Activity Accompanies Maria Adams', "Mike - 162261" (2004-2005
OOW)

Time Required: about 20-30 minutes



Goal/Purpose: Often times students will add to their drafts,
change grammar errors from time to time, but they don’t really go in and
change what they have already written significantly. The goal of this activity
is to show students radical ways to approach the drafting process – to
fall out of love with what they have already written. This exercise should help
students to realize that just because they have a good draft doesn’t mean
that it cannot be better, or different and just as good.

Procedure: While this may be a good story, it seems to jump
around, touching lightly on a number of different issues, but not fully exploring
any of them. As a class, discuss what this story is about, and list each answer
on the board. For example, this story is about friendship, the dangers of advertising,
the desire to fit in and/or be cool, visiting someone in jail who has wronged
you, etc. Then divide your class into groups, and set them to making a list
together along the following lines: If you were going to rewrite this draft,
and place more emphasis on (turn to the list and assign each group one of the
topics the class came up with), what would you need to add to the next draft?
What would you need to take away? After about ten or so minutes, have each group
present their findings.

Additional Comments:

If you wanted to take this further, you could:

• Ask your students to follow up on the lists that they made and have them
  each rewrite the essay to accommodate the new emphasis of the paper. Then, each
  group could read over each other’s essays, and see how even when emphasizing
  the same points of the same papers, how different the results can be. or,
  

• Have students take one of their own works in progress and workshop with their
  peers, with the same idea in mind: what are the main ideas, what are the points
  supporting it... and then either spending time in class on free-write revision
  or have them turn in their next draft with a polished revision based on one
  of the main points their peers saw.