Reflection on Writing Lab II

Yesterday we practiced using annotation as a way of engaging in "active reading," and as a way of generating ideas for a paper. Today you used the same method on your own writing--the stories you wrote about your own experiences of learning about race, which will be one of the two core texts for your essay. The worksheet asked you to find two or three words, phrases, images or ideas in your story that struck you as especially central or significant, write them in the first column, then comment on them in the second column. Some writing teachers call this the "dialectical notebook." You don't need any special form for it, just a piece of paper with a line drawn down the middle, so that you can put quotes on one side and annotations on the other. If you're working with a longer piece, the more quotations you annotate, the more connections you will start to see, both in the text and in your thinking about it.

This method of annotation is useful not only as a way of reading and thinking about a text; it is also great way to get started on a first draft. After you've identified at least three key images, phrases, or ideas, follow up with some writing that leads you towards the next level of synthesis. Some possible questions: What do the phrases, images, or ideas you chose have in common? What theme runs through what you have written? You can do this exercise with both your story and the reading that you've chosen.

The next stage, which we began at the end of the lab, is to put the two texts (story and reading) into dialogue with one another. The second worksheet asked you to choose two of your key words or phrase, or short quotation, and then to find a short quotation from one of the readings that seems to you to "speak" to them--through a common theme, or a point that's somewhat different from yours but still related in some way, or a shared key term (which may mean something different to you, in terms of your experience, than it did for the author of the reading). Use the middle space to explore your ideas about the connections between your writing on the topic (how kids learn about race) and the other author's. Use the other author's writing to expand your own ideas, or to react to something he/she said.

You can use these writings as notes when writing the first draft of your essay.

Great work today! Please post your stories on the Blog so we can all read them...