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Write initial understanding

hello and welcome to today's video my name is alexey and i'm the creator of bachorus tutorials the perfect place for any study organization or time management tips in this video i'm going to be talking about how to better understand instructions for school now the steps that i show will be most beneficial for essay instructions or project instructions but the steps that i show you can really apply to any instruction whether it be on a test or a quiz or anything else i see students over and over again complete an essay and miss out on some information or work really hard in a project and forget something that they're supposed to include the steps that i show you in this video are going to help reduce the risk of that happening if you find this information helpful please be sure to like this video and subscribe to my channel i come out with new videos every thursday so subscribing will make sure that you don't miss out on any future videos so let's jump right into the video the example that i'm going to use in this video is from a passage analysis which is a writing assignment for the purpose of this video the instructions are relatively short however you can take the steps that i discussed in this video and apply them to any other instructions whether they be longer or shorter the first step to completing any assignment is to read the instructions so let's go do that together and then we'll move on to the next step okay so here we are these are the passage analysis instructions that i've used for my classes in the past as i mentioned earlier a passage analysis is a writing assignment usually we would do this assignment after reading a book i would then include a few passages from the book to include in these instructions however for the purpose of this video i am just going to show you these instructions and i took away the passages that i would have used for this assignment so let's read through this together and then i'll tell you what the next step is on a separate piece of line paper or in a google doc please write a paragraph analyzing the significance of one of the following passages using the passage you select begin your paragraph by stating a claim about its significance to the work as a whole give the context as a lead-in to quoting specific words or phrases from the passage do not rewrite the whole passage discuss one or two literary elements connect this passage to at least one other moment in the text that supports your initial claim the first step that i recommend in helping you better understand instructions is to eliminate any unnecessary words now these are words that might be redundant or might be repetitive in the instructions the purpose in eliminating unnecessary words is to make it so that way you're focusing on less words than what might be written which will in turn make it a little bit easier to understand so let's start with this first section up here on a separate sheet of lined paper or in a google doc please write a paragraph analyzing the significance of one of the following passages now if you are completing a writing assignment you most likely are going to know that you are either typing it or handwriting it and you don't really need instructions to remind you of that so what i would recommend is highlighting this section right here and somehow crossing it off now you can just draw a line through it with your pencil you can use a highlighter to mark it just make sure that you know however you are marking it that means that that text is unnecessary in understanding the instructions so i'm going to go up to this highlighter button and highlight it in black so that it completely disappears if you are doing these steps on a printed piece of paper i would not recommend completely blacking out instructions like this for instance using a sharpie to draw over the instructions the reason why i recommend this is because if you ever need to go back and check those instructions it's going to be really hard to see through a sharpie however on a computer if i ever need to go back and check it i can just highlight it and then change it back to its original color so for the purpose of this video i am going to keep it black just so it makes it less distracting as i'm going through these steps so then the rest of the section reads please write a paragraph analyzing the significance of one of the following passages now that is pretty important that tells me exactly what is being asked to me for this assignment so i'm going to leave that as is so let's move down to the next section using the passage you select begin your paragraph by stating a claim about its significance to the work as a whole in this sentence i would say that i could black out this section right here in the sentence above it already lets me know that i am going to be using one of the following passages so this section right here is just repeating that information so again i'm going to go up to this highlighter button and just highlight it black moving on to the next sentence give the context as a lead into quoting specific words or phrases from the passage do not rewrite the whole passage i would say all of the information in this sentence is important again it is telling me exactly what is being asked of me nothing is being repeated and all of the information is pertinent to what is being asked of me discuss one or two literary elements again this is something i'm going to need to include so i want to keep this as is connect this passage to at least one other moment in the text that supports your initial claim again this is important because this is something that i'm being asked to do in the passage analysis so i don't want to black it out because i need to make sure that before i turn in the assignment i've done this now in this example there was not that much information that was unnecessary which is great usually you want the instructions to be pretty concise that way they're easy to understand however if you're working on an assignment that might be longer or have more wordy instructions this step is going to be really helpful in making sure that you fully understand what is being asked of you so now that that stuff is done we're moving on to the next step which is annotating the instructions now that we have removed any unnecessary information we are going to start annotating these instructions this is going to look different for everyone you just have to find a style that works for you if you want to highlight that's great if you want to bold or underline that's great again just make sure that you mark it up so that way it is easier for you to understand the instructions so let's go back to the top up here please write a paragraph analyzing the significance of one of the following passages there's a few important bits of information here a paragraph means one paragraph so i'm going to underline that and then make a comment saying one paragraph to remind myself that that is the only amount of writing i'm going to do analyzing the significance of one of the following passages now this is the task at hand this is exactly what is being asked of me in this assignment so i'm going to bold that now here it says one of the following passages so i'm going to underline that the way that i underlined this section up here when it reminded me that i'm writing one paragraph about one of the following passages now that we've read this bit a couple of times i know that there seem to be multiple steps in this section so i'm going to be using numbers to break this up however if you want to use bullet points or something else that is totally fine you can do that as well so starting off right here it says begin your paragraph by stating a claim about its significance to the work as a whole so i'm going to put a number one right here because that is the first thing that i should include in my paragraph it explains that right here it says begin your paragraph by stating a claim moving on give the context as a lead into quoting specific words or phrases from the passage now this sentence has two things that i need to do the first is to give some context so i'm going to put a number two right here and then it says i need to quote specific words or phrases so that is going to be the third thing that i need to do i need to make sure that i include a quote from the passage moving on discuss one or two literary elements that is the fourth thing that needs to be in this passage and moving on to the last sentence connect this passage to at least one other moment in the text that supports your initial claim that will be the fifth thing that needs to be included the last step in this process is to take what we have done and turn it into a sort of graphic organizer now again i can't stress this enough these steps need to be adjusted to suit your learning style and your understanding however these steps that i'm showing you in this video are things that i have tried myself and i have used my students for years and years and find that they often benefit students so i'm going to re-share my screen with you right now and show you how you can turn the instructions into a graphic organizer i'd like to start off with things to remember so these are general things that i need to make sure that i remember to do as i am writing this assignment what i'm going to do is make a comment so it's over here in the sidebar here let's make a comment like this and we'll write things to remember first thing to remember is that this assignment is meant to be one paragraph that's why i highlighted up here so i need to make sure that i remember it is just one paragraph next thing i need to remember is that i am only using one passage for this analysis so over here i'll write analysis of one passage and then the last thing that i'm going to write over here is this right here this reminds me that i'm not using the whole passage as a quote i need to choose specific words or phrases to use as a quote in this passage there we go i think that covers the main things that i need to keep in mind as i am writing so now let's go through and make a graphic organizer so as i know i need to start off this passage analysis by stating a claim so that's what i'm going to start off with in my graphic organizer this claim needs to be about the passages significance to the work as a whole so in parentheses i'm just going to make a couple of notes to help you remember that all right moving on let's give the context as a lead in so that means that the second part of this organizer needs to be the context and then in parentheses i will say lead in to the quote good and then continuing on i need to make sure that i include the quote i'll just remind myself that it needs to be words or phrases moving on i need to include one or two literary elements in parentheses i'm just going to include a couple of examples of literary elements just to jog my memory and then lastly i need to remember to connect to at least one other moment and then in parentheses i need to make sure that this also supports my initial claim the claim that started out my paragraph and there you go some simple steps that allow you to break down wordy instructions to help you better understand what is being asked of you now as i mentioned at the beginning of this video the example that i used was pretty concise and pretty short however you can apply these steps to any instruction that you have whether they be longer than this or even shorter than this i hope you found this information helpful and useful and you can use this in the future for assignments that you have again please be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss out on any future videos if there's a topic that you'd like me to make a video on in the future just leave a comment down below thanks for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] you