Autumn quarter

Argument Reconstruction

In the first featured workshop of fall quarter, students build the skills required to write about complex works by first practicing how to reconstruct the arguments from a text through close reading. Students are led through an argument reconstruction exercise with a short selection from a primary text and they collaborate to diagram the text and then compose an exegetical paragraph about it. In this workshop, and throughout the quarter, writing advisors work with students to teach them how to distinguish summary statements about a text from interpretive claims. Students learn to identify curious or puzzling moments in a text that they can explore to develop their own substantive claims and arguments.

The Work of a Paragraph

Once students set to work on producing written work, writing advisors address how to write paragraphs as units of a larger argument. The second workshop of the quarter addresses common issues with paragraph coherence (and therefore argument coherence) and asks students to revise some of their work. Students learn to see how a paragraph creates expectations for a reader by presenting an argumentative claim or point, how those expectations are either borne out or collapse as the paragraph unfolds, and how to effectively revise their paragraphs for length and cohesion. Students will be taught how to write discrete paragraphs and break up their own writing into effective paragraphs by anticipating what a reader needs and expects. This workshop builds on the argument reconstruction workshop, in that students need to know how to go about generating a claim that will then form the cellular structure of an individual paragraph, instead of simply writing paragraphs based on a vague topic.

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, especially when an assignment is itself open-ended. A reader may well miss the value of a refined thesis statement or main claim if there is no viable sense of a problem to motivate it and the argument of the paper. In this workshop, writing advisors work with students on how to first construct a viable problem for an essay, and then how to test their own solutions to that problem as a potential claim that is intelligible to readers.

On Argumentation

In the second workshop of winter quarter, writing advisors work with students to emphasize the relationship between claims, reasons, and evidence, to build a clear chain of argumentation. Students learn how to properly marshal evidence in support of their claims and the importance of explaining their reasons for why a reader should accept the evidence as the plausible grounds for their claim.

Spring quarter

Introductions and Conclusions

Finally, in spring quarter with several essays under their belts, students are ready to consider some thornier aspects of writing, such as the function of a conclusion. Writing advisors work with students on different purposes that conclusions can serve: to reiterate an argument, introduce new statements of significance, or broaden the scope of the inquiry by posing more sophisticated questions that follow from the argument of the paper. This spring workshop de-mystifies conclusion writing by having students discuss the relative purposes and effectiveness of different approaches to conclusions, read examples of conclusions in relation to their introductions, and rewrite their introductions and conclusions from a pervious essay.