Glossing Ideas in Student Writing 

• What is "glossing"? Glossing refers to writing a brief summation about a passage in the margins, as a kind of shorthand or guide to the content or purpose of that passage. Most of us use glossing as we read, to help us understand a challenging text or to guide us back to relevant passages as we marshall our research for papers. Glossing is a useful technique to help writers understand what they have written, the relationships between their ideas, how to reorganize those ideas, which ideas need substantiation, and even how to rephrase some ideas.
• Strategies for using glossing:
• "What did you say here? Can you put a label on this paragraph?" When writers are asked to gloss a passage, they often either name their ideas, or they identify the rhetorical function of the paragraph ("Here I'm just giving information," or "Here I'm contrasting this idea to the previous one.") Tutors can ask students to write glosses on their glosses, which may lead to whole new passages and sentences that either connect ideas well or restate them in clearer words.
• "How many ideas are in this passage?" This question asks writers to identify all the ideas in a section and gloss them, perhaps list them in order. This allows the student and tutor to group related ideas, reorganize the section, and probably elaborate on some of the points in newly-developed paragraphs. Listing and mapping may be useful tools to use here.
• "What is the gist of this passage?" This question, similar to WIRMI (What I Really Mean Is), forces writers to restate their ideas and to examine transitions between ideas. It's also a good way of doing "sayback," where you ask the writer to read the passage, then say back to you the main idea.
• "What does this paragraph do?" This is a good way of producing an outline. Even if a rough draft is in pretty decent shape, it can usually be improved with some reorganization, but often it's hard to see how to reorganize a paper. If the tutor asks this question (similar to # 1 above), and has the writer put their response down on a notecard or typed into the computer, it's easy to start seeing which sections need greater explication or supporting material, etc. E.G.: a gloss of a paragraph might read: "describes widespread use of veil in modern Iranian culture", and by moving that gloss around, it might "fit" more usefully somewhere else. If the paragraph glossed was only 4 sentences long, the tutor might well be prompted to point out that greater descriptive detail is needed at that point. This is like a storyboard, and a mapping tree can also be used with these notecards. If you're glossing on screen, you rearrange your list at this point.
• N.B.: You can insert invisible comments into Word documents by pulling down the Insert menu and releasing on Comments. This will split your screen, allowing you to insert a comment at the last insertion point.