Three things I’ve learnt from or with my students this past week‍

1. One way to think about introductions is they have three purposes:

    a. To answer the question and establish the thesis

    b. Communicate the structure of the piece of writings/ lay out the arguments

    c. Give any relevant context so the reader is able to understand the argument/ the marker knows that you         know the context (this can be a separate section following the introduction or can be the introduction         itself). One of our students is currently working on improving introductions, and is getting a hang of         purposes b and c so once they feel comfortable with this, we’ll come back and add in purpose a.

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2. For students who might not have enough general knowledge on a topic, assigning homework which builds general knowledge can overtime strengthen their use of case studies and inclusion of statistics. This is particularly of use in subjects such as economics, history, geography and legal studies. For example, a student at the moment studying economics with us hadn’t heard of the 1973 oil crisis so for homework they watched a few summary videos about it on Youtube (from decent sources). Later in the week, they realised they were able to include it as a case study to demonstrate an argument when writing a short answer question. 

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3. When trying to teach argument structure, using characters from a book a student is already reading can make the exercise more accessible. For example, this week I asked a student to outline Harry’s reasons for wanting to take down Voldemort and then to organise them using a basic argument structure. Made the lesson much more fun for both of us.

‍Two quotes about writing

                                               “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

                               ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

                    “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

                                                                    ― Jack Kerouac

One suggestion to consider‍

Next time you need to memorise information such as verbs in language learning, quotes in English or statistics for economics, try writing them down 5-10 times 3 times a day for a few days. See if that helps it stick in your memory. 

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Happy writing,

‍Jaye Sergeant

Founder & Lead Tutor of Turtle & elephant