Don't Take This Exercise for Granted
Purpose: This exercise encourages students to explore ways of employing effective detail-driven transitions within their writing. By finding common threads, they’ll be able to unify ideas within their papers. This is also an exercise for invention.
Description: Students will work to combine significant events, people, or beliefs with effective transitions. This can either be done in groups or individually, depending on how much time you would like to spend. Both ways can benefit from reading Meagan C. Arrastia's "The One I Took for Granted” (2004-2005 McCrimmon Award Winner).
Suggested Time: For both methods, about 35-40 minutes will suffice.
Procedure: There are two ways of completing this activity -- in groups or individually.
For Group Paper:
1. Divide the class into groups of three or four and have them brainstorm on common themes in their life (ex: "overcoming adversity," "growing pains," "influential people," "trips," "beliefs," etc). 2. The students will then list as many important moments or ideas that have defined their lives and that they feel circle around this common theme. 3. The groups will select one event from each member’s list, based on which event sounds the most interesting and that they'd all like to hear more about. It doesn't matter how disparate the events or moments are. As a matter of fact, students should be encouraged to choose events that don't tie together in obvious ways to make their group paper more interesting. 4. Each group member will then freewrite on his or her topic. After 10 minutes, group members will come back together and share what they have written and try to figure out how they can string the story together. Ideally, they will work out ways to transition between the snapshots of the lives of different group members in an engaging way.
For Individual Paper: 1. Students are asked to choose "a significant person," "a significant event," and "a significant belief," and list them on a clean sheet of paper. Below each "significant" header, students choose and list three scenes or incidents that are especially vivid about that person, event, or belief. They are encouraged to choose scenes that are far apart in time and place and perhaps don't seem to connect in obvious ways. 2. Students then trade their paper with classmates; at least six or seven other people. Each classmate votes for which topic sounds the most interesting, based on the "scenes" listed. With that many opinions, they can see where the reader's interests lie. 3. When students get their sheets back, they are tied to the topic that received the most "reader votes." For each scene in that topic, they start listing the personal emotions they felt, the adjectives that describe the person, event, or belief as well as their state of mind. The goal is to keep them from tying their paper together in a simple chronological way, and to order it ideationally. Hopefully, they find that in many of these scenes they were in a similar state of mind. 4. Have students begin freewriting one of the scenes, and as soon as they find themselves expounding on one of the adjectives or emotions that help tie the scene together, they’ll jump to the next scene (they can always come back later to flesh out the scene fully, but they have the ever-important and ever-missing from freshman writing – transition). They do this until they've tied together all their scenes, and they have the bare bones of a personal experience paper.
Additional Information: For other ways of "making connections," students could also look at the Raymond Carver's poem "Sunday Night," in Bishop's On Writing. (As Bishop writes, "what small, overlooked elements might loom large in your composition?" In other words, how can find unique connections in the minute details of your stories?)