Week 3 Discussion Guide: Monday--"serving the reader" and source use

•  Serving the reader--one way to understand all the rules that govern academic prose is to consider them ways to serve your reader.  What do readers need from you, and when and where in the paper do they need it?  If you have problems at almost any stage in your paper's development, answering that question will often solve your problem.  One "disservice" student writers sometimes do to their readers is leaving them unsure whether they are reading the writer's independent thinking or sources' thinking the writer is paraphrasing.  That confusion can be merely annoying, or it can be plagiarism.  What makes the difference?
• Faculty and students typically distinguish quite clearly between "criminal" plagiarism and incompetent plagiarism.  Do you?  The thug plagiarist is stealing or intentionally and falsely representing another's words as one's own, acts with clear criminal components.  The more common plagiarist is unintentional, the student who mistakes the rules for borrowing ideas and language from sources cited elsewhere in the document, or mistakes for common knowledge an idea or fact that remains someone's intellectual property.  The most common cause of faulty borrowing is incorrect paraphrase of sources' language, followed closely by incorrect source citation.  First-year students are given extraordinary chances to allow them to learn, which includes accepting certain kinds of mistakes along the day, but the time is coming soon when "mistakes" will be considered "criminal negligence," a level of carelessness likely to harm the culture in which they are working. 
•         One major reason people get into trouble with faulty paraphrase, and its cousin, excessive direct quotation, is that they simply have not yet figured out when scholars quote sources.  Here are two, short web pages that attempt to explain this arcane point of judgment: "When to quote and when not to" (University of Bristol, Faculty of Arts, Graduate School); and "Week Seven: What to Do When You Quote" (The New Humanities Reader [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002]).
•         After discussing intellectual property and the problem of determining what constitutes fair use of it, we will discuss how to properly cite online information.
•         In the second half of the class, you will pair-off in a peer editing session with your rough drafts.  Our first goal is to improve the authors' pictures of their best readers' needs--how will they use the product and what parts of the product matter most to that?  Our second goal will be to help structure the paper's presentation of the evidence so that it leads logically from the readers' needs through a set of possible products' features and toward a "best choice" recommendation.
•         At the end of class, we will briefly look forward to the next class in which we will begin the second paper assignment, a Humanities paper based on short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, beginning with "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux" (1832 / 1852).

 Read Ahead!

       To prepare for the next class, look at the hyperlinked sites in this paragraph for the the Hawthorne Paper project. If you have time to read ahead, get started on three stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux," "Young Goodman Brown," and "Rappaccini's Daughter."  They are available in many anthologies, and in the hyperlinks above that connect to an acceptable edition from the University of Virginia's E-Text Library.  If you have time, click here to read two responses to student questions about the upcoming literary analysis paper which may help you read with a clearer purpose.  Click here for a glossary of literary terms and an explanation of how they might be used to explain an insight about literature.

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