EN 112 - Weekend Roundup - Week 3
We led off with a discussion of common problems students face in reading for EN 112. Broadly speaking, I see most of these challenges fall into two main camps:
1) students apply the strategies they’d use to skim passages and answer comprehension questions on a timed test
Those strategies are good for getting the main idea of a short piece of writing quickly; by their nature, however, they aren’t very effective at developing a detailed understanding of the text at a sentence level, or at preparing you to dissect its argumentative structure.
2) students apply the strategies they’d use to read a history text before an exam
In this case, the strategies (typically some combination of underlining/highlighting, note-taking, and maybe reverse-outlining) are a bit closer to what you’ll need for EN 112 ... but if you are used to employing this kind of reading primarily to identify and remember key facts, then you are likely to end up looking the right way for the wrong thing, so to speak; in EN 112 we do of course care about facts (an argument that isn’t based on facts is going to have some serious flaws), but we are interested in them mainly in terms of how the writer puts those facts together on the page.
There are several schools of thought about how to teach students enhanced reading skills, but I’ve never found anything that works better than just telling people up front what we’re trying to do here. (I have a feeling the real reason this hasn’t caught on is that it’s hard to sell textbooks on the basis of, “Have you tried just ... telling your students what you’d like them to do?”) So:
1) you will need to get the gist of whatever you are reading, obviously, but you will also need to read for more than the gist in order to analyze any piece of writing effectively
2) any techniques you’ve learned for identifying and remembering key portions of a text can probably be adapted for EN 112, but you may experience something of a “learning curve” as you get a feel for the kind of details (often rhetorical cues, rather than names, dates, or statistics) we’ll be examining
So far as I know, there is no “magic formula” that will ensure you come up with the perfect understanding of every text, every time (for one thing, written materials are notoriously subject to interpretation, and even the person who wrote them often can’t remember exactly what they were thinking when they wrote a specific phrase) ... but the following list of questions should get you off to a good start.
Every question in this list can be applied to pretty much any text you encounter, and you’ll almost always need to be able to answer these questions in order to get a good analysis “off the ground,” so to speak. There are additional questions that only pertain to certain kinds of writing (”What is the plot?” would be a very weird question to ask about an instruction manual, for instance), but on Tuesday we focused on questions with broad applicability:
One reason I asked the class to read O’Malley’s piece, “More Testing, More Learning” before we began our discussion of reading strategies was so that we would all have a text the whole class had just read to which we could apply the questions for practice during our conversation. Accordingly, we took time to answer each question on the list for O’Malley as we went.
Before we wrapped for the day, I asked everybody to annotate their text for the following class period’s discussion in two ways:
1) by marking each time O’Malley changed point of view in the essay
2) by marking each piece of evidence he introduced and how he presented that information
Whew! Tuesday was a busy day! :)
We led with a quick review of the semester so far and a very brief refresher on syllabus essentials. Somewhat disconcertingly for me, the most-missed item by far was ... my name.
(For the record: I am Dr. Carpenter.)
The backstory here is that I have gotten several emails lately asking me questions that were answered on the syllabus. I never mind getting the questions themselves. But the fact that people were asking the questions suggests that they hadn’t fully assimilated the information from the syllabus yet.
For some courses that probably wouldn’t matter very much –– but in a course like EN 112, which has you doing quite a lot of small assignments that all fit together to form larger projects, understanding the way the syllabus puts the course structure together for you can make a huge difference in your experience because it affects how much you feel like you’re lost or like you know what’s going on. Feeling “oriented” and sure of what we are working on at any given time is extremely helpful in keeping your overall stress levels down as we begin to pick up speed on some of our writing projects –– so I want to make sure that everybody has a firm grasp of the essentials ASAP.
Names in general turned out to be something of a theme in Thursday’s class, as we also spent substantial time discussing O’Malley’s handling of his sources. I want to underscore that we were interested not just in the content (the information he gleaned from his sources, and is using in the paper), but the textual integration of both quoted material and practices of attribution. His fourth and tenth paragraphs in particular give a good example of several related sources referenced back-to-back, and managed with enough dexterity that the information they contain feels like a natural part of the paragraph structure in each case, rather than some sort of “breaking news” alert.
It’s worth taking the time now to examine some of O’Malley’s techniques, because a research essay by its nature is going to have you handling multiple sources at once and needing to clearly indicate the transitions between your own ideas and those of other scholars as you go. This kind of interwoven commentary is very much a learned and learnable skill, but it requires significant practice, which for most people comes more easily after they have studied someone else’s example a few times.
The last thing we did on Thursday was to lay out the essential elements of a proposal essay.
demonstrates that the problem is a real problem and the reader should care about the problem
proposes a solution to the problem
demonstrates that the proposed solution is functional and feasible
makes a case that the proposed solution is the best available solution to the problem
You have more flexibility with the last element than with any of the preceding ones; if you are missing any of those elements, then whatever you may have, it is not a complete proposal argument!
On Tuesday 09/06/2022, we will examine O’Malley’s essay once more, this time in the light of a proposal argument.
If you missed class on any day in Week 3, your catch-up assignment is to summarize this document and to leave BOTH your summary AND one question about managing sources in an academic essay as a comment on the most recent Announcements post in Canvas.
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