Autumn quarter

Argument Reconstruction

Early in the quarter, our aim is to have students build the skills required to write about complex works by first practicing how to reconstruct the arguments from a text through close readings. In the first small-group workshop of the quarter, writing advisors lead students through an argument reconstruction exercise with a short selection from a primary text and ask them to collaborate to compose an exegetical paragraph. In this workshop and throughout the quarter, writing advisors work with students to both underscore the difference between relaying and analyzing content for a reader by separating summary statements from interpretive claims, and to help them identify curious or puzzling moments in a text that they can develop into their own substantive claims and arguments. This is the grounding work necessary of all their future writing in SOSC.

Sources and Arguments

Once students are comfortable with the difference between summarizing an argument and making an argument about an argument, writing advisors turn to teaching students about the kinds of arguments different sources can support. As students prepare to write their first essay, they are confronted with making claims about ancient philosophical texts, speeches, and poetry, as well as contemporary scholarly work. Writing advisors work with students in one-on-one meetings to help them understand the scope of claims they can make with these different sources and how they might deploy those claims in their arguments.

Winter quarter

Problem Construction

Although instructions on well-crafted assignments from instructors often indicate where there are problems in the text worth exploring in detail, generating and setting up a problem to address in a paper is a difficult skill for students. In the second workshop on offer in winter quarter, writing advisor work with students on how to construct a viable problem for an essay by having them consider introductions as the logical place to set up a problem, examine the clues coded into assignments and prompts suggesting which problems to focus on and where they are in the text, and practice revising their own essay introductions, theses, main claims, and body paragraphs.

Archival Sourcework

This workshop is used in conjunction with an introduction to primary source collections by library staff. The aim is to encourage students to move from summarizing what a text says to evaluating aspects of real-world context for an argument they would like to make. The workshop follows a write-pair-share format that asks students to write for five minutes in response to a question about a core source, then exchange and discuss responses with a partner, then write for five more minutes about a different aspect of analyzing historical documents, and so on. Students walk through these exercises to begin thinking about how the context of a source’s production influences its content and, therefore, its place in contemporary arguments.

Spring quarter

Writing after Research – Argumentation

In this workshop students will complete a reverse outline of a peer’s paper. They will learn to evaluate the argumentative structure of this paper through identifying the claims of each body paragraph. Once they identify the claim of each paragraph, they will assess how those claims either support or distract from the thesis of the paper. They will then isolate and evaluate the conclusion and introduction paragraphs of their peer’s paper. This workshop is meant to build on the first reverse outline workshop of the Democracy sequence, reminding students of the value of a reverse outline as a tool for building argumentative coherence in longer papers.