w. 41

Friday, 9 October

We started the lesson with the paragraph exercise that we didn’t have time to finish on Tuesday. This exercise was harder than the outlining one.

Things to keep in mind:

-       Go from the general to the more specific.

-       Group together information related to a specific topic.

-       Use chronological order whenever possible.

Finding a clear organization for your material is very hard. It requires a lot of thinking. Part of the problem is that while our brains can comprehend a lot of information in complex constellations (like an elaborate mind-map), writing is linear – it goes in one direction. You have to present material in sentences and paragraphs, one following the next. It is very hard to figure out a coherent way to present this web of information in a long string of writing. But using these tools/skills for organization will help you.

We then looked at the difference between narrative and analytical writing. You read a paragraph connected to the bombing of Japan at the end of World War II. Part of the point was to see that in history we regularly alternate between the presentation of factual material and some sort of analysis or explanation. The writer must constantly let the reader know what significance or relevance information has, and constantly connect the information to the larger thesis/point of the text.

Remember that as the writer, you are in charge of the information. You are the one that brings relevance to the facts.

The rest of the class was spent working on finding a topic.

I have a number of books, and I note the SVT series Världens konflikter – 28 (?) 30-minutes shows that focus on the political history of many of the major areas of conflict from the past fifty years.

(You will find all the exercises on Vklass under Writing Skills.)

Tuesday, 6 October

We spent the first the first half of the lesson laying out the Imperialism assignment, connecting it with Core Contents and Knowledge Requirements for the course.

We then did an exercise to help you think about how to order material in a paper. (You can find this exercise on Vklass – it’s called Outlining Exercise, and it’s under Writing Skills.)

When writing, you want to go from the general to the specific. In organizing, information, you want to have a main idea for the entire paper under which all the sub-points fall. Each sub-point relates to the main idea and also helps to organize the specific points that fall under it.

 After doing the outlining exercise, we started with ordering a specific paragraph.