Before You Read:
The goal for this project was to read five academic essays and summarize them, not unlike an annotated bibliography. I had never created an annotated bibliography before this project, so my efforts in deciding what to summarize were heavily influenced by sample summaries I read. Once I had an idea of how to keep my summaries from getting too long, I relied on the information in Thonney’s first essay below to help me understand the other articles I read. This project not only taught me how to read academic writing and efficiently summarize what I read, it also helped me to notice patterns in my own writing that I need to work on fixing.
Thonney, Teresa. “Teaching the Conventions of Academic Discourse.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 38, no.4, May 2011, pp. 347-362.
In this article from Teaching English in the Two-Year College, a journal for professors of first- and second-year writing courses [appositive], professor Theresa Thonney of Columbia Basin College argues that there are six common features between various genres of academic writing. As evidence, she cites quotes from twenty-four articles of six different disciplines with similar purposes. Thonney emphasizes to other writing professors that teaching students to recognize these devices will help to improve their writing. This article may help students to recognize elements in academic writing that make it easier for them to process other articles and journals.
Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 31, no. 4, Dec. 1980, pp. 378-388.
In this essay from College Composition and Communication, a journal that publishes research from college (writing) professors, Harvard professor Nancy Sommers compares the revising strategies of students and professionals. By citing quotes from twenty college freshmen and twenty experienced writers who all wrote and revised three essays, Sommers tries to show other professors what separates professionals from students in their writing and rewriting processes. This article can be useful for students in the way it shows different perspectives on editing papers; trying a new method as suggested by one of the experts could help improve a student’s writing.
Howard, Rebecca Moore, et al. “Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences.” Writing and Pedagogy, vol. 2, no. 2, 2010, pp. 177-192.
In this article from Writing and Pedagogy, a journal dedicated to sharing research on writing in various disciplines, professors Howard, Seviss, and Rodrigue share their findings [hypozeugma] on how students cite and summarize resources in their papers. They argue that students aren’t processing the things they read, and this causes them to plagiarize when they write. The authors cite statistics from a study of eighteen student papers they analyzed and highlight specific instances of plagiarism. This essay was written to begin research on the relation between comprehension, summarizing, and citing, so students can read this to take note of how piracy may affect their own writing.
Thonney, Teresa. “‘In This Article, I Argue’: An Analysis of Metatext in Research Article Introductions.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 43, no. 4, May 2016, pp. 411-422.
In this essay from Teaching English in the Two-Year College, an academic journal that shares research on the nature of writing in college courses, Teresa Thonney, a professor and frequent researcher of questions in writing [appositive], highlights how professionals use metatext in their essays. After citing her own studies of the percentage use of metatext in various fields, Thonney makes the claim that professors need to show students how to effectively use metatext and create assignments that foster that ability. Students can learn from this article that metatext, when used correctly, is an effective tool in academic writing that shouldn’t be shied away from.
Rose, Mike. “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 31., no. 4, December 1980, pp. 389-401.
In this essay from College Composition and Communication, a journal that focuses on methods for professors to improve their teaching, professor Mike Rose uses his training in counseling psychology to analyze why students experience writer’s block. His study of ten individual students’ writing processes and experiences leads him to the claim that a writer’s block comes from restrictive rules and plans. This article may indicate to students that how they approach their writing could negatively affect their productivity and prose.
My Reflection
In short, I feel that these five articles have shown me even more new ways to think about my writing. Having read these, I feel that I have gotten better at reading academic writing; Thonney’s essay on the six “common moves” in academic articles helped the most in learning to find patterns in this writing. In terms of the students in the studies that these essays were about, I related the most to the students in Rose’s study about writer’s block. My personal ideals about writing aren’t as strong as theirs—strong meaning something to completely dictate my writing process, like the idea of not continuing to write until the introduction is complete and satisfactory [distinctio]—but I related to the experience of rules being so restrictive that I get stuck on one part of an assignment. All of these articles explained problems that I’ve experienced in my writing before and most of them even proposed solutions to those problems; I’ve already started to notice more tendencies in my writing, and now I have methods to improve on those tendencies. For instance [logical connector, example], after I read the article “Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences,” I noticed that I tend to patchwrite important ideas from a text that I have just read. While the article didn’t teach me specifically how to notice that or fix it, it did define the term “patchwriting,” effectively setting an alarm in my brain for whenever something I write sounds familiar [procatalepsis]. Much like the students in Rose’s study on writer’s block, my writing (until this point) has been limited by rules and restrictions set by assignments. Having the freedom to just write and try new things has taught me more than any five-paragraph essay.