Summer Reading 2008

Given some of our conversations yesterday, I thought I’d say more about expectations for your projects. I’m pretty sure you all understand this already, but let’s make sure. The guidelines I wrote in 481 hold, for the most part:

Publishable essays have the following qualities:

• Strong analysis: demonstrate a line of reasoning about a topic; write an argument, not just a list of facts or a summary of the thought of others;
• Copious evidence: use multiple well-considered quotations, examples, and other source material to make your argument;
• Adequate development: extend your analysis beyond the obvious or well-known, offering new insights about the stylistic concepts you engage;
• Articulation: connect your work to others in English studies and/or other discourses;
• Relevance: select a topic and focus relevant for English studies, or explain why a particular approach to style is valuable;
• Originality: avoid rehashing other work—find a new perspective, approach, synthesis, or application of existing ideas;
• Conventional style: Use your MLA Style Manual to ensure your format is conventional.

A few tweaks:

1. The least important of these criteria is originality. As Nan said yesterday, “filling in” your knowledge of writing studies is a core goal of this independent study. So if you find yourself working through a wide range of material on your topic, don’t be worried; that work is important not only for the short term (building your knowledge base) but proves useful in situations where showing broad support is required. For example, a writing program administrator might need to explain decisions to a chair or dean; no need for originality there, but rather showing good antecedents for your thinking.
2. Make the form meet your needs and your audience, especially if you are working with content presented online. You need not write the proverbial 20 page paper; annotated lessons, pedagogical guides designed for practical use, or other forms are fine as long as the criteria above are met. I am happy to discuss alternative formats with anyone.
3. Finally, let’s continue to use this space to share. We can use the weblog to share documents, web addresses, excerpts, or all of the above. And I will happily support use of my wiki or other spaces. Just let me know.

Questions &c. below.

More how-to… last night I also mentioned the CCC Online Archive, a hugely valuable resource for searching College Composition and Communication, arguably the most important journal in college-level writing studies. Have a look at the site; I think you’ll find it very responsive to searching (look for the box in the lower left). Other features are very cool; for example, Kathi Yancey’s chair’s address/article has links to other CCC articles which cite it, and then in the Works Cited links to those it cites. That enables a reader to quickly click backward and forward in an articles “citation heritage,” so to speak.

I talked to the WIU librarians this morning, and unfortunately they didn’t have much to offer in terms of citation indices in the WIU databases; they gave me a couple leads I’ll follow up and share if they are worth it.

However, Google Scholar does a pretty good job. Try this search for “the idea of a writing center.” It’s the first result in the list, and you’ll note “Cited by 107″ is a link, too. That will give you a list of articles which cite North’s piece. To address the recent articles problem we talked about last nigth, you can use the Advanced Search to limit by date. For example, when I limited the search to articles from 2006-, 31 hits remain.

Again, I’d love to hear your feedback about using CCCOA or citation indices.

Last night I mentioned the writing studies database CompPile. Have a look.

The default search interface is a little overwhelming; here’s their simpler one. I searched for “writing center” and got 65 hits, with the first two pages from 2007 or 2008, including quite a few links to full text. Pretty cool. If you use it, please let me know what you think; the more specifics, the better.

I forgot to comment on this question by Katherine, and it’s a good one, so I wanted to raise it to a big post:

On a side note, Bradley, I’ve not been successful at actually accessing articles from CiteULike (many are linked to library databases for which I don’t have an ID), so I’m sticking with WIU databases for now. Am I missing something? There were some really good articles I wished I could have accessed.

First off, I’d love to see some samples–it’s important to keep track, so we can hassle the libraries to get databases we don’t have access to. Let me know what you want to read.

WIU has more access than is sometimes obvious. And because the databases are often hard to search (which one to use?) CiteULike remains worth a shot. I’ve had success logging into the WIU proxy server and then accessing the article by hacking the URL. For example, here’s “Teaching for Creativity” in Rebecca Moore Howard’s CiteULike. In the “Fulltext” box, if you click DOI (that stands for “Document Object Identifier, a unique ID for scholarship), it will direct you to this database page:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/g518p92082×3l221/

Without access, you get the abstract but not the article–unless you hand over $32–feh! But if you’ve logged in to the WIU proxy server, you can hack that URL by adding “.ezproxy.wiu.edu” just before the third slash:

http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.wiu.edu/content/g518p92082×3l221/

That routes the connection through WIU’s server. From there, you can click the PDF link, and there it is.

Now, if that doesn’t work, put in an interlibrary loan request for the article at WIU, and in a few days you get an email with directions for downloading a PDF copy. I do that via Illiad, but I’m not sure if that’s the best way for you. I asked, and I’ll update this post accordingly when I hear from the librarians.

Update 07/02: The WIU librarians say you folks should sign up for and use Illiad (link above); they just haven’t updated their web site yet.