Glossing Project 3—Persuasive Essay
Glossing and Interpretive Paraphrase are strategies to help you read and think critically about a text—your own or another author’s. They require you to read carefully and to make detailed summaries of important ideas using different words. These processes will help you become more conscious of the rhetorical choices you and other writers make.
Glossing your own work helps you to gain some distance on a draft. It’s another pause in the writing process, a time to ask, “What have I said?” It can lead to you being better able to answer the question, “What do I mean,” as you interpret and paraphrase your ideas. It can also help you to see and assess the organizational structure of your text. Interpretive Paraphrase involves less summary and more detailed “re-saying” or rewriting. The key questions interpretive paraphrasing asks you to answer are: “What does each paragraph or chunk of text say?” and “What does each paragraph or chunk of text DO within the entire text (i.e. how does it function rhetorically?)” With these key questions you can better analyze what you have said in your draft, or you can critically examine what the author of another text is saying.
1. You need a copy of the draft or the text that you can write on. Title the draft if you haven’t already. Or think of 2 or 3 different titles (creating a title helps you see your texts globally, helps you summarize the meaning of the whole draft).
2. Read the title and the first sentence or two. In the margins of your draft, write some notes to yourself about what you as a reader would expect the text to be about. Based on those first two or three sentences, what do you predict will come next?
3. Part I-Now go through the draft slowly, glossing each paragraph. In the margins write a paraphrase (the same ideas in different words) for each paragraph or chunk of text where you think a natural break occurs. Concentrate on what the draft is actually saying, not what you meant or wanted it to say. A paraphrase as a part of the glossing activity is a direction-finder, a summary, another way of saying something. Part II-Next, write a phrase or sentence on how each paragraph or chunk functions rhetorically within the entire text. What does this text DO for the entire text?
4. Copy those glosses onto another piece of paper. Look at what you’ve got in terms of arrangement or organization. What is happening to the development of ideas? How persuasive have you been? Have you acknowledged the opposition? Are there possible directions for this draft to take, places where it isn’t accomplishing what you had hoped?
5. Ask yourself: What difference does it make to the meaning of the text and to potential readers if you arrange ideas differently? How does it change the conceptual framework?
Homework for Friday, November 20, 2009:
- Complete draft two of Project Three--Persuasive Essay. Please come to the next class prepared with a hard copy.
- Continue revising earlier papers as necessary for final portfolios due December 11, 2009.
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