Forskjell mellom versjoner av «Micro writing exercise to start an essay»

Nåværende revisjon fra 12. sep. 2016 kl. 09:53

Rachelle Esterhazy, Høst 2016

As I am not teaching this semester, I have tried out a micro writing exercise with a friend who is currently trying to write an essay about phenomenology. I knew that he was already quite advanced in his thinking about the topic, but was still struggeling with bringing things to paper and deciding on a problem statement. I explained to him the difference between presentation writing and writing to think and then asked him to write for two minutes everything he knows about "phenomenology". After this I asked him to finish the sentence "What I actually wanted to say is...". And in a last step I let him transform this sentence into a question.

Even though it was a brief exercise, both of us learned quite a bit from it. When I asked him about his experience, he reportet that he first was struggling with writing down everything he knew, as he felt he knew a lot but without seeing a particular structure. He was surprised that the first thing that came to his mind was actually the origins and roots of phenomenology and how it emerged as a rection to scientism and naturalism. When I asked him about what he actually wanted to say, he spontaneously realized that his definition of phenomenology is centred around the fact that it is challenging the natural attitude (he wrote: What I actually wanted to say is that phenomenology is a branch of philosophy challenging the “natural attitude”).

When asked to turn this statement into a question, he said that this was at first not a clear instruction. For me as the "teacher" I realized how it seemed unproductive to him to turn the statement into a question (i.e. is phenomenology challenging the natural attitude?), as this was not really bringing his thinking any further. After a brief discussion we agreed that he could use any question word (e.g., how? why? since when?) which led him to the question "How does phenomenology challenge the natural attitude?".

Concluding, my friend reported that the exercise has helped him discover the core of his thinking about the topic that he has been reading about so much lately, and which he had felt to have lost the oveview over. He was positively surprised how the time pressure and simple instructions let his central ideas come to the surface so quickly and made him find a problem statement for his essay.

My own conclusions are that micro writing is an exercise that can be very useful not just to explore new topics, but also to get to the core of topics that one knows very well. However, the part of transforming the statement directly into a question seems no to be working so well for someone who might have already advanced in his thinking. Therefore I will consider to give more advanced students the possibility to think of any question related to the statement, to make the exercise a bit more open and more worthwhile for them.