Using Sources

In this article, the purpose is to teach how to identify and utilize sources when writing a research paper. The first part talks about finding the correct sources to use, n context of what the topic being addressed is. They use the phrase “Practice Intention”, to refer to how one must practice finding the sources they need within a large database of information. When picking sources, one must fully analyze the type of sources they need, on the basis of what their writing is about and what type of information one may need. It is a long process to try and find the information that someone might need to explain their thesis, but one they do they still have the challenge of actually incorporating the information within their research papers. There are many ways that one can add the information that they acquired; summary, paraphrasing, and quoting. All three has the purpose of being information from source, with the identification that the idea was from someone else. Depending on the situation, one of the three types are used in context to how the writer wants to portray the research that they have done. Overall, the idea presented is that it is very important to prepare what you want to write and how to writ it, when making a research paper. It is a long and tedious process, but the more one practices the better their paper will be.

Writing Style

People have different writing styles in that the way that they portray information can be executed differently with others. Although it is a personal difference, such as a handwriting, other factors can impact how a person writes their paper. For once, the context of the writing plays a big role as certain genres of writing require different rules that makes that type of writing different from others. The execution of information varies within the many genre of writing, which requires a writer to know the difference between the types. For a writer, it is crucial to know when or when not to do certain things within their writings, due to the context of a piece. For example, one cannot have personal opinions or views within a research paper because the writing is supposed to be neutral. Another issue that writers have to check is their way of citing sources, as there are many different ways to cite sources depending on the type of writing that is occurring. Like genres, citations have their own genres which varies from the type of research that the writer is conducting. There are those that are meant for sophisticated and formal writings, while there are less. Each form of citation is identifiable and related to a type of category of writing, so a viewer should be able to identify the type of article it is based on the type of citation along. It is important for writers to use the correct writing style and citation based on the context of the paper they are writing about.

The article “Using Sources” by Andrea Lunsford and John Ruskiewicz explains the various ways one may incorporate another piece of work into a paper, paying close attention to the relationship between research papers and sources that may support the paper’s argument. What really caught my eye was the difference between paraphrasing and a quotation. Writers should paraphrase when they are able to explain a part of a source in their own words. In addition, this also shows that the writer has synthesized the information gathered. Quotations should be used when the weight of what a source says will be lessened if paraphrased. By quoting some phrases and interpreting others, the writer can develop a way of speaking to his or her audience that is charismatic, and perhaps meaningful.
In the introduction to “Refining Your Writing Style”, Lisa Blankenship brings up the fact that like code switching between discourse communities, we can sort of code switch with our writing, depending on who the intended audience is, which I find quite relatable. For example, an academic paper I wrote would sound different than something I’d write in a journal entry, and both of those would be different from the way I write on this blog. She then explains what I think is an important point, which is the fact that your writing style must fit your intended audience. It’s safe to assume that your audience isn’t everybody, as it would be hard to reach a majority of the world through one style of writing. A writer should be able to connect with his or her audience, as well as being open and truthful. Not only will the writer be able to reach his audience easier by doing this, but the paper will also not sound so generic.

The first reading “Using Sources” explains how to identify the most useful sources possible and putting them into your own piece of work. Finding information is easy but to turn it into something you can use to persuade your audience is harder. The reading also explains the term “infotention.” Infotention refers to the “use of appropriate tools to work efficiently within a digital environment.” The author also explains the difference between paraphrasing and summarizing information. You could use quotes to emphasize someone’s exact words or use signal words to emphasize your own point and the author’s point. This was a really interesting read because learning to use information from sources effectively can change bring your argumentative essay to a whole new level. You don’t want your essay to be all over the place and using information sources effectively can make your essay look and sound like a well oiled machine.

The next reading talks about how you should keep discourse communities in your mind at all times no matter what kind of paper you are writing. You also have to consider who your audience is. If you start discussing things that do not matter or things that your audience does not care about your argument won’t be as strong.

Using Sources Summary and Response

The reading “Using Sources”, by Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz, is about identifying the most useful sources and integrating them into your own piece of work. It is important to note that finding information is easy but knowing how to turn them into “credible information that will be persuasive to your intended audience” is what makes someone a good writer. The authors further explain the whole idea behind the term “infotention.” It is simply a fancy word that explains how to collectively use your brain and web to identify the sources that don’t only provide you with the most valuable information but also comes from a well-known source. Moving on, the authors differentiate between paraphrasing and summarizing information, using quotations to emphasize the author’s precise words, and utilizing signal words to “characterize the author’s or source’s viewpoint as well as your own.” The latter part of the reading talks about employing sources in a correct and a proper fashion that would further develop your argument, instead of making it sound like a cluster of unorganized information. In my opinion, having guidelines to do all these things was really helpful because as much as the argument made sense, but if I couldn’t use it properly then there wouldn’t be any point. So having guidelines that I can follow gave me a physical sense of direction as to how and where to improve when using sources.

Introduction to Refining Your Writing Style Summary and Response

The reading “Introduction to Refining Your Writing Style”, by Lisa Blankenship, gives its readers important notes to keep in mind when writing a paper. For one, when you write a paper, whether academic or popular, discourse communities should always be part of your conscious. It is a fact that for academic writing certain disciplines, values and styles should be given special consideration for your point to go across. What is also important to consider is the audience. If one is employing the use of conventions that are not persuasive to the intended audience, the argument wouldn’t be persuasive at all. When a person understands what his/her audience’s style is, he/she gains “cultural capital” over its audience. In response to this reading, what I found really interesting was how learning different styles give one flexibility in approaching different kinds of audience. Not only this, if he/she intend on improving their respective styles, they also can get the attention of a more professional audience in that field.

Using Sources

Today, we are flooded with information on practically anything. In this age of information, it is important for us to know where to put our attention and discriminate among what deserves notice against what doesn’t. Professor Howard Rheingold has coined the term “infotention” which is supposed to describe “a mind=machine combination of brain-powered attention skills and computer-powered information filters.” Practicing infotention requires skills of synthesizing information and critical thinking. As you get more information, you need to find a way to integrate it to support your own ideas. There are a lot of things to evaluate in your sources. You must find which ones help set the context for your argument, provide background information, define your key concepts, outline counterarguments, and more. You have to be able to paraphrase and summarize your heavily-used sources. Being able to briefly get across the main idea of a source and deliver what the author was trying to say makes the paper stronger while keeping you as the primary voice. A huge thing to remember in academic writing is to properly paraphrase and summarize sources, or it can be counted as plagiarism. This is known as “patchwriting.” You should always throw in where you found your information and who wrote it.

This text pointed out the importance of sources in an academic paper. The quality of one’s sources has a huge effect on the quality of the paper being written. The text pointed out to me how much of your writing is based on the sources you use and formulates a lot of your paper’s content, like definitions of key concepts, background information, illustration of difficult aspects of the subject, and overall context for the argument you’re trying to make.

Intro to Refining Your Writing

There are rhetorical situations that allow for different writing styles. A large part of learning to write in college is learning about the discourse communities you write for. Different fields like humanities, classic literature, or the sciences have different writing styles which reflect their values. This can be seen clearly in the different styles of citation for said fields. Those in the social sciences, a field dependent on timeliness, prefer APA citation since it puts a lot of relevance on the date of which sources were published. It’s important to determine who your audience is when writing. It helps to keep your writing focused and maybe even more relaxed. Being able to differentiate between the writing styles of different communities is a valuable skill, especially as student. If you know who you’re writing for, you words can become a lot stronger and meaningful.

Using Sources

While doing research, we are exposed to an enormous amount of information that may or may not be useful to us. When this happens, we must have “infotention,” which was coined by Howard Rheingold and describes how we must filter out any information that isn’t related to our topic. When it comes to finding sources that would give the best support, one must build a critical mass that doesn’t include any circumstantial evidence before information synthesis can occur. During information synthesis, one can organize their sources in a way that makes the most logical sense. Once the writing process begins, the writer can choose to paraphrase, summarize, or directly quote from sources to help support his or her claim. When sources are used, it is important to avoid “patchwriting,” which is a situation where information from a source has little to no proper citations. In essence, knowing how to effectively pick sources and how to strategically place them in a paper is essential to writing a strong, argumentative piece of work.

In my opinion, this article gave really great tips on how to use sources for our papers. For written works I’ve done in the past, I’ve just used my intuition to figure out how I should use different sources. After reading this, I now have a better understanding about how to effectively use and cite sources. However, I still have one question about paraphrasing: Say you’ve written a small paragraph where you paraphrased information from single source. How would you properly use citations if you decide to not use signal phrases? Would you place the source at the very end of the paragraph, or after every sentence within that paragraph?

 

Intro to Refining Your Writing Style

We all have our own writing styles, but when it comes to writing for a discourse community, we must adapt to that discourse community’s specific writing style to effectively get your point across. This also includes changing the way you cite sources. For example, one wouldn’t want to use a biologists’ style of writing and citations to write an persuasive essay about how great pizza is. When it comes to writing, we must be mindful of who our audience is so we can come across as credible when presenting our claims to them. As we write papers for different classes, I find it interesting how, whether we realize it or not, we change our writing styles to sound credible.

Using Sources:

Using Sources, by Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz, brings up the questions of how do you identify useful and credible sources among the millions available to you, and how do you use them well once you’ve found them. The simple answer is practicing “Infotention”. This is basically described as one’s attention skills to sort various information and use critical thinking to find the best most reliable sources. The authors also mention how multitasking doesn’t cut it. Along with this, the authors bring up strategies to achieve this along with the guidelines to paraphrasing, summarizing, and using quotations for sources. The second half of this piece focuses on the technicalities of writing a paper with sources. Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz mention the importance of signal words and signal verbs, highlighting how they can be used to clarify and support an argument if used properly. The biggest take away from this writing for me is the importance of focusing all your attention one source at a time and that multitasking, although it seems efficient, can lead to weaker source development.

 

Intro to Refining Your Writing Skills:

Before writing any piece one must understand that there are different requirements for different rhetorical situations. Sociologists, biologists, and humanities scholars all have different ways of viewing and perceiving certain information. For instance, the different ways of citing sources like APA and MLA formats. For academic writings, the audience is often more focused and is really more important than a popular writing precisely because of discourse communities. Once you know your audience and the type of style to best inform them with, you now have cultural capital. This is kind of like the gateway to refining your work. In conclusion, the audience is essential to writing an overall better paper as well as finding your own voice that fits with your targeted audience.

Using Sources

When writing a research paper, it’s imperative that you have a thorough understanding of your sources to be able to turn them into credible data and integrate them into your argument. Having a diverse batch of information before you begin pondering how your sources come together to support your claims is important. When using your sources in your paper you have the option of either paraphrasing, summarizing, or quoting directly from the source; each of these must be done properly to maximize effectiveness and avoid accidental transgressions. “Patchwriting,” or simply taking material from a source and inserting it into your paper, is an example of plagiarism and should be avoided at all costs. I’m surprised that this even needs to be said.  Putting information from a source into your own words doesn’t take too much effort and is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge of a source (and increase your credibility).

Introduction to Refining Your Writing Style

A writing style is a person’s unique “voice” that shapes their writing. When writing in certain disciplines, however, we have to alter our writing style to fit their acceptable conventions. Knowing these conventions is especially important as it allows us to break or change them while maintaining credibility. To further refine your style when writing in a specific discipline, imagining an audience is helpful. As long as this audience isn’t general, visualizing it can help make your piece and your style more truthful. Trying on different styles is a good way to experiment with your writing and make it even stronger, although we’re all basically already doing it. I feel like my writing style is an amalgamation of bits and pieces of different styles that I had picked up over years of reading and listening.

“Using Sources” Summary and Response

The second step after finding a source is to separate the important and unimportant facts in the article. Sometimes it is difficult to determine what is considered important, which Howard Rheingold has coined, “infotention”. You also have to find enough evidence to back your claim and it cannot all be circumstantial evidence, which is “indirect evidence that suggests that something occurred but doesn’t prove it directly”. Then you have to figure out how each of your sources supports your specific claims. Understanding how to use your sources is called synthesis. After you’ve begun writing, you must paraphrase what your sources say. In a paraphrase, you state the significance of the sources in your own words. You must then reiterate the key ideas about the source and how the source relates to your thesis. You can also quote from the source directly if you can’t paraphrase the thought in any other way, when the author has a lot of credibility on the subject, or when the author strongly disagrees with others in the field. Before talking about a source, you must introduce it to transition from thought to thought in your paper. You can do this establishing context of the source. It is essential for you to use transition words so that the sources are do not seem randomly placed in the paragraph, otherwise known as “patchwriting”. Reading this article has really helped me in my research paper. I am trying to decide which sources would support my claims and which are a bunch of trivial details. I also understood the circumstances for when to paraphrase and when to quote a source. I originally had many quotes, but after reading this article, I realized that it is better to paraphrase when I can to include my own analysis and thinking into my paper.

“Intro to Refining Your Writing Style” Summary and Response

Discovering and understanding what kind of writer you are may make writing a lot easier for you. Everyone has a different writing style, but depending on the rhetorical situation, there are certain requirements for the type of writing you provide. Scholars usually write in “academic style”, but people in different professions can interpret “academic style” vaguely. In college, it is important to learn how to write in various academic styles in various discourse communities. Knowing which style to write in based on the purpose and audience of the paper and being able to fit into that style is called cultural capital. I think it is incredibly significant to be able to change your writing style based on who you are writing for and the goals of the paper in order to get your point across most effectively.

In the reading, “Using Sources”, Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz points out the sources that we find are of no use unless ‘infotention’,  a word they used to describe “a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills and computer-powered information filters” allows us to pay attention and focus our attention to it. When using sources, we have to look for information that would support our argument and define concepts of our claim. It is possible for us to base an argument from a source and working around from that or to write our point and support it with the takeaways we gain from reading the source. Some methods that this writing suggests is paraphrasing, summarizing, or quoting a source. The writing says that we should use paraphrasing when we understand and respect the meaning of the source. Paraphrasing helps us to be able to get the main points in our own words without changing the author’s viewpoint towards the topic. It is common to use paraphrasing when the source is heavily used in the writing. Summarizing a source helps the reader get the gist of the source and helps identify key points without the reader having to read the entire point that the source is trying to bring across. It is helpful to summarize our sources when it is used to signify importance in our argument or when the key points could be condensed into a few sentences. We can use quotations when the main point or key points of the source can be expressed one just one sentence and most of its conditions is to use the phrase of the author word for word because the phrase didn’t come from our own ideas. The point is, how we use our sources in our essay has a big impact on its meaning and structure of the paper.

In the reading, “Refining Your Writing: Style, Voice, Editing, and Grammar”, the author encourages us to develop our own style of writing. Everyone has a unique voice and for each person, we use another voice to communicate depending on the discourse communities we are in. Academic writings limit our capability to explore new ways to express our ideas as our grades are reflected on how we present it and the professor may not enjoy us using humor to convey an idea. Also, we should have a defined audience when we write a paper because it allows our writing conventions to vary and help us make a successful argument due to the style we are opened to which can be referred to cultural capital from Pierre Bourdieu. Using our stereotypical standards of academic writing can be repetitive and boring, so the author encourages us to try different styles to convey an idea that we can be comfortable with.