I wanted students in my Professional Writing class to practice writing headlines and 1-2 sentence summaries. I thought the headline writing would help them write titles for their own documents, as well as help make their future blog post titles more creative and informative. I thought the 1-2 sentence summaries would help them practice their ability to write more succinctly. They are writing summaries and analyses right now so here is what I asked them to do:

1. Find 3 sources on the Internet about how to write a summary, using a variety of search engines, and post them to our class del.icio.us account (2030pw).

2. Find 3 sources on the Internet about how to write an analysis. (again, they had to link to a unique source and post to the del.icio.us account)

They worked in pairs on this activity (someone they hadn’t yet worked with), which I thought might help them get to know each other. Also, later in the class, they worked with this same person doing a peer review of their summary, analysis and personal response assignments. (Note: they’re not having any difficulty responding to something personally so I didn’t ask them to do any extra research on that topic).

The results were not too bad. Several students said they liked the activity and thought it was good practice. One student said that she would never have thought to go to the Internet for more information on how to complete a writing assignment; rather, she would have just tried the best she could or referred back to the handout that I had provided, so she thought it was good because it provided another way to get help. However, when I asked if this activity bordered on a cut and paste activity, another person said that finding 3 sources was too many. He suggested finding just 2 sources on each per person. I think that is very good feedback. If I did it again, which is quite likely, I’d probably only have them find one source on each topic per person.

The next day in class I asked them to review the links that everyone had posted. A couple people mentioned sites by Named Universities as being the best. However, I think the consensus was that those sites that promised “simple” and “direct” and especially “steps” to writing these types of documents were the ones that they thought the most useful.

I haven’t graded the most recent documents they’ve submitted. I’ll have to see if doing this activity will have any impact on the quality of work they submit.

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