Let’s start pulling some things together. Here are a few lessons from our first unit of the course that I hope you will carry forward in our next projects:
- We need to understand a text’s rhetorical situation before we can work with it—over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at some sets of texts that talk around some of the same issues but from different angles. Looking closely, we can trace many of these differences to facets of their writing situation: i.e. different audiences, different purposes, different credentials/experiences of the authors, different contexts. In order to figure out how much stock to put in folks’ ideas, what ideas of our own we might build upon them, or how to use these sources to help explain ideas to other people, we MUST first understand the texts themselves and where they’re coming from.
- Understanding a text’s rhetorical situation also gives us a window in to whether and how it works, and what we might learn from its example as writers—we can see how writers try to appeal to their readers (using 2nd person, anticipating and responding to their concerns, styling their text to be visually engaging). We can see how writers build their arguments (linking evidence to claims, providing the reader with opportunities to follow their chain of thought back through hyperlinks to sources or citations). We can see writers drawing on their personal experiences to tell us stories about how they came to wonder about something and how they developed their understanding of it. By watching how other people do this work, we prepare ourselves to do it, too.
- We need a variety of tools—we’ve examined how-to texts (from Harris and TSIS) and content-focused ones; we’ve watched videos; we’ve discussed. We’re coming to appreciate the complexity of our big topic area and to see how we’re only really going to make progress toward our understanding by engaging with a variety of resources and voices. That’s not just an academic exercise for us in this course; that’s a core guideline for research. As researchers and writers, we will also need that multi-faceted set of perspectives if we’re ever going to make progress toward understanding. AND we need to use a multitude of tools in presenting our ideas to our readers—whether that’s templates, graphic representations of data, varying levels of formality, etc. Furthermore, this sort of diversity of perspectives and approaches is a core value for organizations–an essential component of fair and effective collaboration.
So let’s continue. We’re growing our body of knowledge this week through accretion—each of you is adding something to it with the article you’re going to explain to the rest of us, and reviewing your classmates’ posts will be an important part of this week’s work. As we move forward, we’ll continue to learn from each other even as we head down individual research paths.
One final point, summary isn’t just a hoop for you to jump through. It’s how you test yourself to ensure that you’re conversant enough with the text to work with it in your own writing. If you can’t effectively summarize it, you probably shouldn’t be working with it in a project, because you can’t be sure you’ll fairly characterize its perspective and utilize its full value. A careful definition and description of a source (as part of a summary that also details its main take-away points) is a necessary precondition to be able to work further with that material.
Ready to move on? The unit 2 assignment sheet is available here and on Blackboard. Take a look, and let’s get ready to go.