty. . . .
Living Large
The coolest person in New York at the moment is a man named Fred Brathwaite,
who is known most of the time to most of his friends as Fab Five Freddy, Fab, Five, or
just Freddy. Freddy has a lot of jobs. He has been, at one time or another, a graffiti artist,
a rapper, an internationally exhibited painter, a video and TV commercial director, a
screenwriter, a film scorer, an actor, a lecturer, and a television personality. Currently, he
is also know to millions of viewers as the host of MTV’s popular Saturday-night rap
music show, Yo! MTV raps. Freddy also knows a lot of people. He counts among his
friends the late Andy Warhol. . . .
I Want this Apartment
Jill Meilus is a New York City real Estate broker. Like Superman, she can see
through walls. Walking down a Manhattan street with her is a paranormal expereince.
“Nice building,” you might remark as you pass a handsome but unrevealing prewar
façade, to which she might respond that the J-line apartment on the third floor has a new
kitchen, that the guy in 8-A is being transferred to Florida and will entertain any offers
more than two hundred thousand dollars, that the super is a chain-smoker, that there is a
one-bedroom for sale because the owners are having money troubles or are having twins
or made a new fortune or are splitting up. New York is . . ..
Devotion Road
The biggest, nicest thing a traveling gospel group might pray for is a bus. Usually,
gospel groups consider themselves blessed if they book a show, and truly blessed if they
can also find a way to get there; sometimes they get the call but they don’t have a ride.
Flying is rarely an option, because it costs too much, and because gospel concerts are
often in places that are underserved by airlines, like Demopolis, Alabama, and Madison,
Georgia. The Jackson Southernaires, who have been singing in gospel programs around
the country virtually every weekend for the last fifty years, used to travel from show to
show crowded in whatever care they could get their hands on and they thanked God if the
care got them to the program and back before it broke down. In 1965. . ..
Shoot the Moon
White men in suits follow Felipe Lopez everywhere he goes. Felipe lives in Mott
Haven, in the South Bronx. He is a junior at Rice High School, which is on the corner of
124th Street and Lenox Avenue, in Harlem, and he plays guard for the school basketball
team, the Rice Raiders. The white men are ubiquitous. They rarely miss one of Felipe’s
games or tournaments. They have absolute recall of his best minutes of play. They are
authorities on his physical condition. They admire his feet, which are big and pontoon –
shaped, and his wrists, which have a loose, silky motion. Not long ago, I sat with the
white man at a game. . .
Brief Encounter
Of all the guys who are standing around bus shelters in Manhattan dressed in nothing but
their underpants. Marky Mark is undeniably the most polite. For instance, even though he
is very busy getting ready to go to Japan for a promotional tour, Marky took the time to
call from Los Angles the other day just to chat about his now role, as the Calvin Klein
Underpants Boy. Heretofore, Marky has been known only as a young white rap star. . . .
Tiffany
One thing that Tiffany, Tiffany’s manager, and the entire Tiffany organization
would like you to know is that even though it may seem too good to be true, Tiffany’s
real name is Tiffany.
“Of course her real name is Tiffany,” says George Tobin, her record producer,
manager, and vigilant shepherd. “Her name is Tiffany just like Madonna’s name is
Madonna….”
A Gentle Reign
Kwabena Oppong, who is the King and supreme ruler of the African Ashanti
tribespeople living in the United States of America, has a throne in his living room. The
throne….
Figures in a Mall
One of the last happy meetings of the Tonya Harding Fan Club took place at
Nancy Welfelt’s house, around her dining-room table. The meeting had actually begun at.
....
The three Sisters
In Bulgaria, some tennis balls are like dumplings. Manuela, Katerina, and
Magdalena Maleeva, Bulgarian sisters who are three of the best tennis players in the
world and definitely the three best tennis players in Bulgaria, know all about putting
topspin on a dumpling. They also know how to park themselves at the baseline and bang
back every dumpling that comes over the net. The flabby, bounceless tennis balls in
Bulgaria come from Poland. . . .
The Bullfighter Checks her Makeup
I went to Spain not long ago to watch Cristina Sanchez fight bulls, but she had
gotten tossed by one during a performance in the village of Ejea de los Caballeros and
was convalescing when I arrived.