Students today looked at a Schaffer paragraph written by students in previous years, first identifying all the elements of a Schaffer paragraph:

1. topic sentence
2. concrete detail
3. commentary
4. concluding sentence

The result was this:

We then evaluated the effectiveness of each element from this paragraph:

Your new teacher for English will be the well-known Mr. Scott, and he might come to be one of the most challenging teachers you will encounter in middle school. For instance, Mr. Scott will often give pop quizzes dealing with the previous night’s reading for the work of literature you are reading. Many times, this might catch you by surprise, and will bring down your grade, sometimes tremendously, if you didn’t do your reading you were supposed to do. So, this teaches you to always do the reading you are assigned to do by him, and never try to sneak by without reading. Also, Mr. Scott will probably be grading nearly everything you do very critically. If you decide to simply not do much work or even act like you don’t care about your work, you will probably earn poor grades and therefore earn a poor average for the course. You will have to put a lot of effort into all your major and minor assignments to ensure your good grade for everything you do. In summary, your new teacher, the easily recognized Mr. Scott, is going to make your life as an English student a very long and difficult life.

We determined the following things:

1. “Your new teacher for English will be the well-known Mr. Scott, and he might come to be one of the most challenging teachers you will encounter in middle school.”
   The TS is of acceptable quality but not perfect. The beginning of the sentence makes the claim unclear: is the paragraph proving Mr. Scott is well known or challenging?
2. “So, this teaches you to always do the reading you are assigned to do by him, and never try to sneak by without reading.”
   The last CM of the first chunk doesn’t really explain how the CD (about pop quizzes) proves the TS (the challenge). The CM deals with doing all the reading one is assigned, and this is clearly connected to the CD because the pop quizzes will be about the readings. However, that connection alone doesn’t support the TS’s claim about Mr. Scott being challenging.
3. “Also, Mr. Scott will probably be grading nearly everything you do very critically.”
   The second CD is okay, but there is a lot of vagueness in it:
   1. “nearly everything” means exactly what?
   2. “very critically” means exactly what?

Over all, students saw that, while this is a good paragraph, there is significant room for improvement.

Homework

• English I Honors: perform the same analysis on “Example 3 (Paragraph)” on Classroom. (Complete instructions there.) (This is primarily for students who were at school today, but all students need to have it completed by tomorrow.)