“Pulling It Together” Modules

Creating Bibliographies 

What can this module teach your students? 

This module will help your students learn how and why to cite the sources they consult in writing an essay. It shows students how to avoid the inadvertent plagiarism that can result from poor citation practices. Students are given an overview of the standard citation conventions (APA and MLA, for example), and they are introduced to online citation management systems such as RefWorks and Zotero. 

Tips on using this module in the context of your course 

This module can be very useful for helping your students understand the citation process and its purposes. A separate resource is provided to illustrate the conventions associated with each of the major citation styles. The module could be particularly helpful if you would like for your students to learn how to create and maintain an annotated bibliography. The concept of annotated bibliography is described and illustrated with example annotations. Students who might be expected to search out and use a large number of sources can be directed to the information on RefWorks and Zotero as a means of keeping their material well organized.

Writing Strategies 

What can this module teach your students? 

This module helps students understand the thinking processes and strategies involved in writing an essay. In particular, students will learn strategies for getting started with their writing, for developing and refining a working thesis, and for drafting multiple versions of an essay. Students will also learn to gradually shift their attention to the needs of their potential readers and to address those needs. 

Tips on using this module in the context of your course 

Several ideas about the writing process introduced in this module are likely to be unfamiliar to your students. Many students conceptualize writing as simply putting down on paper ideas that one already has clearly in mind. Discussing the ideas in this module in your lecture or tutorial can help students see that it is normal to learn about and reconceptualise a topic as one writes. They can see that writing multiple drafts is a way to facilitate that process rather than simply being a matter of fixing a few surface features of their work. The notion of a “working thesis” is particularly valuable to emphasize. Asking students to read this module at the same time that you are asking them in class to do some informal writing or speaking about their topics can help the students see the benefits associated with drafting.

Revising Your Arguments 

What can this module teach your students? 

This module will help your students learn how to review their writing and revise it, both to improve their arguments and to better meet the needs of their readers. Students are encouraged to review their drafts multiple times, each time focusing on different aspects of the essay – for example, reviewing the quality of individual sentences separately from reviewing the purpose and effectiveness of individual paragraphs. 

Tips on using this module in the context of your course 

Students often consider revision of a draft to be a matter of editing, rather than an opportunity to reconceptualise one’s ideas and their presentation. Asking students to bring a draft to class and to review it there in line with the suggestions of this module could help students see the benefits of such a review. Particularly helpful in this module is the material presented to support a peer review process. Peer review is often ineffective because writers are unsure what questions to ask and reviewers are reluctant to comment beyond superficial sentence features of the draft. The Peer Review resource provides a number of questions likely to stimulate useful feedback from a peer reviewer. The final section of the module can also be assigned to draw students’ attention to the overall purpose of the essay and whether that purpose is being accomplished through its themes, arguments, and attention to its readers’ expectations.

Essay Editing 

What can this module teach your students? 

This module will help students learn the various aspects of an essay that require attention in the editing process – citations, grammar, punctuation, and formatting, for example. It introduces students to a number of general editing strategies, including ideas for using online editing tools effectively. 

Tips on using this module in the context of your course 

It can be helpful to your students to discuss with them the difference between revising a draft and editing a final paper. This module emphasizes that editing at the sentence level is usually best left to the end of the process as many sentences will change or be omitted altogether in the revision process. Discussing this module and the Revising Your Arguments module at the same time can help students see the difference between revising and editing. An interesting assignment for class discussion would be to have each student prepare their own list of common personal errors to be tracked as suggested in the final section of the module. Such a list could lead to each student making a personal version of the module’s Editing Checklist resource for use when editing their papers.