Week 2 Discussion Guide: Wednesday

        To test your summary, paraphrase, and direct quotation judgment from Monday's class, 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?

        During the last half of the class, we will workshop the best-reader-needs and product-features for your PPR projects.  Bring a printed copy of your working draft of the paper.  This should include a working title that describes the product type and the best readers' needs for which the product will be used.  It also should include at least some expert sources, including web page addresses for those which are online.  In the workshop, we will concentrate on improving the precision of your product-reader descriptions.  On Friday, we will continue to work on searching for more and better potential sources of expert, if not scholarly, opinion, but that should not prevent you from starting your search right now!