In my U.S. history survey course, I base student grades partly upon two major writing assignments — brief (3-5 page) essays involving a focused inquiry into a historical problem of a student’s own choosing, based upon an analysis of archival sources from their own research. (This is where their source analysis worksheets come in handy — they can draw their evidence from the work they have already done.)
I start by showing students how to write the introductory paragraph for such a short paper. I provide them with a sample first paragraph, accompanied by a sentence-by-sentence analysis of the rhetorical function of each sentence and the overall rhetorical structure of the paragraph as a whole. We go over this in class, and we spitball some further examples on the spot, crowdsourcing a few different intro paragraphs on the fly so the students can get the hang of how this structure feels. Then I tell my students to imitate this structure in their own writing, rhetorical move for rhetorical move.
I have uploaded part of the “First Paragraph” handout I prepared for my students this fall — if you follow this link, you should be able to view/download it from my Google drive. If you end up adapting this handout for your own teaching, please let me know. And if you see a way to improve it, please let me know that as well.
This is really helpful–I’m struggling with some really poor writers this term, and may play around with your intro handout for their final papers. Thanks, LD!
You’re most welcome. But — yikes! — how many times am I going to use some version of the verb “to base” in this blog post? Total style fail. I blame jet lag and post-conference brain.