Monday, March 30, 2009

The Writing Process

William and Jesse are each working on a research paper. Since we are studying early American history, and since biographies are the easiest research to teach, they are doing their papers on the Founding Fathers. William is writing about George Washington and Jesse is writing about Benjamin Franklin. They have completed the most arduous part of the project--the research itself. As they read various sources they took notes on index cards. Each bit of information fit somewhere in the outline I gave them-- II: Childhood; III: Adulthood; IV: Contributions to American history, including specific subheadings. They put the outline code in the top corner of each note card and then organized all their cards according to the outline. Now they have taken their notes and written the body of their papers, one paragraph at a time. The next step will be to improve their writing--making it more interesting by adding colorful verbs, adverbs, and adjectives, and by varying the sentence structure. If topic and clincher sentences are missing they will add these. Finally, they will write their introduction and conclusion paragraphs using the topic and clincher sentences from each of the "body" paragraphs.

I thought you might enjoy following the process as William writes his paper on George Washington. Here is his first draft, otherwise known as the "sloppy copy".

On February 22, 1732, George Washington was born in Virginia. On April 12, 1743, his father died when he was eleven years old. George had to help his mother take care of his sister Elizabeth and his three younger brothers, Samuel, John, and Charles. George Washington was a great, hard-working student in school. His favorite subject was arithmetic.

When George was sixteen years old he got a job surverying Virginia land. After that he made maps. On January 6, 1779, George Washington married Martha Custis. Martha was a widow with two children. After George was married he moved into a Virginia home which once was owned by his brother. George's favorite things to do were to boat, fish, and most of all he liked to ride his horse.

George was appointed the commander-in-chief for the War for Independence. He was appointed because of his great successes in the French and Indian War. In 1789 George Washington was elected as the first President of the United States of America. After being President for four years, President Washington was reelected as President in 1792. George ended his second term in 1796.

As you can see, William has a good foundational report with a few informational gaps. As we work on the improvements together, we will identify those gaps and add more information as it is needed. The final copy of these three paragraphs is due by the end of this week, so check in after that to see how the paper has evolved.

2 comments:

Benjamin Crum said...

My favorite part of the writing process has always been embellishing. The concept is simple: you take a story, usually a droll anecdote, and you add an alien attack or an infestation of man-eating moths, thus ending up with one humdinger of a report.

mom said...

Perhaps you would like to try your hand at adding an alien attack or an infestation of man-eating moths (or better still, an infestation of alien-eating moths) to Will's report on George Washington. I promise it will be easier than it sounds.