Molly, in my Writing 111 capacity

Here are a few pointers to writing students who have the opportunity to meet individually with an instructor regarding a paper:

1) Reread your own paper before your conference. The fresher it is in your mind, the more you’ll get out of the conversation.

2) As you reread your paper, critique it yourself. The more refinements you make on your own, the deeper you can go into the big picture with your instructor. Here’s a quick checklist for your own read-throughs:

-Is there a strong, pithy introduction containing a clear, arguable thesis?

-Does the paragraph structure follow a logical progression that supports your main argument and transitions smoothly?

-Does the conclusion culminate, rather than summarize, your main point?

-Have you eliminated all the gritty detail work of proofreading? Are all works properly cited, grammatical errors scoured, i’s dotted, and so on and so forth?

3) Come prepared with 2-3 specific questions you have about how you might improve your paper or 2-3 “problem areas” you’d like help with. Don

Wesley, here’s an analysis of food blogs from a few years ago you might find interesting. It talks about the professional culinary world’s response to amateur food blogging.

Here’s what your final essay assignment says about the Storify show-and-tells:

You will also do a ‘show and tell,’ communicating something interesting about your community using Storify, a tool we’ll explore in class. This presentation will be informal, low-stakes (ungraded, with feedback from your classmates and me), and just 3-5 minutes long … so please enjoy it rather than freaking out about it. If you do not present or if you are unprepared and sloppy in your presentation, the participation adjustment in your final grade will be adversely affected; if your presentation is awesome, the adjustment will benefit.

In addition, I’ll add that the most worthwhile presentations will:

1) communicate your enthusiasm for your topic, and 

2) use Storify’s unique storytelling mode to good advantage by incorporating a variety of media.

On providing Tumblr comments and questions for your classmates:

1) From this point on, presenters should please embed their Storify slideshows on their Tumblr pages before presenting their show-and-tells in class.  This allows your classmates to comment at their leisure as soon as you’re done.

2) Again, comments and Tumblr posts don’t count toward the normal Tumblr count per week, and must be posted within 24 hours of each show-and-tell.

3) Here are the prompts for your responses:

What was the most effective moment in this presentation?

What did you learn?

What questions do you have after listening/watching?

Or share a relevant story or link, if you have one.

4) If for some reason your classmate hasn’t posted his or her show-and-tell as a slideshow yet, go ahead and post your response as a public comment on their Tumblr page.

Annie, I really liked the way you highlighted the diverse forms taken by online Hunger Games communities. I had no idea there was such a robust fandom for these books and movies!

(Source: ketcha18)

questions to ask to hone your introduction/conclusion 

What are your reactions as you read? What’s interesting? Where do you feel lost, wondering ‘where are you going with this?’?

Does the introduction establish the topic and point in a way that will engage the interest of communication scholars?

• Does it lead smoothly up to a clear, strong thesis statement at its end?
• Is any sentence getting in the way? Should anything be moved out of the introduction to a later paragraph?

Does the conclusion wrap up without sounding like a summary?

• Does it sound like a concluding paragraph, without having to say “To conclude” or “In conclusion”?
• Will it leave its audience of communication scholars interested and engaged? You want to end on a strong note, as it’s the part your readers are most likely to remember as they judge your work.

Try starting with the guides linked from our library’s citation page (see tabs across the top for various styles). I find some of these pages much easier to navigate than print citation guides, personally.

If you’re using APA, for instance, I’d recommend going to this guide and then scrolling down to:

• “Nonperiodical Web Document, Web Page, or Report”
• “Online Forum or Discussion Board Posting”
• “Blog (Weblog) and Video Blog Post”
• “Wikis”

as appropriate.

Citing Twitter/Facebook:

• In APA: These are not set-in-stone formats because the APA style guide (the big official book) does not yet have specific guidelines for Twitter. However, there are two useful posts at the (official) APA Style Blog, here and (especially) here.
• In MLA, basically all electronic sources are cited as variations on “a website.” These formats and conventions are also in flux, but … look at the right column of this page for information and an example.

Hello, all! I’ve recently received two emails expressing the same concern (“There are no scholarly sources on my topic!”), so I suspect some of the rest of you are also having trouble with this deliberately-challenging part of the process. Here’s the deal:

There probably are no scholarly sources on your topic.

And that’s totally fine.

There were no scholarly sources on my precise dissertation topic, which is why it was an interesting topic—no one had worked on quite that issue before. And yet I managed to use hundreds of scholarly sources in the project, in meaningful ways. You too can find and use relevant scholarly sources! You just need to think more flexibly about the purposes of research as you make your own argument.

Example one:

Imagine that I’m writing an article on some shared aspect of three nineteenth-century US novels.

• I could obviously search for their titles and/or authors
• —but maybe it would actually be more helpful to find a really clear or thought-provoking definition of “nationalism” or “the novel”
• or historical context on the US in the 19th century
• or an interpretation of how and why Americans read novels in that period
• or an argument about how gender is typically represented in a particular type of fiction
• or whatever. But I don’t need to find an article about those three novels together, or even about the aspect I’m exploring in one of those novels.

Example two:

Imagine that I’m doing the final project in our course, and the topic I chose is mothers who blog and who identity as “attachment parents.” There is no scholarly literature on this topic. But there’s no need for me to panic; that means my work is original and potentially interesting! Instead, I can search in Women’s Studies International, Communication Abstracts, Google Scholar, and perhaps other databases / search engines for scholarly articles about any of these topics:

• mothers who blog
• gender issues in blogging
• attachment parenting
• parenting subcultures
• contemporary parenting culture
• theories of contemporary motherhood
• blogging and community-formation
• blogging and advice
• blogging and [whatever relevant factors I’ve identified in the community I’ve been observing for weeks]
• mothers’ writing (perhaps in historical context)

Make these lists for your own topics/arguments. How might a source might help you define or explore a term, offer context, or ask more interesting questions?

Armed with such a list, consider heading to the reference desk. It would be an excellent idea to show the reference librarian this post, so that he or she understands what sort of research you’re trying to do.

Remember, a strong thesis:

• is contestable/argumentative (You can imagine an informed, reasonable person disagreeing with it. Since there need to be multiple defensible interpretations of whatever you’re interpreting, you’ll need to start with a puzzle/mystery/tension—a truly challenging interpretive ‘problem.’)
• is the controlling organizational principle of your essay (Clear and foregrounded throughout the essay, the thesis always determines what is included and what is omitted.)
• is interesting and a genuine contribution to a conversation (As Karen Gocsik writes, “a good thesis sentence will inspire (rather than quiet) other points of view.” Thought-provoking is good!)
• is appropriate to the rhetorical situation (Especially remember your intended audience, and the genre in which you’re working. A strong thesis for a blog post aimed at members of the online community under analysis is not a strong thesis for a scholarly essay aimed at communications scholars—and vice versa.)

What’s wrong with this thesis? (These four examples are from A Writer’s Reference: online supplementary materials.)

• “In Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried, the main character is named Tim O’Brien, but the author claims the work is fictional.”
• “In Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried, in which the main character is also named Tim O’Brien, the author deliberately blurs the line between autobiography and fiction.”
• “In Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray presents readers with a heroine whose ambition and disregard for the morals of the nineteenth century make her seem more like a woman of our time than of her own.”
• “Patricia Highsmith’s novels and short stories are among the most disturbing literary works ever written in English.”

What does this (good) thesis require in an essay? What do readers need to know or accept in order to get on board with it? How might you structure such an essay?

• Menstrual product advertisements “implicitly and explicitly emphasize [menstruation’s] dirtiness and/or its secrecy, and thus contribute to the ongoing cultural construction of women as Other.” (Elizabeth Arveda Kissling, “Marketing Menstruation”)
• “While, at first glance, [Jackson] Pollock’s painting [Full Fathom Five] seems to be little more than a random web of lines representing nothing, it can be approached more productively as an investigation of the possibilities of representation itself.” (Henry Sayre, Writing About Art 113)
• In her novel My Son’s Story, “[Nadine] Gordimer portrays [the father’s extramarital] affair as transgressive but ultimately necessary. In doing so, she directly ties the personal to the political, reflecting the political changes of the period in which the breaking of boundaries was not only desirable but critical to the success of the anti-apartheid movement and the national shift in consciousness.” (student essay)