Reading Response 3

In her article, "Helping students use textual sources persuasively," Margaret Kantz analyzes the way college students do their research writing compositions. To do that, she takes for example a typical college sophomore named Shirley who has to writes a research paper based on different sources. What Shirley does is what most of the students do. She selects the most important ideas about the topic and writes them as a story without commenting on the material in anyway. While she believes she's done a great job, her grade turns out to be a C.

Like Michael Kleine in his article "What is it we do when we write articles like this one--and how can we get students to join us?," Kantz argues that students need to read source texts as arguments and to think about the rhetorical contexts in which they were written. Kantz explains that writers uses rhetorical strategies to express their thoughts based on their purpose, the context in which they writing and the effect they want to cause on their audience.

Kantz also explains that whenever students read to do their research, they take everything they read as a fact. If they find contradictions between sources about the same topic they thinks there's an error but the truth is this "facts" are actually "claims". This also relates with Michael Greene's article "Argument as Conversation" in the way that different sources interact with each other  expressing different points of view about the same topic.

Questions for discussion and journaling

1. Facts and opinions are the same kind of statement: they are claims. The only difference between them is how they are received by an audience. To refer to argument, Kantz quotes Toulmin who thinks that an argument consists on claims proved with data and backed by ethical claims called warrants.

2. Things students don't know, misunderstand or don't comprehend about how texts work:

• They read texts as stories.
• They think that when sources disagree there's a mistake instead of thinking about the rhetorical purpose of the writer.
• They don't question the material. They don't try to figure out who the writer is, what context he wrote the text in, why he wrote it or to whom he wrote it to.
• They look for the most important ideas about the topic and write them as a story without commenting on the material.

I think she is correct in everything she says and after reading this article I believe that I understand what she's saying. Of course, like Shirley, it's going to take some time before I can use this information in the right way and write the research papers the way they are supposed to be done.

Applying and exploring ideas

Prior to this class, I never thought about research and creativity being connecting in any way. I thought of research as a process of finding sources about the same topic, finding the most important ideas and translating them into my paper. Kantz thinks that creativity is what research should be about. After reading this article I think that what she is talking about is that we need to be creative in the question or the problem we want to present as the topic of our research. According to Michael Greene, that is the way we enter a conversation that's being going on for a long time.

Meta Moment

Kantz is trying to analyze the construct of college students' research writing. She fights against the idea that research can't be creative and encourage teachers to do more theoretical work about research with their students to help them analyze their sources. I found this article really interesting, specially because when I do research I never stop to think about the author, his purpose and the context in which he wrote the article. After reading this article and the two others we read for past classes I realize how far I am from doing a real research.