Several years ago, Harvard completed a longitudinal study of student writing that, among other things, produced a couple of short films. The first film, Shaped By Writing, is below. You’ll see Nancy Sommers in the video; we’ll be reading her thoughts on responding to student writing later this semester.
Whenever I watch the video, I am impressed by how the students are able to articulate the role of audience and purpose. I also like how the one guy explained how he narrows his topics. Please use the comments to share your thoughts.
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I really liked what was said about topic selection, especially since I’m struggling to fine-tune my proposal before class tomorrow. One girl said to ask yourself a question — what do you really want to find out? Another said to write about something that’s difficult for you to understand, something that doesn’t make sense. And yet another girl talked about how sometimes the paper you start with isn’t the paper you end up with at all, and I think we all know that that can be true.
Towards the end a gentleman said, “you don’t know what you think until you write,” and I liked that too.
This was an inspiring video and I am sure that the attempts Fd14A are similar. Many persons believe that unless you’re a Humanities student focus and excelling at writing isn’t too important. I was one of these persons, until I realised that it is very difficult to express exactly what i want to say, even kin simple language.
I do hope that before I finish this course I will show significant improvement of expression on paper. As, a gentleman rightly stated, when writing, body language and facial expression cannot be conveyed so we need to be able to do so with words. Loved it Dr. Taylor.