an ah-ha! moment

Technically, I think I’m supposed to comment on someone else’s post, but I am still excited from working at the Writing Lab this morning, so I want to write about that instead. I had a student who was working on a paper about the effects of technology on society; specifically, she was working on the development and expansion of the railroad in the 1800s. The paper was a good first draft, although she needed some more specifics, but she wanted me to help her with the organization and development of her argument. As she was reading the paper to me, I noticed that the flow between her paragraphs was somewhat awkward, and I realized that she had organized them chronologically. I pointed out this fact to her, and suggested that she consider arranging them by topic instead (because her first and third paragraphs dealt with similar topics, despite being separated by some decades). As soon as I suggested this, she realized both how she had limited her organization and how changing her organization could help her writing. For me, it was a perfect example of Flower’s theory of writer/reader based prose at work. Although I don’t know for sure, I’m guessing she received her information chronologically, which was how she in turn presented it. For her argument and the reader, however, it made more sense to arrange it by subject. Now, I would have loved to have sat there with her and discussed the finer points of Flower’s article and how she was a wonderful illustration of it, but, I refrained. Nevertheless, it was helpful for me to have Flower’s ideas in my own mind as I was trying to work with her.