Any ideas for an in-class writing exercise using a model essay?

July 15, 2013 10:46 AM

I want my students to learn something from reading a "model essay." But how do I do this?

I often give my students (transitioning to college writing) "model essays" from previous students or other disciplines. In theory, I think this helps them see good writing and what an "A" paper looks like.

I'd like to incorporate some in-class element to this, so that they can actually register what the paper is doing well. Some ideas I had would be to circle and analyze topic sentences and/or transitions, or perhaps color code "analysis" "evidence," etc with colored pens or highlighters.

Does anyone have any other ideas? I'd love to do this more in class so they can see more specifically what is going right with these great essays.

Thanks!

posted by caoimhe to Writing & Language (8 answers total)

Some of my colleagues make a list of things to circle, highlight, star, etc. I think this is a good idea, but the more items on the list, the more fatigue and annoyance will set in, probably preventing much learning. If your class is big enough, you could assign small groups to work on identifying different aspects of the paper, and then have them direct you to mark them on the overhead/smartboard/etc. (or if you have less time, just put up a marked-up essay and have groups report on how well theirs match, etc.). You can also ask them some questions about how long they think it took to write the essay, how much rewriting was involved, etc. Students often don't realize that advanced writers spend lots of time rewriting.
posted by wintersweet at 11:29 AM on July 15, 2013

Show them some essays that are less than perfect. A comparison between a B essay and an A essay (or even an essay that failed) can be quite instructive.

Another idea is a 'before and after' comparison. Show an essay in a draft form and then show the same essay after it has been polished, explaining why certain changes were made and why the essay is now better.
posted by MighstAllCruckingFighty at 11:32 AM on July 15, 2013 [5 favorites]

I erased a bunch of stuff here, mostly because I am emphatically not a fan of the "model" approach in general. I would take MACF's suggestion and engage them even more. Show them a draft essay, solicit their recommendations for revision, and then show them the completed essay to demonstrate both that there are multiple ways to come to the assignment and multiple valid revision paths. By the same turn, I would consider introducing the sort of metacognition into your students' processes so that they could actually turn around and say, "This is why I took this approach; this is why I made these revision choices." This not only provides fodder for future terms, but emphasizes student agency and reduces the "Here is the Platonic model of an essay; go forth and praise it," dynamic that teaching exemplar essays tends to foster.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 11:45 AM on July 15, 2013 [5 favorites]

In my school, the teacher used to use some articles on the last page of Time magazine as a "model" essay.
posted by jacobean at 11:46 AM on July 15, 2013

We do the color coded highlighting you mentioned. We also do an exercise called Make It Worse/Make It Better where you take a small passage of high quality writing and cross out all the elaboration, figurative language, evidence, whatever you are trying to show is valuable, and then extract the base argument and show how thin it looks. You then take a less-than-perfect passage and tell students to make it better by adding elaboration, evidence, figurative language or whatever. It's a great way to practice with support.
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:01 PM on July 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

I do this at the beginning of the semester with my comp/lit classes:

1) elicit from the students some of the elements of good writing: organization/structure, logical argumentation, support for ideas, appropriate register for the intended audience, attention to conventions like grammar and punctuation.

2) I do some review on these elements if necessary.

3) I give them 3 essays of varying quality to take home and read; they take brief notes on their impressions of the writing quality in each essay.

4) Next class period they get into small groups and try to come to a consensus about why the writing in each essay is or is not effective, and provide suggestions for improvement.

5) Each group reports to the whole class. Generally there is a lot of agreement but sometimes the groups have different ideas. This can promote some good discussion and debate.

If this is for a first year class and you'd like some materials, feel free to MeMail me and I'll share some of mine with you.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:33 PM on July 15, 2013

1) Get The Bedford Reader
2) Read One
3) Write One

The eleventh edition of the book is composed of over seventy essays, one short story, and one poem. It is divided into eleven sections by the various methods of development: narration, description, example, comparison and contrast, analysis, process analysis, classification, cause and effect, definition, argument and persuasion, along with a section on mixing the methods.
posted by j_curiouser at 1:09 PM on July 15, 2013

Like Emperor SnooKloze, I'm not a huge fan of the "ideal" or "A paper" model. Students can often see that the paper is good and may even be able to point out why, but I don't often see them transferring that knowledge in meaningful ways. Knowing that a paper should be organized is not the same as writing an organized paper, for instance.

What I've tried a couple of times, though, is to give them a set of short papers (2 pgs. or so) of varying quality. Get them into groups and see if they can get consensus on ranking the papers from best to worst. The discussion within the groups and then with the whole class should trend toward the criteria by which papers are read. If possible, give them papers that promote dissensus. Does the grammatically perfect but boring paper get a higher rank than the insightful paper that has a few more errors? Does this paper with an interesting story in the middle get ranked lower because there's a break in the expected organizational pattern or does it get ranked higher because it is more effective overall? Does this paper on video game violence get docked for using informal language or is that language more persuasive for the intended audience because of that language?

I find that this approach helps students learn to make effective choices about their writing (which they defend in written reflections on their own papers and revision processes) rather than trying to force them into some artificial academic model that may not suit their purposes and won't help them much in other writing situations outside the classroom.
posted by BlooPen at 9:06 PM on July 15, 2013