In this assignment, students take triple entry journal entries and turn them into source-based paragraphs. To do so, they mix-and-match an intro of a source, a quote/paraphrase, a citation,and a commentary on the quote paraphrase. These are the “moves” made in most source-based paragraphs. I once observed a class of our colleague Gilbert Morales who had the same type of paragraph building going, and he modeled it for the students by color coding the different moves on a sample paragraph shown on the overhead projector. The students could then be asked to do their source-based paragraphs at home and then to color code them. A second step asks the students to link these paragraphs together into a coherent argument simply by adding thorough transitions at the start or end of each paragraph to move the reader from one idea to another. There is no doubt that this is all schematic and very clunky. But once the writer learns to do this, they can then get creative and fluid with how to use sources well.
–Tim
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Teaching Writing at John Jay College 