Friday, March 27, 2009

Reference page practice

Diana Hacker's webpage on APA citation style.

I want you to practice creating in-text citations and a Reference Page entry.

For each one of five sources, write a sentence with an in-text citation, followed by a Reference Page entry.

For example:

In 2002, a consumer group claimed that the medication was related to the deaths of 19 people (Hilts, 2002).

Hilts, P. J. (2002, March 20). Petition asks for removal of diet drug from market. The New York Times, p. A26. Retrieved from LexisNexis.


You'll have to go to Diana Hacker's list of Reference page entries to get the reference exactly correct.

Use EITHER your own five entries from your Annotated Bibliography OR five other articles you have discovered in your research OR a combination of both until you reach five examples.

Post your five entries, each with an in-text citation and a Reference Page entry, to your blog.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Annotated Bibliography Prompt

As a first step in the Research Paper process, you have to be able to find, read, and analyze other articles about your topic. For the Annotated Bibliography, you’ll be proving that you can do precisely that.

For this assignment, you will find and read five (5) articles about your topic. You can choose a chapter in a book, but not the whole book. They can all be on-line articles, or all print articles. You can have ONE (and one only) Wikipedia/About.com/Encyclopedia article. The articles don’t necessarily have to be the articles that you will use in your final paper.

Once you have read the articles, you will format your Bibliography this way:

  • Each article starts a new page, so your assignment will be at least five physical pages long.

  • Each entry will start with the correctly formatted, APA style, Works Cited entry in bold on the top of the page. Go to dianahacker.com then click on Social Science-->List of Citations for correct formats.

  • You will then spend one paragraph summarizing the entire article, in which you will paraphrase the main argument. Make sure this is correctly formatted for a summary/paraphrase, meaning that you indicate in every sentence that these words/ideas are not your own.

  • You will then spend one paragraph saying what you think you’ll use from this article in your paper. What intrigued you? What did you find helpful/interesting? What did you agree/disagree with?

  • The two paragraphs should be substantial paragraphs, about half a page each, so that you have a full page of text for each entry.

So your Bibliography will be at least 5 separate pieces of paper. On each piece of paper, you will start with a Works Cited entry in bold, then a paragraph paraphrasing argument and summarizing article, then a paragraph analyzing what about article is important to you. Next page, start over again, with Works Cited entry and two paragraphs.

This assignment gives you the opportunity to practice research, reading, analyzing, summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. The assignment is worth 10% of your final grade.

Due Dates:
Friday, February 27: Post one full Annotated entry to your blog, complete with correct heading and two paragraphs. Title the blog post “Annotated Bibliography Entry.” I will grade it over the weekend.

Friday, March 6: Hand in paper version of full Annotated Bibliography. Post it to TurnItIn.com

Friday, February 13, 2009

Plagiarism

For the next few weeks, we're going to be talking about plagiarism, about what it is, and how to avoid it.

Today in class, I want you to read some definitions of plagiarism:
Plagiarism.org
Wikipedia (notice esp. self-plagiarism)
OWL
Exercises

Classwork/Homework then consists of:
  • Find one of the articles you will be using for your paper
  • Open your blog and start a new post
  • Create a link to that article at the top of the post
  • Cut and paste a paragraph from the article that you feel includes the main thesis of the article
  • As in the exercises above, demonstrate plagiarism of that paragraph in a made up paragraph of your paper
  • Then demonstrate how to properly quote and/or paraphrase that paragraph for use in your paper. (HINT: a proper quote includes an introductory phrase like "Smith argues", the quote, and then analysis of the quote.



Wednesday, February 11, 2009

For Friday, February 13

Post to your blog, for Friday, your thesis paragraph that we've been working on in class this week.

As a reminder:
  • First sentence should take a stand about your topic
  • Most of the paragraph will be dedicated to summarizing the evidence you'll be using throughout the paper to prove your point.
  • Last sentence argues why your issue/topic/argument matters. Why is the world going to be a better place if we all do what you say we should?

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Extra Credit

Something that I think will be very helpful to you as you do your research on the Internet is Delicious, online storage of your "Bookmarks." Currently, if you're on a computer and you want to save access to a page you think would be helpful to your paper, you have three choices:
  • Save it to "Bookmarks" on the browser window (usually Internet Explorer). This only works if you only ever use one computer, because the Bookmark saves to that specific computer's browser window. If you use another computer, you lose your Bookmarks until you can get back to the computer on which you saved them.
  • Cut and paste the address you want to keep and put them in a document and/or email them to yourself. This can get cumbersome unless you consolidate emails every time.
  • Save the address to an online website that will give you access to your bookmarks as long as you have Internet access.
Delicious is the third option. It's an place to save your bookmarks online so that, as long as you have Internet access, you'll be able to access your bookmarks, no matter what.

Delicious also allows you to tag your bookmarks. So you can tag them with a topic or with something like "helpful" or "quote"--stuff specific to YOUR use of the pages you're saving. You can also choose to make the Bookmarks public or not.

So, go to Delicious. Sign up for an account. Use it over the next few weeks by saving at least five subject-appropriate bookmarks (WITH TAGS!) to your account.

And link to MY Delicious account. You do this by clicking on "Go to a user" in the top right corner of your page once you've logged on. Enter sarahfrantz in the box. Once you've found me (and then have access to all the bookmarks *I've* ever saved on Delicious), click on "Add to my network," again in the top right corner of the page. When you go to the "Networks" tab, I'll show up on the right hand side of the screen, and you'll show up in MY Networks tab.

This is a long-term extra-credit, obviously. But this is a powerful tool available for your use. Have fun!

Friday, January 30, 2009

Jan 30: Class and Home Work

I want you to start exploring possibilities for your larger paper assignment.

You need to find a topic that fulfills two requirements:
  1. The topic is interesting *to you*. Whether you have a personal connection to a topic, or it's just something you're interested in, I don't really care, but you need to find a topic that you don't mind spending the rest of the semester researching and writing about. Additionally, DON'T worry whether *I* find it interesting or not. I'm just grading it--YOU have to write about it.
  2. A topic that has a controversy in it. This can be as simple as arguing that agility training is much better training for dogs than obedience training, or that the BCS Bowl system is terrible, or that James Bond films portray women in sexist ways, or .... fill in your blank here. But you can't give me a biography of a person or a history of a topic--you need to be able to take a stand on the side of an argument in the topic.
Forbidden topics: Anything to do with reproductive rights, anything to do with gay rights/equality, and anything to do with religion. Neither you nor I can be objective on these issues. But other hot button issues (whatever they might be) are (mostly) fine, although I reserve the right to be able to veto a topic idea.

Classwork will be preliminary research on your topic and discussion with me as I come around the room.

Homework will be posting what you find to YOUR blog. Don't post links by themselves. Post links and then summarize them. Tell me what you found, what interested you, and where/how you might be thinking of taking a stand. Give me a preliminary idea of what your argument might look like. (For a guide for all your blog posts, you should be writing about 200-250 for each one.)

Friday, January 23, 2009

A Day of Catch-Up

Homework over the weekend:
  1. Read this article.
  2. Choose one person who is quoted in the article with whom you DISAGREE. Copy the quote you disagree with onto your blog, making sure you include the name and why they're considered an "authority" to quote in the article, and then write 200-250 words about why you disagree with them. You don't have to mention the Dylan case at all, although you can if you want.
Don't forget that this is the SECOND writing assignment. Make sure you've answered these questions on your blog, too. I will get around to responding to every blog post this weekend.

Class summary:
If you made it in to the computer lab today (9 am class), we made sure everyone was on the same page for their blogs. If we weren't in the computer lab (12 noon class) we did an activity. We'll switch places on Monday, so make sure you read this carefully.

Everyone make sure your settings are in order! Even if you did this in class, DO IT AGAIN to make sure you saved the settings properly.

Blogger:
  • Log in.
  • Click on Settings.
  • Click on Comments.
  • Under "Who can comment?" check “Anyone.”
  • Go all the way to the bottom of the Comments page and enter your email address into the box at the very bottom of the page so that you’ll receive my responses to your blog posts!
  • MAKE SURE YOU SAVE YOUR CHANGES. Make sure you click on the "Save Settings" button on the bottom of the page.

You can change the look of your blog by playing around with the rest of the “Settings” and the “Layout.”

Additionally, right here on my blog, make sure you're "following" the blog. If it doesn't say "Following," click on the "Follow this blog" button and follow the instructions. This way, you should (I think) get an email every time I update the blog.

WordPress:
  • Log in.
  • On your Dashboard, click Settings on left side.
  • Click on Discussion.
  • This will give you a bunch of choices, one of which says "Before a comment appears..." Uncheck BOTH boxes.
  • MAKE SURE YOU SAVE YOUR CHANGES. Look for the "Save Changes" button on the bottom of the page.

You can change the look of your blog by playing around with all the stuff on the left side of the screen.

For those of you with WordPress blogs, you won't be able to "follow" MY blog very easily (unless you have a Google/Gmail account--then you'll be fine, and please click the "follow" button on the right. You'll just have to remember to try to check it at least once a day.