Today’s Plan:
- Some Nuts and Bolts
- Guidelines for Peer Review
- Pass #3: Bibliographic Analysis
Some Nuts and Bolts
I want to open today by talking a little bit about how I approach academic paragraphs. My approach tends to be a bit formulaic. Of course, not all paragraphs will follow this formula–that would make for repetitive and boring writing. But this is a blueprint you can work from. It goes something like this:
- Transition/opening sentence that makes a claim, states a fact central to the larger argument, etc.
- A few sentences that point toward evidence for that claim, and give context for that evidence (how was it collected?)
- The evidence itself / a paraphrase of someone’s argument / a direct quotation
- If a direct quotation, a chart/graph:: a one sentence summary of the evidence
- An explication, making sure it is absolutely unquestionably clear how that evidence relates to the opening claim/fact
- Addressing any potential counter interpretations or arguments
- Close the paragraph hammering the point home one more time
So that’s it. Let’s look at this example from a presentation I gave a few years ago:
In her 2012 article “Rhetoric’s Other, Levinas, Listening, and the Ethical Response,” Lisbeth Lipari argues that Western thought has paid scant attention to the significance of listening. While speaking is framed as empowering, listening is either degraded as vulnerability or ignored entirely. Lipari believes that it is essential to develop our ability to listen if we are to develop ethical approaches to dialogue, willing to meet others rather than dominate them. She notes that “listening connects and bridges” (233), and argues that
[…] the ethical fulcrum sits not between visual and auditory domains but between oral and literary perspectives–ethics springs not from a literal eye that speaks but from an aural eye that listens. The voice of the other invokes listening ears and aural eyes grounded in the intersubjectivity of the relation rather than speaking eyes and deafened ears born through the subjectivity of objectification and domination. […] And just as the unimodality of vision alone cannot hinder the impulses toward mastery and domination, so the voice without a face cannot resist the lure of speech’s call for merger and unification.
For Lipari, the physical, embodied act of listening is an engaged encounter with an other person’s material form–their words literally echo in my ears, hitting me, moving my ear drum. Unlike vision, which operates without interrupting my possession of the world, speech and sound manifest as intrusions (or, if welcomed, visitations). One cannot close one’s ears like one can close one’s eyes. Of course, as D. Diane Davis has argued, one can strap on headphones and immerse oneself in another world to avoid encountering any faces in this one. But Lipari’s point is well-taken–that developing a rhetoric or philosophy from the perspective of listening, rather than speaking, means developing an approach to thought and communication that begins by making space for other people, other ideas–especially ideas that might challenge my own perspective.
Let’s look at one other example, from a student’s paper last semester investigating how the gender expectations children adopt have a lasting impact throughout their lives:
Social implementation of Essentialist approaches to gender has been seen to affect all ages. Jessica W. Giles and Gail D. Heyman’s (2005) findings suggest that children have organized patterns of gender roles before they reach school-age and that impacts how they react in certain social situations. So, at certain points of development there are different understandings to the gender roles, as I have found through my research. For example, Giles and Heyman talk about differentiated behavior among the two sexes at ages as young as preschool (pp. 3-5). Within these ages, they found that “boys are rated by their teachers as more likely than girls to engage in physically aggressive behavior, whereas girls are rated more likely than boys to engage in relationally aggressive acts….” further showing that young boys display more physically aggressive behavior than girls (p. 107).
Such tendencies are not only seen in young children. Jamie M. Ostrov, Nicki R. Crick, and Caroline F. Keating (2005) observed how college students reacted to children and determined their aggressiveness, saying that maybe adults just see boys as aggressive because of the conditioning on the gender-stereotypes. They’re seen that way, so maybe that’s why they act that way. Or maybe they’re seen that way because they act that way? These tendencies could be seen in the study which showed that the college students who identified as male had a harder time at realizing when a preschooler was indeed acting aggressive, comparable to the college students who identified as female who were able to perceive acts as aggressiveness relatively accurately. They believe that this showed that there might’ve been pre-meditated biases which affected the objectivity of the college students’ observance. This study seemed to point towards the idea that we perceive aggression differently based on stereotypes that are socially constructed to essentialist beliefs.
Finally, I want to show you my sentence syntax for introducing a source. And I want to introduce the generative power of the period trick. I use this, or something like it, virtually every time I bring a source into my writing.
[Author’s] [time period] [genre] [title] [verb] [purpose]
For instance: Derek Mueller’s 2016 article “Mapping the Resourcefulness of Sources” offers a more robust method for teaching students how to integrate sources into their writing.
Or In her 2013 book Participatory Composition: Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy, Sarah J. Arroyo argues that Rhetoric and Composition scholars need to better integrate video technology and culture into their pedagogy.
One more: Rage Against the Machine’s 1992 anthem “Killing in the Name of” might be more at home in today’s “Resistance” movement than it was in relative economic and political stability of the early 1990’s.
So, three take-aways today:
- The structure of an academic paragraph
- A syntax for introducing sources (who wrote it, when, what is it, what is it called
- A trick for trying to develop more coherent logical development
A Few Guidelines for Peer Review
On our first day, I mentioned that a significant influence on this class was Inoue’s book Anti-Racist Writing Assessment. One of his central claims in that work is the importance of demystifying writing assessment by having students regularly assess each other’s writing, using the same tools that I would use to make an assessment. In short, he wants teachers to familiarize students with rubrics by having them use them. This semester I will ask you to read each other’s work as if you were grading it. But not today–because I haven’t provided you with a rubric before you wrote this material, it wouldn’t be fair to assess it according to one. But I want you to know what’s coming.
What we are going to do today falls under the old name of “peer review.” But before we get started, I have a confession to make. I often think peer review with undergraduates can be a waste of time. I say this because the feedback provided is either “nice sentence” or “comma error.” The later definitely isn’t the point of peer review–we aren’t here to provide grammatical correction. A study years ago by Richard Haswell found that students could identify and fix over 80% of the grammatical mistakes in their papers. These mistakes appear because of a lack of careful proofreading. Students fail to proofread carefully because they are working on tight deadlines (and, um, maybe wait until the last minute). Here is what we know: when you are *thinking* chances are your writing will be sloppy and full of mistakes. And since writing–even for several drafts–involves thought–the spontaneous discovery of new possibilities, new ideas, new directions–your writing will be messy. But–at least until week 12 or so–we don’t care about messy. Messy is ok. Messy is thought happening. The paragraph structure I gave you above is a slight attempt to mitigate that mess, as is the period trick. We want a productive mess. We want the intoxicating possibility of thought.
I’ve veered a bit off track. So, if I’m a bit skeptical toward the value of peer review feedback, why am I so committed to doing it? Two reasons. First, I think that feedback can become more valuable with a little training. Research indicates that the value of peer review goes up substantially if I give you very specific things to look for. Second, I think it is very valuable for writers to critically/constructively engage other people’s writing; meaning that the value of this activity isn’t necessarily the feedback you give so much as the methods for examining writing that you internalize.
I want you to get into your groups for today. Pass your paper to someone in the group. Here’s what we are looking for today:
- Does the semantic analysis offer at least one concrete, interesting perception into the article it describes?
- Is there a great sentence, one that grabs you, makes you smile, is really specific?
- Is there a term in the analysis that you don’t understand, that needs explication?
- Is there a sentence “jump”? A moment where a new sentence doesn’t seem to answer the question or connect to the one before it?
Time to read.
Bibliographic Analysis
For homework, I would like you to move onto the next part of Mueller’s worknet project–the bibliographic analysis. We will use the results of this analysis in Wednesday’s class to construct a visualization using Google Draw.
Here is what you should do:
- Identify 3 entries from your research article’s bibliography that are worth tracking down
- Link to three of these articles using Summon (make sure we can have copies)
- Read the abstract and skim the intro/conclusion of each article, generating a paragraph summary of each piece (main claim, method for gathering research, quick one sentence summary of findings, quick one sentence summary of expectations)
- For each of these articles, identify three entries from the bibliography potentially worth tracking down
I’ve added to my example document some idea of what this will look like. PS. I know this is a lot of work for one night’s homework–but I’ll make it up to you around midterms and finals.
Homework
Conduct the bibliographic analysis and add it to your Google Doc. We will be working with this in class on Wednesday. I have updated the template, feel free to copy/paste for formatting.
