Week 2 Discussion Guide: Thursday

• Product Types and Best Readers Workshop:  We will start with some peer-editing conferences to help develop and refine our best defined product types and to help improve our understanding of the best readers for a product recommendation we might make.       
• Discovering the thesis in your evidence:  You also will need some rules for detecting a thesis in all of that evidence.  Remember the advantage of "The Grid" for pulling your evidence out of your sources' order and into an order in which you can see patterns.  Consider that good theses for academic papers tend to arise from the author's discovery of:

  1) a pattern in the evidence that can be interpreted to make meaning, or

  2) the discovery of a violation of such a pattern that can be interpreted to make meaning. 

  Identifying pattern-making and pattern breaking rules are the scholar's best sources of insight. 

          In the case of the PPR evidence, you will need to see a pattern of combinations of features that seem important, or a violation of that pattern in some product's unique way of delivering the same value in a radically different way.  Play creatively with your evidence in "The Grid," or use some other strategy for pulling your evidence our of your sources' order and into an order you control.  Look for patterns of features. 

• Organization of your recommendation: Once you have discovered a pattern of features that leads to a product choice, you have to deliver that information to your reader in an organization that makes clear sense.  Comparison of the features usually works like a "sieve":
  • first, many of the products are excluded by consideration of the first important feature;
  • then, most of the rest are excluded by consideration of the second (and perhaps a third, but don't press your luck!);
  • and the final feature turns out to distinguish between the remaining two (or among the remaining three or more) products. 

  That pattern of rhetorical organization could be called "climactic" since it moves from the least decisive to the most decisive comparison, but it also has the advantage of being partly "anticlimactic," since the first comparison weeds out the most number of choices, and the last remains dramatic because it makes the final choice.  In rhetoric slang, such an order is sometimes also called the "relay race" order: start with the next-fastest-runner, then your slowest runner, then the next fastest runner, until you end with the last leg run by your fastest runner.  The opening is strong, the middle builds in significance, and the end is impressive.

• Turning evidence/information into a paper that recommends a product to a known kind of reader:   Your analytical categories for evaluating the product you recommend must be clearly evident in the introduction of your rough draft on Friday. Those analytical categories should show up in a logical order in the outline or body paragraphs that follow.  On what key features should the best readers' decision depend?  Think about what problems they would be trying to solve by purchasing the product and you will discover the features that affect how well the products will deliver solutions.  We also can use those online expert sites to see how they decide what categories of information are most important for the product they are analyzing.  In general, you should pick the very best model you can find and, if you cannot improve on what s/he is doing, imitate her/him, and give her/him more explicit endnote credit for shaping your thinking about how to understand the product.

• THE BIG PICTURE:    This week marks our first formal discussion of issues relevant to "Information Literacy."  "IL" is a huge topic, but you already know a lot about it as an amateur researcher.  Scholars need to understand "IL" far more formally than non-scholarly users of information because they seek expert authority in their discipline.  That authority comes only from the difficult task of learning to integrate research and writing into our lives.