Re: formulaic writing, a different take?, reply

[Kathryn Scrivener <scrivene@vancouver.wsu.edu>]

As a matter of fact, I did stumble onto an interesting experiment this
spring when -- out of a desperate need to avoid the thin, cheesy first
drafts of a particularly sleepy morning class -- I required of this class 
a 10-page first draft of a paper that was to be 5 pages long as a final
draft.  My other, more alert mid-morning class turned in the usual thin,
cheesy first drafts and lightly edited "final" drafts but my early morning
group tended to have awakenings in their first drafts.  They would write
out all the obvious first thoughts, spend a paragraph or two bemoaning the
fact that they were still at the keyboard when everybody else was watching
"Friends" and then many of them kept writing into some really
interesting musings about the assigned text and their relation to it.  The
differences in the depth of the final drafts between the two classes was
amazing -- the students even commented on it themselves.  Many of them
finally awoke to the joys of staying at the keyboard after the obvious
ideas have had their turn.

Kate Scrivener
WSU-Vancouver
scrivene@vancouver.wsu.edu


On Wed, 3 Jun 1998, Denise Rogers wrote:

> Lynne and others,
> 
> >
> >I did have one student this spring who wanted out of that prison.
> >Not only had he been taught the three-point theme, but also he
> >had been taught that theme needed a certain number of sentences.
> 
> I'm curious as to what the results has been for teachers who have
> established word-length requirements. I've been opposed to this in general,
> but a couple of semesters ago in my developmental English class, I required
> an essay of 700 words and was quite surprised at the improvements in terms
> of content for several of the students. This wasn't "padding" either,
> unless they thought it was. One of the students in the class had seldom
> written more than two pages before, and here he wrote something like five
> and a half. He made interesting assertions and developed them as he never
> had before (this was on the final, by the way, and the topics had not been
> announced beforehand).
> 
> Has anyone else experimented with this (word-length requirements)?
> 
> Denise Rogers
> University of Southwestern Louisiana
> 
> 
>