Getting to Paragraph Two in Synthesis

Alright! Today we sauntered our past past paragraph one in our synthesis essays and arrived--not yet exhausted--at paragraph two. Here is the link for some examples of our first paragraph synthesis statements, which we worked on yesterday. And here is the synthesis assignment (in case space gnomes have stolen it).

And HERE is a link to a video on how to create your synthesis statement for your introductory paragraph in case you need a review or were absent. 

Today, we worked on crafting topic sentences for our second paragraphs for our synthesis essays. The rough draft of paragraph two is due tomorrow, and here is an example from our back whiteboard of the process:

The cool thing about synthesis is that--since A + B = C--we already have our topic sentences for Habibi. It's going to be what we used for A yesterday! This second paragraph explores the theme of Habibi on its own terms, and our work is to prove why this theme is actually IN the novel (using two events from the novel). 

Also, before diving in to paragraph two today, we did some editing of our first paragraphs. Here is a picture of our front whiteboard, with the questions we used to revise our first paragraphs: 

And last but not least, our word of the day today was ELICIT, which means to draw out by clever questioning--as in this example: The lawyer elicited the real story during a thirty-minute cross-examination.