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Subject:RE: If You Were Gonna Teach... From:"Marie C. Paretti" <mparetti -at- swva -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 07 Mar 2002 12:59:04 -0500
Geoff Hart and Marguerite Krupp sort of touched on this, but if it were me
(speaking from way too many years of teaching writing), I'd:
1. Read their writing and figure out the top 3 most common and most
important problems.
2. Give them quick, easy strategies for recognizing and fixing those problems.
Basically, what I'd teach them depends on what they're doing "wrong." And
even though we can all identify our pet peeves and common problems, in any
teaching situation, if at all possible, it pays to know your audience
rather than to try to generalize based on what "most people" have problems
with. The 'hierarchy' I tend to rely on when deciding which problems are
most important is:
1. Help writers develop appropriate content first.
2. Help them organize that content.
- choosing major sections
- organizing info into paragraphs
- organizing sentences within paragraphs
3. Work with their writing style (tone, grammar, sentence structure,
phrasing, etc.) to make it clearer. There's probably a hierarchy there as well.
In other words, if I've got a writer who's prose is full of passive voice,
bloated phrasing, and confusing sentences, but who also can't figure out
what information to include and what to exclude, I start with the content
and get them to fix that problem first, then go to sentence-level stuff.
"Good" writing requires pulling it all together, but you have to start
somewhere and improving someone's style doesn't mean much if what they're
saying is irrelevant or badly organized.
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