One of our basic goals for this course has been to learn and practice portable strategies for research-based writing, to accumulate tools and techniques that you can take with you from WRT 205 and apply in various writing situations in your personal, professional, and civic lives. With the semester rapidly drawing to a close, I’d like you to articulate some of those lessons here. There are two reasons for doing this now: looking long term, I’d like you to be able to name what you’ve learned as on your way out the door; in the short term, you’ll need access to some terminology to name the writerly choices you’re making in your current writing project.
In other words, it’s time to actually name and list the tools you’ve learned in this course that you are currently using in writing for this course. You’ll do this as a small group activity in class on Wednesday, 4/27, and will share your list as a comment on this post.
I’ll start: one of the big sets of lessons learned has been that we develop our own ideas by conversing with our sources–by receiving, relating, and responding to the ideas others put forth. When we grab onto those in our own work, we are forwarding, and making that move depends upon coming to terms with and fairly summarizing those thinkers’ words and ideas. So some of the concrete strategies include:
- critical summary (what a source says)
- defining a source (what it is and what it does)
- note-taking (capturing key ideas and your responses to them)
Then, of course, there are a whole bunch of other moves (many of them they say/I say strategies) that you use to actually write with other sources. I could keep listing those here, but I actually want YOU to do that, to tell me what are some of the specific strategies you’ve found most helpful in your own writing?
With your team, get started–brainstorm your list and share as a comment on this post. Feel free to consult the class notes on this blog, as well as your textbooks, and try to be as specific as possible in naming the strategies that we’ve been refining.
Working with: Scott & Matt
List of what we’ve learned so far:
1. How to adjust your text depending on who your audience is, this includes the sources you use, how you present the sources, the length of your text, where your text would be found, whether or not you use visuals, etc.
2. How to use the knowledge at your fingertips from other authors/texts:
-Illustrating: looking at other texts for ideas to include in your own text
-Authorizing: Using another author’s knowledge to expand your text
-Borrowing: Drawing on other texts/author’s ideas for your own text
-Extending: Adding more to the ideas presented in other texts by other authors.
3. How to incorporate quotes and sources into your argument and paper
4. Metacommentary: A way of explaining what your overall argument is and how it is that your audience should be receiving this idea.
5. Coming to terms with a text you’re analyzing:
– Defining the project of the writer
– Noting keywords or passages in the text
– Assess the use & limits of the approach taken by the author
6. Quotation sandwiches
7. How to apply al of these strategies to literary works that are not in written text
8. How to complete a rhetorical analysis (author, situation, etc.)
9. How to find different kinds of sources (library website)
10. How to identify if a source has been used by many other texts/authors
11. Learning what an annotated bibliography is & How to write an annotated bibliography
12. How to write a research brief
13. How to write a conversation essay
14. Learning how to go through the process of choosing a research topic
15. How to successfully summarize a text with purpose
With Noah and LaNia
Tools:
1. Start with a basic skeleton and then find sources to fill it out
2. How to define a source and integrate it into a paper
3. Learning how to find academic sources using the library resources so we can have a better variety of information
4. How to use what other people are saying and turn it into what I want to say
5. Choosing a source because it disagrees with what I’m trying to say
6. Writing so you can add to and advance the discussion on that topic instead of trying to solve the problem
7. The quotation sandwich and how to use quotes effectively and only where they are needed
Stephanie & Laura
5/2/16
Critically analyze source (background info, author info, etc)– with this we had to do research on the author and their background in order to use their credibility and expertise to enhance our writing.
Importance of meta-commentary– Directing the reader to what they need to know exactly from the text they are about to read. We learned that meta-commentary can be as simple as a sub heading but very important for the unification of the piece
Quotation sandwiches– we learned how important it is to utilize a quote and actually “do” something with it to ensure that the quote isn’t just taking up unnecessary space and has value to our writing.
Authorizing, borrowing, extending– learning these three tools has helped us in our writing. We spoke a little bit about authorizing in which we use the author’s expertise to our advantage to make credible claims. With borrowing, we learned that it is crucial that we use the right type of terminology and stay away from unnecessary jargon because our readers may not fully understand the text. Extending is important to use the sources one has used and spin off in a different, unique direction.
Countering — offering other perspectives that are the opposite of your own to gage with the reader. Sometimes, we only offer the perspective that we are arguing and bringing up the countering side helps us really make a stand for our argument to prove that what the writer is saying actually means something and worth arguing for.