Group Work: Building Paragraphs

[The following exercise was used in a freshman seminar in order to give students the experience of building paragraphs that clearly link back to a relatively complex thesis statement. Ideally, they begin to realize that the thesis statement generates a particular structure for the essay, and they also get some practice developing substantial commentary on the evidence they select. A further wrinkle: the reporter can be asked to email the group paragraph to you, which allows you to put together an assemblage of the paragraphs for next class simply by cutting and pasting; then you can lead of discussion of how one would turn the paragraphs into a coherent essay: order the paragraphs, further developing them, supplying transitions, an introduction, conclusion, and perhaps additional paragraphs.]

Imagine that the first sentence below is the thesis for an essay, and that the second and third are topic sentences for paragraphs in the essay. Your task, depending on your group, is to find data (evidence) to develop the second sentence into a paragraph or the third sentence into a paragraph. For each piece of evidence, you also need to find a warrant (i.e., explanation) that explains how the evidence supports the main claim of the paragraph. You’ll need to generate ideas for evidence, decide which to use, and talk about how the evidence supports your claim; this last conversation will give you your warrants. Try to write out the paragraph, with one person writing down suggestions that you revise as a group. Remember, the goal is to get readers to see things in the novel they hadn’t seen before. And don’t confine yourself to the immediate vicinity of the allusion, which is on p. 30. (If you were really writing this essay, the last thing you would do is return to the thesis to revise it in light of what you ended up saying the body of the paper; it’s a little vague right now. And your conclusion would have to make a broader claim about why the connection between the novel and the postcard is important: what, ultimately, does it tells us about the novel?)

1. Thesis for paper: Although Smith’s allusion to the Field Service Postcard in Not So Quiet . . . suggests that her novel radically differs, with respect to content and form, from this “official” discourse, closer examination reveals surprising similarities between the postcard and the novel.

2. The Field Service Postcard throws into relief at least two ways in which Not So Quiet . . . represents a radically different kind of writing.

3. Yet however clear these genuine distinctions are, Smith’s novel also reproduces several key features of the postcard.