1. Show & Tell

2. Telling Academic essays “tell” you quite a bit:

3. Telling Academic essays “tell” you quite a bit: “Literacy is a complex concept.”

4. Telling Academic essays “tell” you quite a bit: “Literacy is a complex concept.” “Smoking can cause cancer.”

5. Telling Academic essays “tell” you quite a bit: “Literacy is a complex concept.” “Smoking can cause cancer.” “Stephen King creates vivid images in his writing.”

6. Telling Academic essays “tell” you quite a bit: “Literacy is a complex concept.” “Smoking can cause cancer.” “Stephen King creates vivid images in his writing.” But they don’t stop there—they have to “show” you in order to craft an argument.

7. Showing How do they “show” you? “Literacy is a complex concept.”

8. Showing How do they “show” you? “Literacy is a complex concept.” Support it through logic & quotation. “Literacy is often defined simply as ‘reading and writing,’ but according to composition scholars David Barton and Linda Hamilton, that includes ‘reading’ a map and ‘writing’ music…”

9. Showing How do they “show” you? “Smoking can cause cancer.”

10. Showing How do they “show” you? “Smoking can cause cancer.” Support it with statistics: “According to Cancer.org, women who smoke are 25.7 times more likely to get cancer than non-smoking women…”

11. Showing How do they “show” you? “Stephen King creates vivid images in his writing.”

12. Showing How do they “show” you? “Stephen King creates vivid images in his writing.” Support it with examples: “When King argues that writing is telepathy, he does not just explain why he thinks this; he does so by asking his reader to imagine a particular image: a white rabbit sitting on a red scarf with a blue “8” painted on its back.”

13. Show & Tell General Vs. Specific

14. Show & Tell Telling—General: “My English teacher taught me how to write better.”

15. Show & Tell Telling—General: “My English teacher taught me how to write better.” Telling—Specific: Add details! “Unpack” those broad, general terms (Dr. Dunbar-Odom). Which English teacher? What did she/he teach you?

16. Show & Tell Telling—General: “My English teacher taught me how to write better.” Telling—Specific: “My fifth grade English teacher helped me to improve my spelling and sentence structure.”

17. Show & Tell Showing—General: “After school, we would meet in her classroom. She would sit in the desk next to me, then together we would read my papers out loud. When we found mistakes, she would suggest a few possible improvements. Once I chose the improvement I preferred, then we would re-read the sentence to see how it flowed.”

18. Show & Tell Showing—Specific: With a “Once” “One time…”

19. Show & Tell Showing—Specific: “I can remember one time when I met with Mrs. Calhoun after school in her classroom, and she scrunched her body into the student’s desk next to me, like she always did. We began reading through my paper together like some kind of religious chant, when she noticed that I spelled “chest of drawers” “chester drawers.” She didn’t laugh, but instead pronounced the word correctly several times in her theater voice, “Chest-of-drawers. Chest-of-drawers. Now how do you think that would be spelled?” I have never made that spelling error since, but she didn’t try to embarrass me to teach me the correct spelling.”

20. Show & Tell Your challenge: when possible, Show & Tell specifically!

21. Works Cited http://comefillyourcup.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/02/show_tell.jpg Cancer.org