Studenting Skills - Specific Strategies

Introduction | General Strategies | Specific Strategies

Read each essay several times.
Make notes in the margins of the text as you read: questions the essay raises for you, vocabulary words you need to look up in a dictionary, interesting points made by the author. These kinds of marginal comments can help you organize your ideas for papers and class discussion. See Reading Skills for more tips.

Take notes when your instructor or your classmates speak.
The purpose of Writing Program courses is to help you develop your own ideas about the essays and to convey them in speaking and writing.

• Your instructor will not tell you what to think about the essays; he or she will not lecture nor put lecture notes on the board as in other classes.

• You must come to your own conclusions in collaboration with your classmates. This process takes place during class discussion.

• Thus it is important for you to write down any ideas you think are significant; these ideas will come from your classmates as often as from your instructor.

Ask questions and participate in class discussions.
Reading and writing are collaborative enterprises.

• If you have a question about the text or about writing, ask it. Chances are that at least five people in the room have the exact same question.

• Don't be afraid to test out new ideas in class discussion. By seeing how other students react to your ideas, you can evaluate how you can construct that idea in your paper.

• Listen carefully to what your classmates have to say. They might help you see a reading in a new light.

• Even if you don't agree with a point your classmate might make, hearing it can help you rethink your own ideas and come up with new ways to write about the essays you are reading.

Participate actively in peer review and follow the advice of your peer reviewer
Often it is difficult to get an objective perspective on your own work. Peer review gives you that objective perspective, and allows you to practice finding that perspective with someone else’s paper.

• Your fellow students are becoming educated and informed readers just like you are. They are learning the same writing strategies, and can double-check to make sure that you are developing the strongest possible argument. Have the confidence in them that you’d like them to have in you.

• They also may have advice and questions that you hadn't considered before. Follow the advice and answer the questions that your peer reviewers pose to you.

• Peer review is also a way to practice the reading and analytical thinking skills you need in order to revise your own work. You will use the skills you learn doing peer review for other people when you reread your own paper.