> Food for thought for anyone who teaches students to write thesis
> statements or outlines. What do you think?
Well, the blogger you direct us to says he/she thinks it is cheating, but
it just looks to me like an automated writing coach. I taught composition
for over 20 years, and this seems to me to be a tool, nothing more - it
will not cause students who don't understand a topic to write good papers,
but it can help students who know the subject but are struggling with
organization to do it better.
I tried it out, typing in a title that bore no relation to the topic (as
well as being nonsensical in itself), then entering irrelevant statements
when it asked for support. The result was an idiotic thesis statement and
an outline that would do nothing to improve the student's grade (material
in quotation marks reflects the nonsense content I inserted:
_____
"Harry Potter: Wizard or Boy Who Lived?"
Introductory Paragraph
Begin with an interesting quotation related to your opinion about the
trojan war
(You will need a transition here)
- End the Intro paragraph with your thesis statement:
"Even though the hungry crocodile devoured my homework, the trojan war
pitted condoms versus athletic socks because I need to go to the bathroom
and the rain in spain falls mainly on the plain."
Body Paragraph #1
Topic of the body thesis:
"the hungry crocodile devoured my homework"
- Find evidence - like facts, examples, quotations, or statistics that
back it upor support the topic sentence of this paragraph.
- Explain how your evidence supports the topic sentence
"Another example that shows that the hungry crocodile devoured my homework
is..."
- Find more evidence - facts, examples, quotations, or statistics that
back it up or support the topic sentence of this paragraph.
- Explain how this second piece of evidence supports the topic sentence.
Body Paragraph #2
"Even though the hungry crocodile devoured my homework, the trojan war
pitted condoms versus athletic socks because I need to go to the
bathroom."
- Find evidence - like facts, examples, quotations, or statistics that
back it upor support the topic sentence of this paragraph.
- Explain how your evidence supports the topic sentence
"Another example that shows that I need to go to the bathroom is..."
- Find more evidence - facts, examples, quotations, or statistics that
back it up or support the topic sentence of this paragraph.
- Explain how this second piece of evidence supports the topic sentence.
Body Paragraph #3
"The most important reason the trojan war pitted condoms versus athletic
socks is because the rain in spain falls mainly on the plain."
- Find evidence - like facts, examples, quotations, or statistics that
back it upor support the topic sentence of this paragraph.
- Explain how your evidence supports the topic sentence
"Another example that shows that the rain in spain falls mainly on the
plain is..."
- Find more evidence - facts, examples, quotations, or statistics that
back it up or support the topic sentence of this paragraph.
- Explain how this second piece of evidence supports the topic sentence.
Conclusion
"So you can see that although the hungry crocodile devoured my homework,
the trojan war pitted condoms versus athletic socks for two main reasons.
First, I need to go to the bathroom. But most importantly, the rain in
spain falls mainly on the plain."
- Now you will return to your attention-getter from the introduction
- Then end your essay with a powerful So What? statement that shows why
the reader should care about this.
_____
All that the site seems to do is to provide modeling and coaching; the
actual content is totally dependent on the student. If it's cheating, so
is the now common practice of allowing students to use calculators in math
classes - which certainly takes more of the work of math out of the
students' hands than this does for the task of composition.
--
Waller Hastings
Visiting Professor
Department of Library and Information Science
School of Communication, Information & Library Studies
Rutgers University
4 Huntington Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1071, USA
hastingw@rci.rutgers.edu
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