Research Sources: Primary, Secondary, Scholarly

In writing research, we have three types of sources we look at: Primary, Secondary, and Scholarly.  Although our definitions are very close to the definitions you've used for Primary and Secondary sources in content research, we apply these terms a little bit differently because we are researching how writing is used rather than simply using writing to research a topic.

For Project 1, you'll follow these requirements for your sources (minimum 15 sources total):

1. Primary Sources (5 total): think of this as the type of writing you want to teach someone else how to do (e.g. Twitter posts, financial reports, resumes.)
2. Secondary Sources (5 total): sources that talk about the Primary Sources, but they come from everyday media (e.g. websites, newspapers, magazines.)
3. Scholarly Sources (5 total): These are thoroughly researched discussions of how knowledge words. (Typically, you'll get these through Milner or Google Scholar. Wikipedia citations are also a good place to learn about the scholars and keywords you can type into a Milner search.)

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Project 1 Proposal

The discussion for Project 1 is very open. There's no specific research component required - I'm mostly checking to see that you know the difference between writing research and content research in terms of how you'll approach you project. So describe the writing genre you want to research for Project 1, and I'll post replies to let you know if you're on the right track.

Overall: Genre, Topic, Details
The main things I'm looking for are that

1. You've identified a genre of writing you'd like to study.
2. You can talk about the topic where you've seen this genre and why that's important to you.
3. You're able to give some details about how you'd research the genre.

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Emperor's Soul as a Metaphor for Writing

Brandon Sanderson's The Emperor's Soul offers one of the best metaphors for the writing process that I've seen.  For today's discussion, we're going to consider how this metaphor works within our differing fields of interest, and then we'll follow-up with research approaches for Project 1.  By the end of this discussion, you should have four posts that provide potential research sources for your Project 1:

1. A Main Post, where you describe your field of interest, and then relate writing in this field to a quote from The Emperor's Soul.  This main post should also include an attached PDF of a scholarly article you found via Milner Library.  (see the next blog post for Videos on Finding Scholarly Sources via Milner.)
2. Three Response Posts.  As in past discussions, each response should refer to a specific point made by one of your classmates (or to my initial post), provide your own thoughts, and then an outside quote or example to support your point (see #3 below).
3. Three quotes for Outside Support.  For each response post, your outside support can be any one of the following: a new quote from Emperor's Soul, a link to a website that you find interesting, or a quote from your Milner article (see #1 above).

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Return to ENG 145 Week 2

Finding Scholarly Articles on Milner

Next week will largely focus on finding good sources for your Project 1 research.  One of the key components for the project is finding useful scholarly sources via Milner Library.  Here's a series of videos that use the example of Trayvon Martin and Twitter to provide tips for finding useful sources. Note that the videos also reveals some of the frustrations of research - not every search will bring up what you're looking for.  These videos are not required for the course, but hopefully the can be helpful as you start thinking about Project 1.

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Twitter, Trayvon Martin, and Writing Research

This week, we have a few key goals toward developing your skills as writing researchers. In this discussion about Trayvon Martin, I'm looking for each of you to develop three skills:

1. Identify genre conventions (in this case, of Twitter and Mass Media)
2. Correlate these genre conventions with CHAT
3. Select relevant quotes from the articles to support your points

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Back to ENG 145 Week 2

Discussion Post: CHAT and Everyday Writing

In this discussion, I want you each to choose a genre that you've written recently (within the past couple months or so) and describe your writing in terms of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT).

To understand CHAT, see these readings from Week 1:

• Edel: In the Twilight of the Modern Age
• Prior: Mapping Literate Activity (just the one page)

 Click "read more" to see an example of how I apply CHAT to blogging.

ENG 145 - Week 1

ENG 145 - Summer 2015 - Writing in the Academic Disciplines

The goal of English 145 is to help each student better approach writing in a variety of academic disciplines.  In contrast to many writing courses, the focus isn't on teaching "the one good way to write."  Instead, we use writing research to help understand how writing changes depending on context.  Through genre studies, we examine how your goals and your audience will affect the success of your writing.  Just as each professor will have different expectations of "good" writing, you'll find that every field of study has different expectations for scholarship.  The goal of the course is to help you identify the expectations of your own field and then adjust your writing accordingly.

Additional Links:

• Click to Open Syllabus in a New Window
• ISU Writing Program Course Design Requirements for ENG 145

Getting Your Words to the Page: Writing as Daily Activity

Where do you write? How do you get your ideas on the page? Contrary to the "inspiration" approach, real writing mostly involves sitting down and getting the words written. But that isn't always easy. Here's a look at how we overcome distraction.

http://pixabay.com/en/office-notes-notepad-entrepreneur-620817/

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ENG 101 - Spring 2015 - Composition as Critical Inquiry

Schedule - Course Policies - Learning Map - Assignment Types

One of the most difficult challenges facing student writers today is the need to reconcile the literate skills learned through social media with the formal demands of academic genres such as essays and term papers.  Often, neither the social nor academic genres prove very helpful in occupational settings - you can't learn resume writing from the five-paragraph essay any more than you can learn it from Facebook.  This becomes still more complicated as you factor in the variety of disciplines represented in English 101 - I frequently teach students in business, nursing, the humanities, and other majors, and each academic field has it's own demands for "good" writing.

My goal as an instructor is to help students understand that there are differences between the types of writing they are expected to write.  From there, we look at how "good" writing in many genres will share requirements for evidence, relevance, and coherence - understanding the differences in approach can allow students to transfer skills from one genre to another.

ENG 227 - Fall 2014 - Introduction to Creative Writing

Schedule - Required Texts - Course Policies - Assignment Types

Welcome to Creative Writing!  In this course, we'll be writing fiction, poetry, and memoir, with additional consideration of how audiences respond to the particular conventions of these genres.

Schedule of Readings and Assignments.  (This is also accessible via the Syllabus tool on ReggieNet.)

Links to Purchase Required Texts (via Amazon)

ENG 101 - Fall 2014 - Composition as Critical Inquiry

Schedule - Course Policies - Learning Map - Assignment Types

Welcome to English 101!

Unlike most traditional writing courses, the Composition as Critical Inquiry course at Illinois State follows a Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) model.  This often causes confusion because we don't focus on "perfecting" writing - unlike courses you may have taken in the past, we won't try to teach "the one style of essay" that will work for all your classes because that's an impossible goal.  Instead, we examine how differing audiences expect unique genres of writing - as you'll see, every audience will have its own definition of what "counts" as "good" writing, and successful writing requires that we adapt our words to match the specific situations we face.

ENG 227 - Intro to Creative Writing - Spring 2014

Creative writing features a tremendous variety of approaches and techniques.  For ENG 227, we'll be examining how to seek out new approaches applicable to our writing goals, and understand the successful writing habits to help us realize these goals, and then effectively present our work to interested audiences.

Major topics for this course include Poetry, Fiction, Life Writing, and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory.

Course Policies - Schedule - Contact Ryan

ENG 247.02 - Intro to Fiction - Fall 2013

This is a course designed to help students develop new techniques both as a creative writer and as a critical reader. During the semester, students will be preparing a significant collection of writing, taking part in workshops with classmates, and reading a selection of outside works. Additionally, this course will place a significant focus on using the internet as a means to present creative work to relevant outside audiences - the types of audiences who may hopefully become loyal readers as students begin the road to publication.

Syllabus - Schedule

English 145 - Spring 2013 - Section 006

For English 145, Writing in the Academic Disciplines, the focus of our course will be using rhetorical genre studies to better understand the social effects of genres.  By applying Cultural-Historical Activity Theory to specific long-term projects, we'll examine how the production and distribution of written materials can significantly affect its social trajectory.

Course Policies - Schedule - Lesson Plans

Literary Analysis: How to Answer a Question of Style and Effect

In analyzing the way writing works, there are a couple main functions your answer must provide.  It's important to cite specific details from the text, and then to discuss how these details create certain effects for the reader.

English 227

Setting and Specificity of Detail

Details make our writing real in the eyes of the reader.  And the best place to see detail (literally) is in the setting.  By examining how authors use setting to establish place, we can better understand how to use specific and relevant details to bring our writing to life.

English 227: Intro to Creative Writing

Assigned Texts - English 227 - Fall 2012

For this course, we'll be using four rather thick anthologies.  I've selected these anthologies to provide a good overview of fiction, poetry, and memoir.  Here are links to purchase these books from Barnes and Noble (which may provide cheaper rates than the bookstore).

Contact Ryan - Login to ReggieNet

English 227 - Introduction to Creative Writing - Fall 2012

Welcome to English 227.  In this course, we'll be considering the variety in forms and genre of creative writing, and then examining the habits and mechanics of successful writing.

Contact Ryan - Login to ReggieNet

Writing Program Assessment

For the Writing Program Assessment, you'll be creating some rather complex documents.

For the program assessment, we'll be going through a couple steps.  You'll do much of the organizational and planning work here in class, but you'll be doing much of the copying, pasting, and writing outside of class.  

Here's a quick guide to get your started.

Genre Analysis Assignment

This assignment is meant to prepare you for the larger Grassroots project by providing practice in writing genre analysis.  Starting with the genre examples you wrote in class and posted on Facebook today, you'll identify a genre convention from within that example and then discuss how that convention is used both in the genre as a whole (e.g. memoir) and in your example (a short example of memoir).

Project 3 - Spring 2012