glossing (taking notes) on the writing assignment instructions

I noted last week the importance of marking up any assignment you get in a class. Here are three situations you may have actually experienced; they are pretty common:

  1. You sweated over your math homework all night; it was way too much work, but you finally finished and grabbed two hours of sleep before class. Grumbling to another student, you find he is not very sympathetic. He didn't find it hard. "But we had twenty quadratic equation problems; it was torture." He looks puzzled. He looks at your homework.

    "Um, you were only supposed to do the odd-numbered ones."

  2. You are taking your final in sociology, and you are ready for it. You look at the prompt and off you go, answering question after question. After a bit you hear some chuckling, and it gets louder. You look up and most students are just sitting, not writing. A few are laughing. You turn to your neighbor and she says, "Read the first line." The first line, which you skipped to start answering questions, reads, "Put your name on this sheet and then turn it over. You do not have to answer the questions. You are done."

  3. You have read the history text, taken some notes, and are pretty confident about the mid-term. You actually finish a little early and check over the paper for any errors and hand it in. When the paper is handed back, you have an F on it. The teacher has written, "You did a pretty good job explaining one cause of the American Civil War, but the question said, 'Write about the four main causes of the American Civil War'; you skipped the other three."

    Wow! Those range from frustrating to mean to embarrassing, but in each case the problem was the student did not pay attention to what the prompt said. All three could have been easily avoided if the student had slowed down a little at the beginning and marked exactly what was required on the prompt before writing. That can be amazingly important. If that history mid-term is 1/2 of the semester's grade, well, ouch!

    Let's Practice, and Let's Make it Useful Practice :)

    This week you have a short writing assignment called Stuff Exercise. For such a short assignment, it's kind of a long prompt; it hsa a lot of detailed instructions. I want you to print out that prompt, and, in fact, I will put a printale copy right here for you to make it easy.

    Exercise 1 prompt   (Word document for printing).

    OK, please print that our right now; you are going to work with it in a second.


    Suki

    I may not be watching you, but Suki is

    Did you print it out?

    If you could not because you do not have a printer, that's perfectly understandable; it will just be a little more work. You will need to open the document and toggle back and forth between the prompt and the lecture a little.

    What is the first thing you notice?

    I hope you answered, "IT'S REALLY LONG!" because, yes, it is really long for a prompt. That's a dual-edged sword. It might seem easier if the teacher just said, "Write something about stuff." But, really, when in heck would you write? What does that teacher expect? Do you know how long it needs to be? what format it should be in? whether this is a description or a personal story or an argument or a research paper?

    If you ever get a prompt that that little useful information, it is time to raise your hand or send an email and start asking a lot of questions. Now, to be fair, the teacher might not give you any satisfactory answers; maybe the teacher is just trying to see how you would handle a topic that is that abstract and vague.

    I am not that teacher.

    In English 101 and English 102 I am pretty much the opposite. I am not going to assume you know how to write for college/university. After all, this is your first college/university writing class. I give you a lot of really precise, detailed, concrete instructions and examples as I can for three reasons:

    1. I want you to know all of the requirements (expectations)
    2. I want to give you some direction (in this first exercise, I am giving you very exact direction)
    3. I want you to demonstrate that you can follow instructions exactly (that is a critically-important ability in college)

    Number 2 above might make me seem a bit pushy. I suppose in some ways teachers are, yes. I never ask you to trust me (you don't know me), but try to imagine all of these things are done with a plan an da purpose, even the smallest things. For example, see if you can spot the paper length requirement here. It's a very short paper, even by high school standards. Your papers will get longer quickly. The average college out-of-class essay is four full pages in MLA (some other subjects use APA; we do not) format; an average research paper will be eight-to-ten full pages. By the end of the class I need to get you somewhere in that neighborhood before sending you on. This first exercise will demonstrate (on a very small scale) some of the ways to do that. I know, it all seems counter-intuitive (write short to learn how to write long), but it works, and even the Discussion 1 instructions showed you how to write long if you were following them.

    Since you have so many instructions to look at here, what should you be marking up (glossing). Well,

    • any requirement, of course (things like page length, format requirements, submission instructions, and so on)
    • I like to note points possible
    • I might add the due date from our Class Schedule here
    • any examples that show me what I need to do at any given point in the paper
    • special notes (like my having to find a source on upcycling that is not one of the readings assigned) and having to include a direct quotation from it, followed by a parenthetical citation.
    • and a very important one: anything confusing, that I do not understand, that I need to ask the teacher about

    That's plenty, and your notes on this prompt will be many (if you do it correctly).

    And then you can use your notes as a kind of checklist that you measure your paper against before you turn it in. Let's say one item on your checklist is "I need a transition sentence between paragraph 1 and paragraph 2," and you realize you forgot that. Go back and put one in before turning the paper in. If you realize you used APA format by mistake, go back and fixt that before you turn the paper in.

    Look at everything on your list. Is it in the paper? No? Fix it. You want the maximum points possible, no?

    I am not going to go over this for you (if you have questions and want me to look over your glossed prompt, I'm happy to; just attach it to an email and send it to my GMAIL account below. I created a partial checklist that you can look at, but please do so AFTER you try to mark up the prompt yourself. No, I can't make you do that. Free will is an interesting thing. But, again, just looking at my list will not help you learn how to do this yourself.

    Exercise 1 checklist.   This is only a partial list, but you should get the idea :)

    very important final note(s) about this:

    If you DO skip this step, you will be wasting a lot of time. Why?

    First, you will spend your time guessing, making it up; I really am giving you templates to plug things into here because I know this is new to most of you.

    Second, you will likely do something incorrectly, have to re-do it, and grab a late penalty (lose points) in the process.