Week 2 Discussion Guide: Tuesday

        In class we will review how to keep track of your research, how to decide whether to summarize, paraphrase, or quote directly, how to cut-and-paste from online sources without committing "cut-and-paste plagiarism," how to use brackets and ellipses to trim quotes, and how to integrate quotation into your sentences.  These are "English 104" skills, but we dare not move into higher level research skills without reviewing them.  How many ways can you describe what a source is "saying"?  Read this list of verbs to specify how your source is "saying" to help you avoid the not-very-informative "X says" formula for introducing evidence.  Not all "sayings" are the same.  If you are not absolutely certain how to use any of these important verbs, ask for an example in class!

        To test your summary, paraphrase, and direct quotation judgment, we will have a quick workshop in which you will decide which to use in order to write sentences answering questions about a source.  One way readers guess an author's expertise is by noting whether the author knows when to paraphrase, when to quote directly, and where to cite sources when you do either.  Scholars use direct quotation sparingly, preferring to paraphrase or (better yet) to summarize sources they refer to while developing their original theses.  Think about it as if you were a professional singer performing a solo with a backup band and chorus.  You might want to harmonize with the chorus occasionally, but you wouldn't want them walking to the front of the stage and singing over you too often.  The "chorus" of a scholar's writing are the sources s/he must refer to most often because they contribute the most important support that the scholar did not discover her-/himself.  These sources are recent enough and important enough that their evidence and reasoning are not considered common knowledge in the discipline.  The "backup band," nearly invisibly present but always there, is the discipline's generally agreed upon common knowledge about the topic, often referred to in introductions, sometimes in the body of the paper, and sometimes in conclusions, but almost never quoted directly or dwelled upon for long.  Never lecture your best readers on subjects they believe to be basic, entry-level expert knowledge required for membership in the discipline. 

        From a student's point of view, that advice is hard to take and to implement!  After all, students are new-comers to the discipline and much of what they read in introductory writing like prefaces and introductions of books will seem like brand new wisdom to them.  Read his advice there and ask yourself if any of it seems arbitrary and hard to defend?  Can you think of alternative ways of knowing whether to cite a source, or of knowing whether evidence is so obvious that it need not be mentioned at all?

        Then we will discuss the concept of "reading to write," and we will review the typical logical construction of a college-level paper.  To help us do that, we will look at ways to answer the format questions on the diagnostic essay and quiz that you wrote last week. 

        Then we will workshop your PPR projects--be sure to bring at least one well-defined kind of product you are considering researching, and a description of the attributes of your product recommendation's most likely "best reader."  In the workshop, we will concentrate on improving the precision of your product-reader descriptions.  On Thursday, we will work on searching for potential sources of expert, if not scholarly, opinion, but that should not prevent you from starting your search right now!

        Click here for a review last week's discussion of criteria for evaluating the quality sources that are not peer-reviewed.  Remember, your recommendation can be no more reliable than the quality of the sources upon which you base your findings.