Leger Brosnahan

4 articles
Illinois State University
Affiliations: Illinois State University (1)

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  1. Comment and Response
    Abstract

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    📍 Illinois State University
    doi:10.58680/ce197716519
  2. Response to Margaret Storch
    doi:10.2307/376083
  3. Getting Freshmnan Comp All Together
    doi:10.58680/ce197616672
  4. Getting Freshman Comp All Together
    Abstract

    IN SEARCH OF A MORE EFFICIENT, effective, and individualized way to teach composition, I have been experimenting for several years with first-sight, in-class reading of students' writing as the entire business of classroom meetings. The exact reproduction of students' papers, necessary for profitable in-class reading, has been, until rather recently, so burdensome that it made fulltime in-class reading impractical, but recent technological innovations have made it easy. This several years' experience has convinced me that fulltime, in-class reading serves the teacher, the student, and the discipline so much better than any other way I know that I offer it here for the consideration and criticism of other teachers in the hope that it might help them and they might improve it. During the first meeting of a term, I explain the purpose of the course, the types of writing we will be doing, the style levels we will be attempting, the final manuscript form required, and give the first of the eighteen weekly writing assignments. I specify only the style level and expository genre and leave choice of specific topic to the students, encouraging them to write on something interesting that they know more about than we, their classmates and I, do. During the second meeting, we discuss the use of the two reference works used in the course: Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 8th ed., and Perrin's Writer's Guide and Index to English, 5th ed., this last to be read a chapter a week and selectively according to the needs of individual students. During the third meeting, I explain and demonstrate how we will read their writing in class, and I collect their first papers. After the third meeting, I take their typed papers and make a thermal transparency and a thermal ditto-master of each page of their writing and run off a ditto copy of each page for each student. At the beginning of the fourth meetingand every third meeting after that-I distribute the dittos for the week. Then I project the transparency of the first page, so the students can easily follow where the changes are being made, and we begin reading, all but the writer of the paper for the first time. A teacher could read the papers before class, but I find my responses fresher, the classes more interesting, and the whole process most efficient if I read them with the students for the first time in class. We read with one question and one restriction in mind: How could we write this better? and, Let's read sympathetically and change the form and content of the author as little as possible. Students participate freely in the reading and discussion, and we read every paper as a whole against the assignment, dealing with

    doi:10.2307/376465