Extra Credit: The Writing Center

On Wednesday I attended the Writing Center Workshop on Critical Analysis of a Secondary Source. The workshop began with a breakdown of things to pay attention to regarding a source. This reminded me of the lay of the land worksheet that Ms. Bates Gave us in class except it was much more detailed and grouped the questions into categories. The workshop leader gave us a handout with this information but the main points were to know information about the author and the intended audience, know the rhetorical situation that the source is discussing, and know the claims and evidence in the source. The workshop leader said that it was very important for the reader of your paper to be able to clearly tell the difference between your voice and the voice of your source. Therefore you have to know the aforementioned information in order to properly judge the source and dominate its argument within your paper.

One of the best ways to judge a source is by pinpointing its unstated assumptions. We went through an example of a newspaper article by David Bonetti in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discussing Washington University architecture. This was helpful because it gave us a real situation where we could judge an article based on its assumptions. The most important thing we learned was how to respond to a source once we had judged it. As Lauren said in her blog, There are three basic ways to respond to sources: Disagree and explain why, Agree but with a difference, and to agree and disagree simultaneously.

This workshop will help me with my Synthesis essay and RAE because I now have practice close reading a secondary source and looking for ways to judge it. I am going to reread my source using the method in the workshop and now I have a template to respond to it. When I annotate my source this weekend, I will use the Workshop handout to respond to it and then base my argument upon that.