Identify a cluster of readings about a topic that interests you. For example, choose related readings from this book and its e-Pages or from other readings assigned in your class. If your topic is assigned and you don’t begin with much interest in it, develop your intellectual curiosity. Look for an angle, an implication, or a vantage point that will engage you. Relate the topic in some way to your experience. Read (or reread) the selections, considering how each supports, challenges, or deepens your understanding of the topic.
See the contents of A Writer’s Reader.
Based on the information in your cluster of readings, develop an enlightening position about the topic that you’d like to share with an audience of college readers. Support this position — your working thesis — using quotations, paraphrases, summaries, and syntheses of the information in the readings as evidence. Present your information from sources clearly, and credit your sources appropriately.
Three students investigated topics of great variety:
One student examined local language usage that combined words from English and Spanish, drawing on essays about language diversity to analyze the patterns and implications of such usage.
Another writer used a cluster of readings about technology to evaluate the privacy issues on a popular Web site for student profiles.
A third, using personal experience with a blended family and several essays on families, challenged misconceptions about today’s families.
The major challenge that writers face when using sources to support aposition is finding their own voice. You create your voice as a college writer through your choice of language and angle of vision. You probably want to present yourself as a thoughtful writer with credible insights, someone a reader will want to hear from.
Finding your own voice may be difficult in a source-based paper. After all, you need to read carefully and then capture information to strengthen your discussion by quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing. You need to introduce it, feed it into your draft, and credit it. By this time, you may worry that your sources have taken over your paper. You may feel there’s no room left for your own voice and, even if there were, it’s too quiet to jostle past the powerful words of your sources. That, however, is your challenge.
See more on evidence.
As you develop your voice as a college writer and use it to guide your readers’ understanding, you’ll restrict sources to their proper role as supporting evidence. Don’t let them get pushy or dominate your writing. Use these questions to help you strengthen your voice:
Whenever you are uncertain about the answers to these questions, make an electronic copy of your file or print it out. Highlight all of the wording in your own voice in a bright, visible color. Check for the presence and prominence of this highlighting, and then revise the white patches (the material drawn from sources) as needed to strengthen your voice.