Prewriting to Gather Details About Yourself

Before you write your résumé, you should think about your experiences and skills. At this point you don't need to worry about résumé sections or parallel structure or "telegraphic style." You just need to think about what you've learned, and what you have to offer employers. Answering questions can help.

Warm-Up for Résumé Writing

In tribal societies, pretty much everybody has to do everything: hunting, gathering, making tools, building shelters, fetching water, hauling goods, fighting predators, bartering, teaching, learning, and so on. In modern societies, people specialize. Most people don't grow their own wheat or make their own circular saws or build their own houses. Instead, they pay experts who can do these tasks much more effectively and efficiently while meanwhile making money doing something they are experts in.

Your schooling is starting you on the road to becoming an expert in something. Your first few jobs will continue that journey. Just as you've learned a great deal in school, you will learn even more as you work and develop expertise. But how do you build a bridge from the classroom to the workplace? You start by writing an effective résumé.

What Is a Résumé?

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A résumé is a document that helps potential employers understand who you are: your objectives, experience, skills, education, and awards. The word résumé comes from the French "resume," meaning to "take back, assume again, or regain." In other words, when you are writing a résumé, you are regaining all of the experiences you've had that can prepare you to succeed in a new opportunity. Some people also use the term c.v. or curriculum vitae, which means "course of one's life."

Thinking About the Course of Your Life

You began life as a single cell. You now have a trillion of them. That's a lot of change to go through. You can reflect over the long course of your life by completing a time line. For each period, list key experiences, educational influences, and who you became. Here's the course of one student's life.

Writing for Literature Assessment

When you respond to a writing prompt, you should start by carefully reading and analyzing the prompt using the PAST questions. Then you should jot down a quick outline of your response. Do these activities in the first five minutes or so of the time you have. (If the prompt includes a reading, take more time with this step.) You'll spend the bulk of your time creating a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Afterward, you'll want to review your answers to the PAST questions and read your response, making sure it is on target. In the last five minutes or so, revise and edit your work. This abbreviated version of the writing process needs to fit into the total time you are given (often between 30 and 90 minutes).

Viewing a Sample Prompt and Response

Read the following prompt, and view one student's PAST analysis, outline, and beginning, middle, and ending. Then you'll get a chance to read and respond to a prompt of your own.

Sample Writing Prompt

Writing for Assessment

A writing assessment gives you a short time to write in response to a prompt.

To do so, you should use a shortened form of the writing process:

Prewriting (5 Minutes)

Answer the PAST questions.

Purpose? Define imagination and knowledge, tell how they relate, explain Einstein's position and state and support your own.

Audience? The reader of the test

Subject? Imagination and knowledge

Type? Position/argument essay

Write a focus statement.

Imagination and knowledge are like energy and matter: the knowledge is the solid stuff, and the imagination sets it into motion.

Warm-Up for Reading and Writing Assessments

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Reading is the process of turning 26 letters and a dozen punctuation marks into meaning. Viewed that way, it's almost a form of magic. You decode symbols and transform them into thoughts. But how did those symbols get there in the first place? Writing, of course. Someone had a set of insights and rendered them on the page using just 26 letters and a dozen punctuation marks. The encoding process of writing is just as magical and powerful as the decoding process of reading.

Reading and writing help you learn and think about any subject. They let you succeed in high school, college, and career. Not surprisingly, these skills loom large in all of the key assessments you take now and into the future: the Common Core assessments for high school English, the ACT and SAT, and the AP English assessments. Don't worry. Reading and writing might seem like magic, but you can practice these skills using the specific strategies in this unit. They will help you succeed on assessments and launch into a bright and thoughtful future.

What Is Assessment?

The word assess means to "judge the value" of something. It originally meant "sit beside a judge" to determine the value of a piece of property for tax purposes. In its modern sense, an assessment is a test to measure the value of a set of skills, in this case reading and writing. You've been reading and writing from your earliest days in school, and all that work will help you succeed on the coming assessments you will face. You can also hone your skills with the specific strategies in this unit.

In the following activities, you’ll learn about close reading—reading to understand the thesis statement, topic sentences, details, and vocabulary of the nonfiction texts you’re assigned. You’ll also learn about writing for assessment—writing to express your own ideas during a test. Strong reading skills help you write and vice versa.

In this unit, you’ll learn the reading and writing skills that you need to succeed in nonfiction assessment. If you’d like to use these skills on a simulated assessment, see the unit “Practice Test for Reading and Writing.”

Thinking About Close Reading

To read closely, you need to think about the ideas in a text. You can do this by asking and answering questions:

• Who wrote this text? Who was meant to read it?
• What is it about?
• Why did the person write it (to provide information, to argue for a position, to tell a story, to make people laugh or think)?
• How does the writer communicate the ideas in the text?
• Where and when did this text originally fit? Where and when does it fit now?

Writing the Beginning Paragraph

The beginning first needs to grab the reader's attention. Then it introduces the topic and provides background leading up to your opinion statement. To get started with your beginning paragraph, you can experiment with different lead-writing strategies.

1. Present a startling statistic.

   According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 1 in 10 Americans had a mood disorder last year, and 21 percent will experience one during their lifetimes.

2. Open with an engaging quotation.

   “I try not to worry about the future—so I take each day just one anxiety attack at a time.” 
   ― Tom Wilson, American Cartoonist

3. Create an interesting scenario.

   Imagine that your life had a movie soundtrack. Now imagine that it was the nerve-racking soundtrack to a suspenseful movie. That's what anxiety and depression feel like.

4. Focus on causes.

   Adrenaline is great for fight-or-flight situations, when you need to energize muscles and put nerves on high alert. Adrenaline is less great when there's no threat, but you feel jittery and paranoid anyway, all the time.

Prewriting to Think About Problems

Problems are everywhere in life. You can start to think about problems by considering any aspect of life, from food to families to fun, and think about the problems that can come up in those areas. Start by consulting the Basics of Life List. This list contains all of the essentials of life—general subject areas. Pick one or two subjects that interest you. Then list problems that relate to that subject. You can click on any of these subject areas to find more resources related to it.

One student selected the subject "Personality" to write about and created a cluster to explore pain points with personality. Afterward, the student chose to write about his own struggles with anxiety, depression, and seasonal affective disorder, and the solutions he has found to help him manage his mood states.

Revising to Avoid Logical Fallacies

From the first Greek philosophers to today, thinkers have been on the lookout for specific flaws in reasoning—logical fallacies. These errors crop up constantly in advertising, political debates, and lunchroom discussions. You should learn to recognize the following forms of fuzzy logic in the thinking of others and eliminate them from your own thinking.

Logical Fallacies

Writing the Beginning Paragraph

The beginning first needs to grab the reader's attention. Then it introduces the topic and provides background leading up to your position statement. To get started with your beginning paragraph, you can experiment with different lead-writing strategies.

1. Ask a provocative question.

   What if Waterford had more dining options, including exotic foods from Africa, the South Pacific, and the Middle East?

2. Provide a fascinating quotation.

   “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” 
   ― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

3. Provide a surprising fact.

   Food trucks have evolved from ice cream and hot dogs to Kobe steaks and calamari.

4. Directly address the issue.

   Most people would agree that special interest lobbies meant to restrict competition result in unfair laws—except when the topic is "food trucks."

Writing the Middle Paragraphs