SNL

SNL

Preliminary results from a small study of SNL students' writing habits indicate that students understand the need to and sometimes even enjoy revising their writing. The pain, suffering and gnashing of teeth come earlier. Students in this study spent little time on and seemed to have had little idea about how to go about organizing their ideas before they began writing. While they spent hours researching their ideas for their paper, most spent no time deciding how to organize these ideas and the results of their research before writing their first draft. They then reported frustration, anxiety and confusion as they struggled with deciding what they wanted to say and how to say it in the initial draft. Students who follow this pattern of thinking of an idea, immersing themselves in research, and then writing often produce papers that are a pastiche of the information and ideas they have collected rather than a reasoned and developed analysis, exploration or argument of their own. You can help such students by doing the following:

Encouraging them to think about how they might organize their ideas before they begin researching by requiring that they hand in a preliminary thesis and outline.  Be sure to stress that these are preliminary and are likely to change as they learn more through the research process.

Providing students with a variety of ways to organize their ideas. Students who are already linear and logical in their thinking tend to do well with outlines. More associative and visual thinkers find mapping more useful, while verbal students may find that they can use talking to help explore how to organize their ideas.

Sharing models of sample papers and having students analyze and evaluate the organization of these papers.

Talking to students about the typical ways to organize papers in your discipline.

Showing students who are ...