Writing strategies for the body
Ripples aid in paragraph development

One of the writing strategies I teach my students is ripple strategy. Ripple strategy is a kind of focused brainstorming. It is used for planning the evidence to put muscle on the topic statements of students' body paragraphs.

Just as a pebble dropped into water creates ever wider ripples, ripple strategy lets students systematically examine their knowledge — and their ignorance — to determine what evidence may work for an essay, term paper, or speech they are preparing.

The rings of ripples

Each ripple starts with the writer. The other sources of evidence are increasingly distant from the writer, just as ripples are increasingly distant from a pebble's entry point.

Ripple strategy forces writers to consider:

• Personal experience or observation they have or can get.

• Second hand (unpublished) experience or observation they have or can get.

• Published experience, observation, or opinion they have or can get.

Using ripple strategy allows student writers to find out fairly early in the writing process whether they have adequate material so they can complete their work in the time allotted.

If they don't have material or time to get it, they should still have time to select alternative thesis statements that fit their knowledge and their schedules better.

Apply ripples to writing skeleton™

Instead of asking students what they know about their writing topic, ask students to apply the ripple strategy to their writing skeleton™.

Each point of the writing skeleton™ for a five paragraph essay is the topic sentence for a body paragraph. Writers must supply evidence to support that topic sentence and develop a paragraph from it.

By applying the ripple strategy to each topic sentence of the writing skeleton™, writers can quite readily examine the evidence that is potentially available to them.

Teach writers to run through potential evidence for each topic sentence in turn using the ripple strategy.

Students pressed for time can ripple through ideas for supporting one topic sentence in under five minutes.

If students have a textbook formula five paragraph essay with three body paragraphs, then they would need to use the ripple strategy three times as they think about evidence they can use to support their points.

The value of using writing strategies such as the ripple strategy as part of a strategic planning process is that the focused attention primes the brain and makes it more likely that writers will notice additional ideas later.

Ripple strategy is one of the writing strategies built into my peer learning activity Talk It Out, in which students coach each other through the process of planning an essay.