QSR4: Research, Making Knowledge, and Writing

We will be wrapping up our unit on rhetoric pretty soon and start our unit on research-driven writing.

From the syllabus, here are the goals for the research unit:

Unit 3 – Research: Knowledge and Writing
The focus for this unit is on research. Now, all writing requires research; research is an investigation into various kinds of information. We can’t really write without doing that. However, generally speaking, and in academic contexts particularly, research usually has a very systematic connotation. In other words, it means close analysis of primary and secondary materials to make some kind of argument about something in a specific disciplinary domain. In this unit, we will consider how research and writing intersect in terms of how writing makes knowledge, how developing information literacy can assist us in making that knowledge, and how there are both general and context-dependent conventions for research writing that help us communicate our research in impactful ways. This unit primarily addresses the fourth Learning Goal (i.e., Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing) but it also touches on the fifth (i.e., Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose). Below are some sub-goals:

 

·      Write to learn (e.g., writing out processes and aspects of a topic to see what you know, moving from analysis to synthesis, moving from summary to analysis, coordinating multiple voices to reveal something new)

·      Develop information literacy (e.g., finding information via search engines/library databases/stacks, evaluating source credibility and relevance, analyzing primary vs. secondary sources, using citation tools)

·      Learn differences in research genres and disciplinary knowledge (e.g., using documentation style, IMRaD vs. thesis-driven paper)

·      Write with other voices (e.g., paraphrasing, direct quotes, summary, footnotes, endnotes, managing claims and evidence with other voices, qualifying claims, counterarguments)

·      Organize and making an argument (e.g., stasis theory, Toulmin’s model, organizing sources and mapping their use, making an annotated bibliography, supplementing research process onto writing process)

 

Research, ultimately, is a way to make knowledge. To do things and think as a way to produce something even slightly new in terms of knowledge. This is what college is for, this is what your professors do professionally.

Writing aids this process, and that is where we are starting are unit on research.

For our fourth Question for Second Reading Response, I want you to get some practice in explicitly writing in a way that can help someone know something as a way for you to think about how writing does that.

Go to Blackboard>Course Documents>Assignment Prompts>Questions for Second Reading Response. Download the prompt for QSR4 and read it.

Comment below if you have any questions about this prompt. If you have no questions, just type “I have no questions” below.

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