Week Six: Making the Best Use of the Assigned Readings
What is it that makes one piece of writing compelling and another piece
bland and unmemorable? When you are reading and you feel yourself being
persuaded to think differently, what is it that the writer done to get
you to reconsider your initial response? One of the persistent myths about
writing instruction is that there is general agreement about what makes
writing persuasive. The truth, though, is that different readers find
different kinds of writing persuasive: some readers are moved by stories,
others by statistics and charts, other by extended examples.
Because we recognize the many different ways that writing can be persuasive,
we don't think it makes any sense to try to convince you that there's
only one way to write well. (Indeed, you will have noticed by now that
the writers included in The New Humanities Reader write in very
different ways and draw on very different kinds of evidence in making
their arguments.) What we hope, rather, is that you'll think about using
your writing to explore and explain why you think what you think. Or,
to put this another way, we recommend that you use your writing to show
not only what your position is, but also what evidence has led you to
hold your position. And the only way for you to do this is to make sure
your writing presents the evidence that has led you to see your own position
as reasonable.
One place writers turn for such evidence is personal experience: in the
NHR, for example, Jon Krakauer draws on his memories of climbing mountains
as a young man to make sense of what drew Chris McCandless to head off
into the wilds of Alaska; Annie Dillard refers to a conversation she had
with her daughter to provide an example of how one might visualize a human
disaster. While personal experience is undoubtedly a very powerful source
of evidence for all writers (we all, in one way or another, check to see
whether or not our ideas "feel right" or "fit" with
our own experiences), in this tutorial we are going to focus on the one
kind of evidence that all readers of the NHR share: the assigned readings.
How can you use what you've read as evidence in your own writing? That's
what we want to focus on in this tutorial: developing many ways to use
what you've read in your writing.
By this point in your education, you've surely been told many times by
your writing teachers that it is important to "refer to the text"
and to "cite your sources" in your essays. But, why should you
do this? When the answer to this question isn't clearly stated, the requirement
that you "cite the text" can seem nothing more than a mechanism
for determining whether or not you've done the reading. That's one way
to use the readings: to prove you've done your homework. We think there
are better ways to fill your time, though.
So, if not just to prove that you've done your homework, why should you
cite the assigned readings? We believe that reading and writing are valuable
insofar as they help you to better understand your own thoughts and your
own ways of thinking. Thus, we ask that you think of your essays as a
place to show what you can do with what you've read.
While this may seem a tall order, since you may feel that you don't have
clearly formulated thoughts on many of the topics discussed in The
New Humanities Reader and thus don't know how "to use" the
assigned readings, all you have to do to get started is just pay attention
to what you marked--and what you didn't mark--during your first time through
the assigned reading.
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Week Six: Making the Best Use of the Assigned Readings, cont...
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