Research, Research, Research!

Research has a different meaning than it did even ten years ago. Today we can jump on the internet and type something into the goggle search engine and find many different resources. Years past that wasn’t the case when trying to compile information, thus life is a little easier today. Libraries still flourish as the main source of information. Now we have databases online with scholarly articles as well as the ability to obtain hard copies of many printed materials.

Through the first years of college, research is a word that you’ll hear repetitively. While at first it may seem like a daunting task to sift through piles of information many tools are in place to make this process easier.

Booth Library is a great tool that should be utilized regardless of the type of research that you’re planning to do. Along with the hard copies of books, magazines, newspapers and journal articles, Booth has a link to many scholarly websites online that are free for all students to use.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THEM!

These resources are provided to the students as tools to help with the process of writing. Along with being able to access the databases at Booth Library, students and faculty can also access the databases through the library when they’re off campus. Using the library number off your Panther Card, you are still open to the wide range of search engines that Eastern has provided through Booth Library.

Research may not be the end all be all of your college experience, but don’t be afraid to ask questions of the reference librarians or utilize the resources available to you while you’re attending Eastern. Professors don’t want the goggle definition for your main research topic, and they aren’t going to want you to rely on wikkipedia.com as your main source in a paper. The databases and resources to be found in the library are you’re best bet when writing academic papers!

Here’s a link to Booth Library’s website.

http://www.library.eiu.edu/

Going Primitive

As students of the digital age, the temptation is strong for us to want to draft our essays directly onto the computer. The instructor said she wants the final draft typed up, 12-point font, double-spaced with 1-inch margins. Mom and Dad dropped a stack of bills for that shiny new laptop with the latest word processing software on it, so you might as well use it, right?

Absolutely. The word processor is no doubt the single greatest invention since the wheel, offering a healthy alternative to deciphering the chicken scratchings of incoming freshmen writers so the instructor's eyesight stays in tact for a few more years and his sanity for almost as long. But should it be the first thing we go to when we get that assignment sheet? No, I think not.

Once upon a time, before the dawn of the Apple II or the advent of the typewriter, people used to write. Using everything from fountain pen to pencil, quill to chisel, folks would write their composition assignments using the most basic of implements.

Has physical writing fallen out of practice? Sadly, yes. Is it obsolete? Good heavens, no.

Maybe you're sitting at lunch with your notebook and pen sketching out a rough plan for your next essay. Great, you're nearly there. Don't pull out that silvery Macbook you got for graduation just yet. Leave that aside and do the unthinkable: write your draft.

The very thought might send your writing hand into a painful cramp, but trust me, there's something to this. Since high school and maybe even junior high school, we've been trained to not only type but type at blinding speeds. Instant messaging our friends at other universities has only made our fingers more limber to the point where we might be typing faster than we can produce thoughts.

By drafting your essay using pen and paper, you sever that connection between the computer and your brain that forces your fingers into hyperspeed. You are more careful and deliberate. You're reading it in your head as you write each word. You catch things that you won't have to catch when proofreading later. Most importantly, you have no Facebook or Youtube to distract you in a spiral college-ruled notebook.

We've fallen into the ease of composing assignments directly to the page, eliminating any extra steps so that we may maximize our free time to work on the multitude of assignments in our other classes. It only makes sense. But if you draft your essay by hand before your hands touch a keyboard, you'll cut down on time in the future when proofreading it. Why, you might even have a more perfect paper to turn in than if you hadn't written out with primitive pen and paper.

The OWL Purdue

The OWL Purdue is a wonderful writing tool for those of us getting acquainted with APA and MLA, and for those of us who continue to write in these styles. Contrary to what the name connotes, the OWL Purdue is not an owl that serves chicken. Rather, the OWL is an Online Writing Lab offered by the Purdue University English Department that walks you through the MLA and APA writing processes.

The OWL has a website that is easy to navigate. You can start by choosing MLA or APA and then search the OWL by the headings on the left side of the web page. These headings will explain the conventions of each writing style, whether you're trying to figure out how to cite within the text or how to format your Works Cited page.

The headings on the left also give you in-depth explanations on how to cite web pages, books, periodicals, and other common sources such as emails or podcasts. For those of you who are visual and tactical learners, there is also a sample paper for each style, which is especially helpful with APA.

Another benefit of using this website is that it remains up-to-date whereas the MLA and APA handbooks must be replaced every couple of years.

Just follow the link below and get started writing!

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

Beginning Brainstorming

Once students have a thesis, finding a direction and goals for a paper could be the most daunting task at hand. From a young age the words “brainstorming” and “developing” were used in the classroom when teachers describe how to start writing a paper. What differs from writing at a college level instead of high school is that papers can flow and change with the information that the author finds through research or that begins to redefine their overall focus for the paper.

The first thing that comes to mind after figuring out a topic or thesis statement is “how am I going to fill all of this blank space on the page?” That’s a question that writers of every level in the educational process face. As a master’s student, brainstorming is still a very important part of the writing process when I sit in front of the blank page.

In the essay from Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences called “Tutoring Is: Models and Strategies,” McAndrew and Reigstad present a multitude of strategies to help students move along the necessary steps of the writing process. One strategy that McAndrew and Reigstad mention is oral composing (46). This strategy is actually something that I used before starting to include anything within the text of this post. 

Talking a paper over with a friend or teacher can be very helpful in figuring out what a student wants to be the main idea or focus of the body of that particular paper. While talking through the possibilities, McAndrew and Reigstad also mention taking notes while talking through the process as a helpful way for students to see where their thoughts for a paper might lead them (46). 

Another helpful strategy that McAndrew and Reigstad suggest is mapping. Mapping is a more visual tool to help students figure out how to connect the main ideas that they want to make sure are present in a paper. Bubbling a pertinent word or phrase and using lines to connect each of them, can help a student get the feel for the flow of how they eventually want their paper to develop (47). 

McAndrew and Reigstad’s essay brings to the table many more strategies than just mapping and talking through a paper. These strategies I’ve found to be very helpful in the early stages of brainstorming. Hopefully the helpful hints I’ve included within this post with leave students and other writers a like better prepared to turn that blank page staring them in the face, into a wonderful work.

A Question of Thesis

It's the beginning of the semester, which means a fresh batch of writing assignments threateningly leering over our shoulders and breathing down our necks like paper trolls. As unpleasant of an image as it might appear, this is the common view after sitting down and taking a second glance at the instructor's syllabus, regardless of whether a student is just beginning his or her college experience or eagerly inching towards graduation day.

The first thought the student may have is how am I going to finish all of this? The harder question comes when the student actually begins his or her essay: Where to begin? Often, just starting an essay becomes the most strenuous part, regardless of the writer's level of preparedness. The thesis is a writer's argument, the genesis of his entire paper. Without it, the paper lacks focus and even purpose.

In the essay "What Tutoring Is: Models and Strategies" from Donald A. McAndrew and Thomas J. Reigstad's book Tutoring Writing: A Practical Guide for Conferences, the authors identify a few strategies for responding to "high-order concerns," or HOCs (42). Thesis development is considered a high-order concern particularly because of how much of the paper depends on the thesis. Without a thesis, a paper buckles and collapses.

One suggestion that McAndrew and Reigstad makes for combating the no-thesis blues is to "create a headline or bumper sticker." The authors argue that "either of these requires that the writer find one thing that is central to the piece and say something about it." Suggestions include a subject like "Causes of the Civil War" or even a bumper sticker-like phrase like "_______ Is Not a Family Value" (44).

One of the reasons why the headline/bumper sticker tactic would work is that it's such an "out-of-the-box" idea that the uniqueness itself might spark the critical thinking necessary for building a clear and concise thesis. Another reason (and why I find it so appealing) is that its background in journalism and creativity might lead those of other disciplines to feel more comfortable in crafting an essay that depends so much on a thesis.

McAndrew and Reigstad list numerous other thesis-generating strategies, but the headline/bumper sticker one seems so out there that students could benefit from discovering less-orthodox methods of combating the paper trolls that await writers from the beginning of the semester until the end of finals week.

For Faculty: Writing Center Information and Orientations

The EIU Writing Center (3110 Coleman Hall) will open on Wednesday, August 24. The Center’s hours are M-Th, 9 am – 3 pm & 6 – 9 pm; F, 9 am – 1 pm.

If you would like one of our staff members to provide a Writing Center Orientation (5-10 minutes) for your students this semester, please contact me at tntaylor@eiu.edu or call the Writing Center at 581-5929 to schedule an orientation.

In addition, if you would like to provide information about the EIU Writing Center in your course policies/syllabi, feel free to copy and paste the following two paragraphs, which can be found on the “For Faculty” page of the Writing Center’s Web page, into your course documents:

     I encourage you to use EIU's Writing Center located at 3110 Coleman Hall. This free service provides one-to-one conferences with writing consultants who can help you with brainstorming, organizing, developing support, documenting, and revising your papers. The Writing Center is open to work with any student from any major at any stage of his or her writing process, and its system of one-to-one conferences demonstrates value and respect for individual writers, all of whom can benefit from feedback about their works in progress.

     To schedule an appointment, you can drop by the Writing Center (3110 Coleman Hall), or you can call 581-5929. The Center is open Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. On Friday hours of operation are 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

One resource that can assist students in your classes is the helpful “Resources for Writers” page located on the Writing Center’s Web page. This link offers numerous portals to writing-related resources and downloadable handouts.

If you’re interested in how to integrate writing more effectively into your courses, the “Resources for Faculty” page on the Writing Across the Curriculum webpage is a strong resource for faculty since it provides links to handouts and Web pages about “Response to and Evaluation of Student Writing,” “Integrating Writing & Designing Writing Assignments,” and “Strategies for Critical Thinking and Discussion.”

Have a great fall semester, and we look forward to your students visiting the Writing Center.

Discusion of Agency in Assessment and a Classroom Idea for Educators: "Text Discussion Demo"

In an article by Libby Garland and Kevin Kolkmeyer in the March 2011 issue (38.3) of Teaching English in the Two-Year College, the authors discuss their collaboration as part of Kingsborough Community College's Opening Doors Learning Communities Program.

The article, "A Culture of Conversation: Faculty Talk as Meaningful Assessment of Learning Communities," is a critique of assessment measures that are mainly quantitatively driven since they argue that exclusively data-focused assessments "fail to capture both important successes and failures and to model the kind of reflective, subjective assessment from a professorial perspective that we believe is vital for larger institutional decision making" (231).

In fact, as Garland and Kolkmeyer relate at the conclusion of their article, how their college touts the learning communities program does not take into account that professors have something to do with learning: "Naturally, we care about those things all the studies [of retention, of success, of graduation rates, et al.] track. But we see two related dangers in allowing such quantitative data to 'drive the bus,' as it were. First, much that desperately needs to be discussed, if we want to know how or why classes succeed or fail, gets lost. What we see and know and do, as professors, does not get factored in. We find it telling, for example, that the MDRC study of Kingsborough's learning communities explicitly says that the study's positive results in no way have anything to do with what professors teach. Rather, they say the data have only to do with the program's structure (Scrivener et al.)" (241)

For professors, that point has to be disconcerting if not enraging.

Their work connects to Christopher Gallagher's theoretical article in February issue (62.3) of College Composition and Communication. In "Being There: (Re)Making the Assessment Scene," Gallagher "propose[s] a rewriting of the assessment scene that asserts faculty and student agency and leadership for writing assessment" (450). For readers interested in writing assessment, whether a university professor or someone who plans to teach at the K-12 level, his article is a must read.

But in a more practical (and hopeful) vein, in Garland and Kolkmeyer's article, they concisely describe an activity they have used to model the type of discussion they want in their classrooms.

They call it a "text discussion demo." Early in the semester they show the type of wide-ranging and text-specific discussions they expect in their classes. They describe the activity in this way: "In other words, the two of us sat in front of class and talked with each other about a short article the whole class had read. We hashed out what the text was getting at; we pointed to specific places in the text that we found central and explained why; we made connections to class discussions; we posed questions about ideas we found dubious or interesting. Afterward we discussed our discussion with the students, asking them to talk about what they observed and how it was like or unlike other kinds of conversations they have had" (237).

If you're planning courses for the fall and you value strong discussion, the text discussion demo might be something that can work. 

Summer Hours of Operation for the Writing Center

If you’re taking or teaching a course this summer, please keep in mind that the EIU Writing Center, located at 3110 Coleman Hall, will be open from 9am to 3pm, Monday through Thursday, during the last two weeks of four-week session and the last five weeks of the six-week session:

• Four-Week Session: May 31-June 2; June 6-9
• Six-Week Session: June 20-23; June 27-30; July 5-7; July 11-14; July 18-21

In addition, if you're an instructor and you want to provide some information about the EIU Writing Center in your course policies/syllabi, feel free to copy and paste the next two paragraphs, which are modified from the two paragraphs available on the “For Faculty” page of the Writing Center’s Web page:

I encourage you to use EIU's Writing Center located at 3110 Coleman Hall. This free service provides one-to-one conferences with writing center consultants who can help you with brainstorming, organizing, developing support, documenting your papers, and working with sentence-level concerns. The writing center is open to help any student from any major at any stage of his or her writing process, and its system of one-to-one conferences demonstrates value and respect for individual writers, all of whom can benefit from feedback about their works in progress.

To schedule an appointment, you can drop by the center (3110 Coleman Hall), or you can call 581-5929. The writing center is open Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., during the last two weeks of the four-week summer session and the last five weeks of the six-week summer session: May 30-June 2; June 6-9; June 20-23; June 27-30; July 5-7; July 11-14; July 18-21.


One resource that can assist you and your students is the helpful “Resources for Writers” page located on the Writing Center’s Web page. This resource offers numerous links to writing-related resources and downloadable handouts.



If you're a faculty member, the “Resources for Faculty” page on the Writing Across the Curriculum Web page is a strong resource since it provides links to handouts and Web pages about “Response to and Evaluation of Student Writing,” “Integrating Writing & Designing Writing Assignments,” and “Strategies for Critical Thinking and Discussion.” 

Have a good summer. We look forward to you or your students visiting the Writing Center.