Reading Literature

Professor John Plotz (English)
"I hadn’t done pre-draft assignments before, but I’m liking them. We did a pre-draft and a thesis exercise that is a sort of partnering. I’m interested in the in-class collaboration because it might be less risky for people. The first exercises were about trying to get them to have their head down in the books. After a pre-draft, we gave them the rubric, talked about it, used it to look at their intros; we gave them the option to do a draft, and we gave them feedback on those, and we met with a lot of them. They got the draft back and had a week to revise. " —Professor John Plotz
Writing Assignments
- Close-reading assignment on poetry, with pre-draft (doc)
- Research assignment (doc)
In-Class Exercises
- Exercise on note-taking (doc)
- Exercise on revising a thesis with the grading rubric (doc)
- Exercise on poetry (doc)
- Exercise on annotated bibliographies (doc)