ksoakes – WRT205 Spring 2016

Lessons: ready to use

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.

In-class activity on Monday, 2/22

Today you’ll begin looking in earnest for some possible articles to work with in your Unit 2 research brief. I’d like you to begin that process by answering some questions. Create a new post on the blog for your responses; please tag your post with “inclass2/22” and “invention.”

In your post, please answer these questions:

I’m interested in where these issues/conversations bump into each other: [name those conversations–i.e. public health and social class and end-of-life]
Here are some of the search terms I’m finding productive in this quest: [list them here]
Here is an article I’ve found at this intersection (include title, author, place of publication, not just a url): [note that this does not have to be your final choice for the research brief; you’re collecting possibilities at this point!]
Here’s how research is working in this article (using Harris’s terminology): [discuss specific passages from the article and name those uses—illustrating, borrowing, extending, authorizing, contextualizing]

Class Notes (from library workshop), 2.15.16

Workshop with Patrick Wiliams, 2.15.16

Some issues to keep in mind as you evaluate sources

authority
currency
validity/accuracy
audience–jargon is a pretty good indicator of audience—even if you’re not sure what you’re looking at, you can take some cues there
point of view

Patrick’s recommendations for specific research tools beyond ProQuest:

SCOPUS (all scholarly, focus on science, tech, medicine, social science, arts, and humanities); provides “who cited this” function
Social Sciences Full Text (a lot of public welfare, social work, and urban studies, so it might be pertinent to these students’ projects)
GreenFILE (collection that is focused on sustainability and environmental issues, but draws from variety of disciplines in social sciences and health)

Remember that there are multiple different ways to access databases, depending on whether you know what you’re looking for–you can look at subject-specific lists, search for name of database alphabetically, or browse area-specific research guides including this one for public health: http://Researchguides.library.syr.edu/public-health

Pay attention to the search results as a set–there’s a lot to take note of here:

different publications where this topic is being discussed (journal titles)–this can be useful in further searching
references lists for valuable texts, which provide jumping-off points for additional searching
how many other scholars have cited this piece, which points to significance of a particular publication

From within search result, you can email, print, or cite (without RefWorks here, you can just have it generate a fully formatted citation that you can just copy and paste yourself).

Note that the journal titles are often hyper links—you can click to see full table of contents, which is particularly helpful if this article is appearing in a special edition whose theme and other contents would be valuable to you

Library subscribes to over 500 different databases–you can use SUMMON to effectively search across different databases for something specific (if you have a title or author you’re looking for). Unlike Google Scholar, the library’s website provides you FREE full-text access to all this information–take advantage of it!

They Say/I Say

Teachers of writing are rather sharply divided over Graff and Birkenstein’s book They Say/I Say: the moves that matter in academic writing. While the book clearly strikes a chord with students (it’s in its 3rd edition, after all), many faculty members resist the template approach that G&B take here. For my part, though, while I can appreciate teachers’ desire to avoid any suggestion that writing is as simple as filling-in-the-blanks, I think that such criticisms miss the larger point: that these templates can provide students with linguistic training wheels, that is, as temporary learning tools, rather than as permanent stylistic crutches.

That said, I’m using the same basic they say/I say move right now in this blog, so maybe G&B are on to something–the moves really are endemic to the work we do, even if the exact phrasing shifts depending on situation. There’s no harm in letting students in on that secret….

Additional examples of public health writing

As promised, here are a couple of additional examples for you to consider. Remember that for your Unit 1 essay, you may work with any of the samples you located or that your classmates located. These ones that I am sharing are also fair game for your analysis.

Here’s a governmental policy brief that relates to hunger issues: http://nascsp.org/data/files/csbg_publications/issue_briefs/going-beyond-hunger-food-insecurity-in-america.pdf

Here’s a piece that’s written by a nurse for other nurses: http://www.americannursetoday.com/nurses-guide-food-banks-food-pantries-soup-kitchens/

Here’s another example of a policy brief from the nonprofit sector: http://www.changelabsolutions.org/sites/default/files/Food-Banks_FINAL_20140926_0.pdf

And finally, here’s a piece of webwriting that is intended for a broad public: http://sodiumbreakup.heart.org/food-banks-promote-health-for-families/

Please remember that by tomorrow’s class you should be commenting on your prior entries (doing some of this preliminary rhetorical analysis work). You’ll find the instructions for that assignment in a separate entry from me (from a few days ago).

Assignment instructions (due 2/8)

Rather than send these via email and have them get buried in your inbox, I’ll put the assignment instructions here. This is what you should complete before class on Monday, 2/8. All of this work is preparing you for the essay that you will write for next Wednesday.

Working with the examples of public health writing that you shared on our blog this week, respond to these two prompts as comments to your original post(s):

explain the rhetorical situation of this text as best you can–addressing author, audience, purpose, context, exigence. Do this for at least 2 sample texts.
explain (in specific terms) how the author uses research in this text–what role(s) does the source material play in this text. (Think here about our discussion in class today about the different ways that Hess employs research in her writing.) Do this for at least 2 sample texts.

Welcome to WRT 205

Our examination of the practices, conventions, and strategies of researched writing continues here. We will use this blog to prepare for class discussions and to further those conversations, as well as to collect and collate your service observations and project ideas.

You will be regularly assigned to post on this blog. Every time that you do so, please be sure to *tag* your posts, so that we can all sort and track information as needed.