Evaluate Your Sources with CRAAP!

Hi, I'm Piper, the resident librarian at the Writing Center. I'll be posting here from time to time, and while my posts might not be directly about writing per se, they will be about library-related aspects of the writing process. Most of my time is spent upstairs in the Dunbar Library, where--among other things--I and my fellow librarians help students find books, articles, and other materials for their research papers. Although we spend a lot of time searching with students in our catalog and in article databases (and if you don't know what those are, get yourself upstairs and ask! we're cheerful and helpful and we love questions!), another big part of what we do is help teach students to evaluate all the information that they find.

“Well,” you might think, “I already know how to do that.” I'm sure that you do, to some degree, but just think of the vast amount of information out there. For example, when you do a Google search, how do you know which sites will have reliable information? What are the kinds of things you look for in a good, authoritative site? These are not just questions that you should ask yourself when you're doing research for a class assignment (and if you are working on an assignment, you should probably be using the library's catalog and article databases ;)), they are questions that you should ask when you are looking up health information, or buying something, or just looking up a fact on which you made a bet with someone.

Some of the librarians here use a handy checklist developed by librarians at Cal State Chico called the CRAAP test for evaluating websites and other information. CRAAP is an acronym for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose. These are all things that you should look for, whether on the TV news, in a book, or on a website that pops to the top of your search results. Take a look and use the CRAAP test: it’s brief, it’s useful, and it could save you from making a big mistake in either school—“Whoops, that web page I cited on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was produced by white supremacists”— or the rest of your busy life—“Oh no, that shopping site put a virus in my computer! “

Analyzing Analysis

As a tutor and as a student, I think it is safe to say that text analysis is my least favorite English 101 assignment. However, it is also more useful than it appears at first glance. Speaking as someone who spent many years in the workforce prior to returning to college, I can say that if I had possessed the skills achieved by formulating a successful text analysis back then, it would have served me well.

Instructors assign text analysis for a variety of reasons. However, one of the most important is to assess students’ ability to truly comprehend the message that is being delivered. This goes beyond the ability to look at an advertisement and know what the company is trying to sell, or the ability look an article and accurately summarizing its contents. It is a dissection of language and images that inevitably tells us more than we could possibly glean from a simple summary.

Generally, I suggest that my clients approach analysis as a mechanic might. I recommend that they examine the text as though it is a motor that can be taken apart and examined piece by piece, then put back together to comprise a whole, working machine. Examining each portion of the text gives the student an in depth understanding of why the author used certain words or images, and how those individual components contribute to the success or failure of the piece as a whole.

Not only does this approach serve as method of creating a successful text analysis for an instructor, it provides the student with tools that will serve him or her in a business setting. An understanding of text analysis can lay the groundwork for better communication in the workplace.

Though it will rarely be a favorite assignment, text analysis will inevitably strengthen a student's skill as a writer. Successful completion of this assignment can strengthen a writer’s confidence and improve his or her reading comprehension in preparation for further collegiate endeavors, as well as undertakings beyond the world of academia.

Six Degrees of Greatness

One of the fun, pop culture games we used to play at parties when I was in college was called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." The game is, I believe, still known, if not popular. The premise of the game was to name an actor and trace a path of other actors with whom that actor had appeared in movies all the way back to Kevin Bacon and do so in six or fewer names. The game was based on the conceit that Kevin Bacon was such a popular actor, appearing in numerous films, that you could trace almost anyone back to him. I'm not sure how Kevin Bacon got swept up in all of this, but the fact is that most of us live within six degrees of one another. (I'm particularly thrilled to be within three degrees of Jennifer Aniston, but she still doesn't return my calls.)

At the heart of the "six degrees" concept is the idea of connection, or for those who like to complicate matters, interconnection -- it's probably all the same thing. The point is that people are connected in ways they often don't suspect. The same is true of ideas. Our form of government, for example, can be traced from our founders back to thinkers like John Locke and, ultimately, Plato. The roots of our democracy lie in the ruins of ancient Greek civilization. But when it comes to the realm of ideas, how are these connections made? Most often, it is through writing.

In the same way that the technology I'm using to write and publish this to you is closely connected to the first printing press that produced the Gutenberg Bible and revolutionized the dissemination of ideas, those very ideas are connected with one another. As a student, you are at the heart of this connection. Everything you read, every lecture you attend, every question you ask is part of the great adventure of discovery that our species has been on since the very day we appeared on the planet. In a very real way, you have access to a connection with the entire sweep of human history. Furthermore, while you may not realize it yet, you have a connection to the far reaches of the future. That connection may be tenuous or great depending on what you do with your life, but the connection exists just as surely as you do.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it remains as true today as it was in the distant past: the most effective and long-lasting way to communicate your ideas is through writing. That may not seem like much, but consider that almost everything you enjoy springs from an idea. Your i-Pod? It didn't exist until someone had the idea to invent it. Television? Radio? Music itself? All ideas. In fact, if you attend Wright State University, you go to school at a place named after two people who had many ideas, several of which led to the invention of the aeroplane.

"Cogito, ergo sum." That's the Latin for, "I think, therefore I am," René Descartes' insightful proof of existence. In a very real way, to think is to live. Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed this idea when he wrote that the unexamined life isn't worth living. What he meant, I think, is that the depth and quality of our lives comes from examining it, from using our critical and creative faculties to understand ourselves and the world we live in. That's the underlying reason for academic inquiry. It is only one way to understand ourselves, but it is a serious and important way to do so. Whatever else you may want to accomplish while you're in school, don't miss the opportunity to learn all you can about yourself, others, and the world in which we all live. Intentional pursuit of that goal may well lead to greatness.

Have you WAC-ed your WID today?

In theory, students who pass ENG101 and 102 (or their equivalents) have the foundation to make it through their remaining writing intensive courses. But in practice, many students hit writing assignments in the GenEd and their major and discover that what worked in English 101 and 102 doesn’t fly. They swear they did what the professor asked and yet they earned a D. What’s the deal?

As one of the people at WSU whose job it is to help faculty teach writing in the major, I spend a good deal of my time trying to keep this from happening. What I’ve discovered is that the problem often occurs when writers mistranslate WAC (that’s Writing Across the Curriculum) into WID (Writing in the Disciplines).

I just got back from the International WAC Conference in Austin, Texas where, along with three other WSU faculty members, I presented a panel on the challenges of translating WAC to WID. This panel grew out of work that began in Fall 2007 with Sarah Twill in the Department of Social Work and reviewing its key points here might help you understand what I mean by the need to translate WAC into WID.

When I first met with Sarah, she was feeling frustrated by her students’ writing. She felt her instructions were clear but she simply wasn’t getting what she asked for. Essentially, Sarah wanted students to describe a visit to a social work agency and respond to what they observed, comparing their practical experience to the textbooks’ treatment of similar situations. And her instructions were quite clear for someone familiar with the discipline. For the description, she wanted an objective report of what happened – details of the observation that could stand up in court as straight, clear fact. No judgments. No personal opinion. No extraneous detail. For the response, she wanted some evidence that the students were making connections between what they read, what they witnessed, and what that meant for them as a social worker.

The trouble lay in the language used. In discussing the assignment with students, Sarah asked for narrative and reflection, terms familiar to many students from their first year writing courses. But in first year composition classes, narrative typically means writing a story. Students are encouraged to include detail and dialogue to convey emotions and attitude. Reflection assignments in first year writing often ask students for a very personal response, one that doesn’t include outside sources. That’s not quite the narratives or reflections Sarah imagined.

The disconnect occurred because students were (understandably) focused on duplicating the ASSIGNMENTS they’d had in 101 and 102 rather than duplicating the THINKING they’d done in 101 and 102. Despite a difference in style, Sarah’s request for narrative and reflection still asked students to think in the same ways that 101 and 102 instructors ask their students to think. Her use of these terms wasn’t wrong. They were discipline-specific to social work, just as the use of them in 101 and 102 is discipline-specific to English composition.

So what’s a student to do? How can anyone possibly know every discipline’s specific meanings? The key is to focus less on remembering particular first year writing assignments and more on remembering the thinking you did to fulfill those assignments.

A good resource for helping you do this is Rich Bullock’s The Norton Field Guide to Writing, a common text in first year writing at WSU. It lists the most common genres in academic writing. Each genre chapter includes a section on key features – the elements expected when writing in this genre, regardless of the assignment. When Sarah and I reviewed the chapters on narrative and reflection, we saw that she wanted these same features in her students’ writing. But because of the difference in discipline, she needed students to express the information differently than they would in an English class. By pointing this out to her students and providing some examples of what she was expecting, she saw instant improvement in student performance.

For example, both my ENG101 literacy narrative assignment and Sarah’s request for narrative ask for ‘vivid detail.’ We both want students to include clear and specific detail to help readers picture who, what, where, when and how. But how we define ‘vivid’ is a little different. In my world, it means to add emotion and color; in Sarah’s it’s about painting a clear picture of the facts.

So if you’ve got a paper to revise by the end of this quarter and are feeling confused about why what worked before isn’t working this time, it might be useful to stop thinking about 101 and 102 as courses that helped you learn writing across the curriculum and consider them in terms of thinking across the curriculum. Take the WAC foundation in thinking gained in 101 and 102 and apply it to your WID. How are writing assignments in different disciplines beyond 101 and 102 asking for those same types of thinking even though the final product may be expressed differently?

What is revision?

As a first-year teaching assistant, a fourth-year writing tutor, and what feels like a gazillionth-year student, I have my own opinions about what revision is. As a freshman in college, I’m positive those ideas were very different. As I read my first year composition students’ papers, I’m also positive their ideas about revision are different than what mine are now. So, I guess that leaves this question - what is revision, really?

Thanks to Peggy Lindsey, a fellow English teacher with much more experience than I, I now have a handout about revision that I use in all of my first year composition classes, be it English 101 or 102. This handout is divided into two main sections: one with inexperienced writers’ definitions of revision (which many of them call by different names, such as “reviewing”) and one with experienced writers’ definitions of revision. Here’s one sample of each:

Inexperienced writer’s definition: “Reviewing means just using better words and eliminating words that are not needed. I go over and change words around.”

Experienced writer’s definition: “It is a matter of looking at the kernel of what I have written, the content, and then thinking about it, responding to it, making decisions, and actually restructuring it.”

In case you didn’t notice, there’s quite a big difference between those opinions. Something I have realized over my years as a writer, which is something I try to stress to my students now, is that revising does not mean just using the synonym finder or copying and pasting a sentence into a different part of the paper. And it definitely does not mean just fixing the grammatical errors your teacher has marked.

When I give my students comments on their rough drafts, drafts I expect them to revise at least once more, I usually make some marginal comments throughout the paper, and I tend to mark the grammatical mistakes I see them making repeatedly. However, I’m much more interested in larger, overall comments, which I usually write at the beginning or the end of the paper. These are comments about big problems I see with organization or logical fallacies or an unsupported or unidentifiable thesis. These are the big things I really want students to work on for the next draft, but they tend to ignore them and head straight for any comments about little things, like grammar.

Even though it can seem like writing a draft was enough hard work, it’s important to remember that a draft is probably just the first step and should be followed by an equally important step: revision. And to me, revision sometimes means writing an entirely different second draft based on what I learned from my first draft. I will at least alter my thesis if not change it entirely. I merge paragraphs together, delete some entirely, add a few, and move others around. When I write a first draft, I figure out exactly what I’m trying to say (or I at least get a better idea), so it only makes sense I would still have some big changes to make.

If you really want to take advantage of the revision process, do more than just change a word or two around or fix a comma here and there. Take a step back and look at the big picture, think about what works and what doesn’t work in a draft. If you have a lot of big changes to make, when you begin to revise, you might want to start with a blank page. Other times you will be able to work within the document you started for your first draft, but don’t get caught up in the words that are already there or the teacher’s comments about little things, like spelling and grammar, when there are bigger problems to deal with.

A link to a helpful document about revision (from the UNC writing center's webpage)

Pet Peeve with Writing Assignments #1

My students HATE strict guidelines for their written reports . . . well, some of them do anyway. They wonder why I impose them. Three of the main reasons for my strict guidelines are (1) uniformity of grading, (2) encouraging correct analyses, and (3) teaching the students how to write like businesspeople for businesspeople. Read through my rationales and let me know whether you buy them.

The strict guidelines help take some of the subjectivity out of my grading. If everyone turns in the same type of paper, consistency of grading is easier. If you were a student who submitted the paper without an element (for instance, an executive summary), and got a lower score for not including it--but that element was not in the guidelines for the assignment--would you consider the grading fair? With strict guidelines, I hope I can clearly convey expectations and thereby help students understand what they need to do to get favorable scores.

Second, some of my guidelines encourage my students to write (and thus think) systematically about their topic. To a degree, there are “best practices” for conducting the strategy analyses I assign to students in my business strategy classes, and I use strict guidelines for the write-ups on those analyses as a way to encourage students to do the analyses the right way. By dictating how ideas in my students’ papers are to be written up, I push students to organize their thoughts, not just their papers.

A third reason for the strict guidelines is that I’m training students to write reports in a way that businesspeople will like. There are certain formats that business audiences for written reports are familiar with, and it often helps students/graduates to learn and work within those formats when composing reports.

Now that I’ve given the reasons for my strict guidelines, I have to confess that I often wonder whether my approach is flawed. In fact, my approach has a couple of risks that I’m aware of (and probably numerous risks I’m not seeing).

Strict guidelines can stifle worthwhile innovation. Why would a student try another approach to writing a paper if it ran counter to my guidelines? If you were the student with a creative idea for fulfilling my assignment, you could do the extra work of clearing your idea with me before submitting your paper, but it’s easier to simply conform. Consequently, I don’t see much variety, and I miss out on opportunities to see potentially useful originality. Still, I’m COMFORTABLE taking this risk. Most of the papers I’ve collected that differ from my guidelines do NOT reflect creative genius.

Another concern is that, given the way I’ve compiled them, my guidelines could be a disorganized hodgepodge. Many of the guidelines were added to the list as a result of shortcomings I’ve seen in papers from prior quarters. Particularly when I see the same mistake in more than one student’s papers, I’m inclined to made additions to my list of guidelines in order to avoid seeing those deficiencies again. There’s a risk that the list of requirements will start to lack organization. Just like any writer, I need to ensure that there’s a logical organization to my guidelines to promote their readability and usability (I admit I haven’t done that in awhile). Similarly, there’s a risk of the list becoming too long and onerous (I’ve never really analyzed that).

What do you think? Do you buy my rationales for having strict instructions? Are there other important rationales? What do you think the downsides to strict guidelines are?

Now What?

I'm sure that just about all of us who have ever written anything longer than 2-3 pages have faced those moments when the wellspring of ideas dries up and we are left halfway through a story or research paper not knowing where to go or what to do. In moments like these, we throw down our pens, pencils, computer keyboards, or other writing implements, grab our hair, or bald scalps, and scream audibly or silently, "Now what?"

I was recently faced with this exact situation as I struggled to write a short piece--which was based on a true story. You'd think that, being based on a true story, it would be as easy as pie. I did, but that's where I was wrong. Knowing how the story ends doesn't make writing it any easier. There are always decisions along the way. What details should be included? What should be skipped over? What's really important? Had I taken the time to ask and answer these and a few other simple questions, the story--which, in its final form, turned out to be 4 pages--could have been written in one night rather than over the course of 2 weeks.

If we compare that instance with another from earlier this year, the point will be clear. A few months ago, I had an assignment to write a 10-12 page paper on a chapter from a book by James Joyce. What was different was that though I'd written nothing, I'd answer the crucial questions in my mind. A full draft was required in class the following day, and with a thesis decided on and points outlined, at 10:00 PM, I sat down to write. Within 10 hours I'd written a full, 11-page draft.

There is a clear difference between 4 pages in 2 weeks and 11 pages in one night. What is the difference? While writing the 11-page paper, I never once had to stop and think, "Now what?" Having those "now what" moments is detrimental to writing efficiently. Those moments literally force you to stop writing. So what can you do to prevent those "now what" moments? Outline. It doesn't have to be a beautifully formatted list of points, sub-points, ideas, and possibilities. Keep it simple. Know what you want to say. Know how much you need to say. Know where to start and where to end.

Your outline can be as simple as a list of ideas or as carefully planned as a list of what points need to be made in each paragraph. Basically, there's this exchange: The more you figure out before you start writing, the less you'll have to figure out while you're writing. Asking yourself questions beforehand is the best way to combat and eliminate those "now what" moments.