Planning Ahead

We had been working on doing some prewriting activities for the final essay of the semester in my developmental writing classes. Not horribly complicated stuff. Just getting some ideas down on paper for use in the rough draft. We'd been at it for about an hour, and I suggested that most of the information needed for a response to the assignment was now on the sheets of paper in front of them. I then asked them to take what we had previously discussed about organization and write an outline for the rough draft. I thought I would get some solid attempts at putting together a framework for an essay, but I have to admit that my favorite came from one of the football players. His outline, preserved in its original form:

• intro
• body
• body
• body
• conlusion [sic]

As one of my colleagues stated, this student certainly seems to have caught on to how things work in a writing class. Unsurprisingly, his final draft was, to be generous, a bit of a mess and rather tough to follow. Makes you wonder how he went wrong with a structure like the one above.