In today's writing workshop video, students are asked to tussle with the following essential question: college is a scam ... or is it?
At least in my classroom experience, I am witnessing an upward trend in large swaths of students electing not to pursue a college degree.
And the reasons and rationale of this spike are explored in this synthesis essay.
In the video, I get to the proverbial easel and canvas and "paint" four model introductory paragraphs demonstrating how to wield my declarative and inverted thesis heuristic. From here, I demonstrate how to sustain cogent lines of reasoning in the body paragraphs (embedding quotes, getting the sources to talk to each other, how to construct concessions/rebuttals/counter-claims, etc). And I even address how to tag an effective conclusion paragraph.
If you scroll down a bit in the video's description, you will find the source packet I put together to help me write my exemplars (Note: many of my students found my sources to be too restrictive and confining, so they did a tad of research on their own).
You can also download all of the slides featured in the writing workshop for your classroom use (again, all the links are in the video's description).
Happy teaching and happy writing!
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