Jago, Chapter 1

Carol Jago
Cohesive Writing: Why Concept Is Not Enough

Chapter 1: Cohesive Writing--The Method

There are a lot of writing methodology texts out there; Cohesive Writing is but one of them. I want to stress this point first off, because despite the amount of talking I'll be doing about the methodologies I like in this text, I don't want to give the impression that this is the only way to teach writing. Instead, I would suggest using this text as another tool in our toolbox.

More to the point, Jago's text tackles one very specific problem with student writing - lack of cohesiveness. I think this is a great idea for an entire methodology book. Other compositionists and educators have written about cohesion in writing, but it's usually a topic for a chapter or just a section of chapter. This text will go in greater detail and will give many examples of ways to teach specific types of writing.

Jago does a great job in this chapter of discussing the importance of writing a good prompt for students and even gives instruction on how to do it. We usually blame our students for their poor writing. More often, we should look at ourselves - and not just in our instruction; we need to give them give good prompts to kick start their writing.

We'll practice this as a class.