week 11

the eleventh week

 draft feedback
• pretty good!
• Some general issues with transitioning between ideas and
specificity, both of which we’re going to talk about today

• Try not to refer to “studies,” especially on your on the exam. I

know you don’t have any studies in front of you so it’s a sort of
weak appeal to authority. If you want to make a point just make it.

• if you want more detailed feedback just email me (but also send
me the draft in the email, because I probably won’t remember the
specifics of your outline)
 here’s the deal
• We’re closing in on the last few weeks of class, so I’m going to start
gearing our in-class stuff toward the final exam

• Even though the short term goal is “doing well on the exam,” we’re
retaining the broader goal of the course, which is “becoming a better
writer.”

• As outlined on your syllabus, there are still a couple good chapters on

technical writing skills (pronouns, punctuation), that, while we’re not
going to talk about explicitly, are still very much worth looking at.

• That being said, I think our in-class time is better spent doing more
“workshop”-type stuff.
 the plan today:
we’re doing two mini-workshops on essays:

1. Giving specific examples

2. Transitioning between ideas

Then we’re going to do a kind of weird writing workshop

that I think will help you develop these skills.
Specificity
 Specificity
Way back in Week 3 we talked about the distinction between general and
specific as a kind of spectrum:

“Social media makes people bad at social interaction”

“Having social media accessible on your phone makes it easy to avoid

talking to people face-to-face.”

“In social situations, the impulse to regularly check one’s phone for new
posts on twitter can fill an awkward moment that might otherwise be spent
meeting someone new.”

For your essays, many of you regularly hit somewhere between the first and
second as your thesis and topic sentences, but it often sort of stops there.
 Specificity

Not only are specific examples a useful tool to fill out a

paragraph, they’re also usually the most effective means of
supporting your case.

While the essays we’re working on aren’t “research essays,”

there’s no reason why you can’t pull more specific
examples from your own experience to better elaborate
the point you’re trying to make.
Locating Strong Examples
Let’s say your thesis is: “Social media has made young people worse
at academic or professional writing.”

And your para 1 topic sentence is like: “Many social social media
platforms encourage brevity through slang and acronyms, which can
quickly denote emotion or other responses but are often heavily
context-dependant.”

This is a good argumentative point, but it can be better illustrated

through specific example: “For instance, shorthand like lol or lmao
can be used online to quickly denote a wide range of emotions that
would need to be more explicitly described in an academic context.”
Locating Strong Examples

Topic Sentence: Social media gives people a kind of social

recognition that is easier to observe and quantify than in
person interaction.

Specific example: A solid joke posted on twitter can

garner hundreds or even thousands of likes and retweets,
while that same joke said aloud might get a couple laughs
out of your friends.
 Examples Exercise
write a specific example that supports each of the
following statements. Try to be as specific as possible:

1. Doing some kind of physical exercise on a regular basis

has many benefits for mental health. For example,…

2. Fiction can provide a useful framework for

understanding our society. For instance,…

3. Web-based platforms like moodle play an important role

in university education. In particular,…
 🚨 exam strategy 🚨
• As with our in-class writing, your exam essay should be
constructed around an outline, so you have a rough idea about
what you want to say.

• Once you’ve constructed your basic 5 paragraph outline, try

and tag each body paragraph with a specific example that
illustrates the point being made by the topic sentence.

• Not only will this give you a useful bit of support in each
paragraph, it’ll also help you determine whether your topic
sentences actually work: are you making points that can be
illustrated with specific examples?
Transitioning Between
Ideas
 Transitions
Today we’re working on bridging the gap between
separate but related ideas.

Roughly speaking, you’re going to have to deal with two

types of transition: linking ideas within the same paragraph,
and linking ideas between paragraphs.

There’s a good deal of overlap between how these two

kinds of transition work, but they each have their own
unique characteristics as well.
Transitions within a Paragraph
This type of transition is something we’re probably fairly familiar with
at this point.

There are a few kinds of transitional words or phrases to keep in mind:

For joining two ideas: furthermore, in addition, likewise, moreover,

similarly,

For introducing a contrasting idea: however, in contrast,

nevertheless, on the other hand,

To show cause-and-effect: As a result, accordingly, consequently,

therefore,
 Transitions within a Paragraph
Exercise
Bridge the gap between the following pairs of sentences using some
kind of transitional phrase that conveys the relationship between the
two ideas:

I am extremely broke. _______ I’m buying a new car.

Elon Musk has like 22 billion dollars. ______ he seems to spend all day
on twitter.

I’m out of groceries. _______ I need to go to the store.

I didn’t vote in the last election.______ I won’t vote in the next one
either.
Transitions between paragraphs
Transitions are also how you bridge the gap between different
paragraphs in an essay.

Not only does this help promote coherence in your own thinking, it
also helps your reader keep track of your overall argument and how
each part of your essay fits into it.

There are a lot of ways to do this, but two fairly straightforward

strategies are restatement and elaboration.

For the most part, these strategies can be applied directly to a

paragraph’s topic sentence (i.e., usually its first sentence) to help refine
the essay’s overall coherence.
 Transitions between paragraphs:
restatement
“Restatement” is probably the most obvious tool for helping
transition between ideas.

The basic move is to restate elements of the previous paragraph

in the paragraph that follows. This helps your reader keep track of
the relevant ideas that you’re developing in your essay.

Para 1: Twitter’s efficacy as a political tool is limited because it

can only impact areas of society that are influenced by public
pressure.

Para 2: Due to these inherent limitations, twitter users often hold

a distorted understanding of the most important issues facing
their society.
 Transitions between paragraphs:
restatement

Para 1: Over the last decade, automated “bots” have become much
more sophisticated at replicating human interaction.

Para 2: This increasing sophistication makes it difficult for people

to tell when they’re interacting with a real person or a bot.

Para 1: Having a pet is a great way to teach kids how to be

responsible.

Para 2: The responsibility kids learn from having a pet can impact
other aspects of their lives as well.

(A pretty good strategy for the exam might be to use specific

language from the prompt question in each of the topic sentences)
 Transitions between
paragraphs: elaboration
Elaboration helps bridge the gap between ideas by clearly
delineating the relevance of one to the other.

If you want to talk about two related ideas that don’t have a
clear rhetorical link, elaboration is a useful strategy for
making that link more explicit.

The basic move, here, is to walk back the topic sentence

until you find some common ground between the two
ideas.
Idea one:
The world’s wealth is
disproportionally
concentrated in the
hands of a few extremely
wealthy people

Transitional idea: This concentration of wealth

has resulted in the world’s richest people
pursuing vaguely pointless vanity projects.

Idea two:
Earlier this year, Elon
Musk launched a car into
space.
 Transitions between
paragraphs: elaboration
Idea 1: The internet has provided a new venue for bands to
promote their music.

?
Idea 2: Streaming services like Spotify tend to pay artists
between $0.006 and $0.0086 for every stream of their
songs.
 Transitioning between ideas
exercise
in small groups, take a look at the following ideas and rephrase them (or add
transitional ideas between them) such that they transition more fluidly into each
other.

idea 1: Even the most commonplace human behaviours can have

consequences for the rest of the planet.

idea 2: The “pacific trash vortex,” a gyre of marine debris in the North Pacific
Ocean, is estimated to be 80,000 metric tonnes, and roughly the size of Texas.

idea 3: Some environmental activists advocate for banning plastic straws and
single use water bottles.