She's Using You

One mark of a strong writer is having control over one’s sources. Early in the semester, student often jam too much summary of their sources into their essays. “Why?” I ask. “Because” they often reply, “ I didn’t want to have points taken off for missing something in the reading.” This answer suggests a habit (perhaps developed in high school) of seeing a written exercise that employs sources as a test of reading comprehension. It also is related to the habit of simply drawing “information” and “quotes”* out of a text to “support your argument.”

Strong writers, while certainly having good reading comprehension, are able to signal that comprehension in a few brief sentences of summary.  Such summary provides important context for the real mental exercise: using the source to help think through a problem and extending the source in new ways.  Strong writers use the ideas of their sources to help them develop new ideas. This process is, of course, very different than simply agreeing or disagreeing.

Joseph Harris’ chapter “Forwarding” breaks down some of the ways you might employ a source by ‘forwarding’ into a new situation or context. Likewise, Graff and Birkenstein suggest that you if you are going to agree or disagree you should do so with a difference; they go on to suggest the significance of conceding good points in your sources while still staking out your own ideas and difference from the source.

Your sources, then, should challenge your original thinking, not merely support it. If you can work with a source that doesn’t line up with what you already think, there’s strong likelihood that you are also creating new ideas as you do so. In other words, USE the ideas of others to help you create new knowledge.

* Pedantic footnote: 'quotation' is the noun; 'to quote' is the verb. You put a quotation into your essay.  You quote your source.

Fuzzy Reception

If you have poked around on this blog, you might have figured out that my main research interest is reading. As a scholar I write about the reading habits of people who lived about 250 years ago, but my thinking extends to our current reading habits and, of course since I'm a college instructor, to the reading habits of college students. There is, oddly, a bit of a conflict here:  as a scholar I should, as objectively as possible, observe the trends and note the evidence.  But as a teacher, I find it difficult not to bemoan the evidence that students just don't read very much.

I confront this conflict when I read Henry Jenkins.  Like Jenkins, my scholarship focuses on reception:  how do readers--or, in his case, media users and consumers--respond to, react to, critique, and negotiate cultural products like books, tv shows, games, movies? On the one hand, I should be quite sympathetic with Jenkins' argument that "consumers and fans are beginning to take pleasure in their newfound power to shape their media environment" (233). As a scholar of historical changes in media ecology, I feel that I should more willingly embrace his notion of this coming change.  That is, I should accept his argument that the people playing online games can create connections "between game play and civic engagement" and that gamers "who share common cultural interests but not necessarily ideological perspectives might work together to arrive at 'rational' solutions to complex policy issues" (233).

But, on another level, I balk.  Can games, or photoshopping, or blogging, or amateur videos really give us the substance we need to understand what is going on in the world, or even our own country?  Don't we really need the fuller, more complex story that written words can give us--whether read in the traditional printed forms, or the newer digital forms? So on the other hand, I tend to be skeptical of arguments that assert the benefits of these changing habits in opposition to the traditional position that only the knowledge and understanding gained through reading can provide the foundation of civic engagement. In other words, some part of me is a cranky pessimist, like Postman, who would have us shut it all down and go back to reading.

Jenkins is hopeful that 'serious fun' will turn out to be real and that we will move between what is serious and what is fun with real, meaningful purpose. Online games, he hopes, can model true civic engagement and the creation of real knowledge. I want to be hopeful, too. But I'll need to see alot more evidence . . .

Works Cited
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York:  New York UP, 2006.