Writing Process: Invention

Writing Process: Invention

Title

1. Fortune Cookies: Focusing a Description
2. In Quest of Culture: Top-Generating for the Research Essay
3. My Ten Commandments: Examining Social Construction

Your NameAllison Palumbo

Goal and Rationale: To provide options for invention activities that will help students choose engaging and relevant topics for the major assignments or projects.

Review of Literature: The assumption behind teaching engaging invention techniques is that the more effort that goes into prewriting, the more likely a student will find interest in the topic, and the better the final product.

Connection to Learning Outcomes:This activity fulfills the C&C learning outcomes for students to develop flexible strategies for invention as well as to engage in small group activities for exploring and expressing their experiences.

The Lesson Plans:

1. Fortune Cookies: Focusing a Description

Description: Students take a fortune-cookie fortune and manipulate it. If you’d like to bring actual cookies, do so! Otherwise, you can search online for fortune cookie phrases on sites like fortunecookiemessage.com. You might compile these onto paper strips and hand them out individually. Requires some printing and pre-cutting.

Suggested Time: 15-30 minutes

Procedure: Each student chooses their own fortune cookie (or grabs a fortune out of your box, bag, etc) and writes down their fortune at the top of a clean page. Have a few extra fortunes on hand in case some students receive a fortune that is too cryptic or for ones that the student just doesn’t like.

Now give the students a few moments to consider their fortunes, then ask them to rewrite their fortune in a few sentences. They can adapt and expand their fortunes but they must stick to the original spirit and intent of the fortune. For example, a prediction about the student’s personality should remain about their personality and not stray to other possibilities like future success, relationships and so on.

Now tell the students to underline any strong words or descriptions they wrote in their revised fortunes. These should be whatever words make a strong impression on the student. Using the underlined words as a guide, have the students write a short fortune for themselves that would be appropriate to put inside a fortune cookie. Don’t feel constrained by Chinese Restaurant language, do it in your own words.

Discuss the new fortunes with in groups or share with the entire class. Consider the nature of the types of changes that were made and question why the student made those changes. The teacher could then ask the students to use the underlined words as key words in an idea cluster or tree to develop other personal ideas for a longer piece of writing.

This gives students a light stretching exercise before a good writing workout. It encourages them to think about themselves and try to capture some narrow aspect of their individual charter, or hopes or fears, and narrow them down to just a few words. Then they are given an opportunity to expand on these few words and say more about themselves.

2. In Quest of Culture: Top-Generating for the Research Essay

Purpose: A Topic-generating Exercise best suited to a culture-oriented researched essay assignment. This exercise helps students learn how to ask the right questions when beginning a research-oriented assignment. By asking them to generate questions about a seemingly uninteresting object, this activity demonstrates the infinite possibilities and important aspects of researchable topics.

Description: This exercise works with the students’ own cultural “artifacts”, or ones that you provide, to help them generate potential research topics and questions in small groups.

Suggested Time: 30 minutes – full class period

Procedure: You might ask students what cultural artifacts they carry with them this very moment. It could be cell phone, a pair of designer glasses, a magazine, Desani bottled water, a dollar bill. Collect a few of these items, or supply some of your own.

Divide the class into groups of four or five. Give each group one iconic, cultural artifact. For about 10-20 minutes, ask each group to generate a list of “potentially interesting questions” about their object. Ask them to consider the objects in terms of:

• Cultural uses
• Possible impact on people
• Processes of creation or development

After 10-20 min., ask your groups to trade objects AND the lists already generated for them. Give them about 5 minutes to consider the new object, and come up with questions the previous group didn’t think of.

Return original objects and questions to their groups. Overhead, or on the blackboard, discuss the characteristics of good researchable topics. I’ve modified Ballenger’s list of “What Makes a Question ‘Researchable’?” (The Curious Researcher 35):

• Not too broad or too narrow
• Focuses on some aspect of the topic about which something has been said (it CAN be researched)
• It’s interesting to YOU
• Answers the question “SO WHAT?” (Relates to how we live, might live, care about, believe, or what we should know)
• Implies a potential audience (part 2, of the question above)
• Implies an approach – how you might go about answering it
• Raises more questions that can’t be answered with “Yes” or “No”

Each group should review their list of questions, and choose ONE they find both interesting and the most researchable. Ballenger asks students to imagine that they are a team of editors working on a new magazine project, and this is precisely the kind of focus we want for this researched article. Ask each group to propose/pitch their topic, with an initial starting question, to the “board room” with the following considerations:

• What’s my publication? (specific, or a general idea: magazine, Cable program, newspaper, journal, etc.)
• Who’s my main interest group/audience?
• What’s my narrative position?

Ballenger continues with approaches through “People,” “Trends,” “Controversies,” “Impact,” and “Relationships” (35-36) – all of which apply to our cultural perspective for a research article/exposé. You can wrap-up discussion by asking students to pose other questions, modify ones from their lists, or examine the possibilities Ballenger offers.

3. My Ten Commandments: Examining Social Construction

Purpose: To examine the social constructedness of our personal moral codes, and its relationship to how what we chose to include or leave out of our writing is directly and intimately connected to our socially constructed values.

Description: My Ten Commandments asks students to generate a list of their own personal commandments (prior to the class period) and then rank these commandments in various categories to examine how much of our values have been influenced by the different communities.

Suggested Time: When previously assigned, at least 30 minutes. When not, usually closer to 1 hour

Procedure: As a homework assignment, ask each student to generate a list of their own personal 10 commandments. They don’t all have to be as grandiose as "I’ll never murder" or "I’ll never steal." I tell my students to imagine that they are at a bus stop and are approached by a stranger who has a great deal of money-- What are 10 things that a stranger would never be able to convince you to do? (students are generally more comfortable with this if you tell them no one but you will see this list--even better, tell them no one else will see it.)

In class, ask the students to look over their list to see if these commandments are indeed inviolable or if extreme circumstances would allow the ‘commandments’ to be broken. (A student might list ‘Do not kill’ but be willing to kill someone if attacked, for example.) Next, have your students create a four column graph. In the first column, they should list their Ten Personal Commandments. In the next column, they should rate these on how terrible a violation they viewed them to be—number 1 would be a very minor transgression, while a 10 would be unthinkable. In the third column, they should list the names of the people or institutions most likely to be hurt by these transgressions. Lastly, in the forth column the students should give a rating number to how serious this other party would view this transgression.

If students are willing, briefly lead a discussion allowing students to comment on their lists and reflect on the lists of their classmates. With or without discussion, the chart often leads my students to see that different people (with different values) view each transgression differently and that absolutes are difficult to come by. Ask the students to write about why there are such discrepancies in how each party rates the seriousness of these transgressions.