Group-Generated Reverse Outline

Teaching Assistant: Patrick Mooney
Writing 2
Fall 2014

This document represents a group-generated outline of Joe Chellew's essay 5 Stars—A Research Paper You can Actually Enjoy, published in the 2014 edition of the UCSB Writing Program's undergraduate journal, Starting Lines. (Chellew's essay discusses Andrea and Karen Lunsford's Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study, available here. Students may wish to log in to the UCSB Library Proxy Server before trying to access that essay.) Students were broken into groups, and each group was assigned a section: they were to find what they took to be the topic sentence, identify anything they took to be evidence in that topic sentence, and make any other notes on writing technique that they thought worth sharing with the class. Then we reconstructed an outline of that essay as a group, using the digital overhead projector and my laptop.

Here's the result:

  1. Lunsford & Lunsford have written something the rest of us can also understand
    1. author writes about … an easy hook … the hype over instant messaging
      • Lunsford & Lunsford ease into the essay instead of slapping the reader on the face with dense paragraphs
    2. Use titles with clever names
      • provide entertainment and structure
  2. Lunsford & Lunsford researched the ways errors in 1st year college student writings since other studies
    1. quantity of errors made has stayed the same
    2. papers have increased in length
    3. papers more likely to be argumentative
  3. Data collection took 18 months but conclusion was interesting
    1. This paragraph is really just a set-up for fourth paragraph, almost a topic sentence for it.
  4. In past, essays were mostly narratives; now mostly argumentative papers. Number of errors remains constant, but there is a difference in error types.
    1. Positive view of errors
    2. Faulty sentences come from students trying to address complex topics in complex ways!
  5. Clear examples given by Lunsford & Lunsford are often exceedingly drawn out
    1. several coffees - unnecessarily chatty
      • two Mr Coffees and one … Mrs. Tea
      • Lots of it seems redundant
        • Situational irony?
  6. Lunsford & Lunsford do a good job of presenting their purpose, methods, findings, and conclusions.
  7. I evaluated an academic source to write a review of it
    1. Paragraph as a whole is an introduction to rest of section.
  8. the best way to critique this paper was to articulate exactly what I thought as I read it.
    1. This technique helped him find his critiques
  9. It was important that we make it obvious which writing was in which genre by following their conventions.
    1. I noted the differences in the genres ...
  10. First: an important convention of Amazon reviews … was the tendency of reviewers to go all or none when it came to rating writings. Also: Conversely, in scholarly reviews, authors could easily include the things they enjoyed as well as did not enjoy and give good recommendations.
    1. 90%+ of reviews for The Murder of Helen Jewett were 1, 4, or 5 stars
    2. Scholarly reviews: I wrote new material in a scholarly review about what bothered me in the text as well as what I liked.
  11. There are a number of other, more basic conventions that I followed as well
    1. Amazon review: informal voice.
    2. Scholarly review: hook and page number citations
  12. It was important to take note of what audiences the reviews were intended for
    1. Scholarly review is probably meant for the same audience as the article itself.
    2. Amazon review … is probably more intended for the non-professional crowd
  13. Another important difference is in the purpose of the reviews
    1. Amazon: Reviewers typically try to persuade to purchase/not purchase product.
    2. Scholarly: presents evidence on both sides, lets readers decide.
  14. Writing on the same topic in two genres has shown me how important genre can be.