Through this weeks reading the common point has been about research papers and citing sources. Praxis begins by discussing how exactly to make a research plan. Since we have already gone over this portion of our assignment I will spare the reiteration of the many steps listed. Next the book talks about Evaluating sources, by doing this we should ask our selves questions such as: Who is the author? For what audience is the text written? What sources does the author rely upon? Does the text have an obvious bias? What do others think of the text? When thinking about these questions we should make sure that they line up with the context that we are trying to achieve. For example if the context that we are reading is addressing the audience of parents and we are trying to focus on the audience of national government those two perspectives do not entirely line up and therefor that source may not be the best option in our case. Praxis provides us with three articles on global warming and after analyzing the three pieces states "Your audience is more likely to listen to what you have to say if you look for common ground and acknowledge the complexities of the issue." Through this we can being to focus on the different perspectives and form a stronger research/argumentative paper. The end of this reading assignment discusses plagiarism and citing your sources. This is something that should be done as you go, not something you wait till the paper is finished to type of. This is an easy way to avoid taking words that are not your own, whether intentional or not.
The next two reading assignment focused on the many different sections of a research assignment. It not only talks about what each section is but some good points of it. Another thing that this source talks about is addressing audience to think about who the audience of your paper is and to keep them in mind throughout the entirety of the paper. This connects back to the Praxis reading in many ways, it is used as a deeper thinking of the may topics that the book focused on. The last reading assignment for this week focused on adding quotes to your paper and making sure your writing is not sloppy. This was also talked about slightly in Praxis from the sense that it was discussed how to evaluate your sources however it focuses more so on incorporating the sources in to a paper. Through this weeks reading assignments we should be able to form a paper that is better than the first draft and have a deeper understanding for what we are looking to create in the long run.
A common saying I hear when students (in my case as well) are reading research papers is that they had a difficult time reading the article and I think a large part of that is audience. I feel that audience is one of the types of category that readers might overlook and as a result might end up confused or bored. So the questions you mentioned up above for evaluating sources is a great and simple way where students are able to start off to making sure their sources are reliable and addressed to their demographic, which may provide a better source for their context.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to plagiarism, I find it to be even more difficult for students and some of these students aren't aware that they are plagiarizing the material. The point you make that citing your sources should be done on the go as opposed to waiting until the end is a great way of fixing this habit, because most of the time students forget that the information they read was the authors words and assume that it was their wording. This is most often seen when students are searching for material on websites as opposed to articles in databases, because websites don't usually have a clear credentials and as a result most students leave with only knowing the information itself and not who provided that information.