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.