Reading Response 2

Getting Ready to Read
2  I have one class this semester that requires the writing of a research paper, this class.  I imagine doing the research for this paper by going through the library looking for books or articles on my topic.  I also plan on browsing the web for databases, papers, articles, or other documents on my topic.  I think that to accomplish my project i will need to spend lots of time researching as well as writing and revising multiple drafts.

In his article "What Is It We Do When We Write Articles Like This One-and How Can We Get Students to Join Us?", Michael Kleine sets out to discover how people conduct research.  He wanted to know how academics researched and why students didn't research like academics.  He developed his own model of research tactics, dividing the steps of collecting, rhetorical sifting, pattern seeking, and translating into two different methods, "hunting" and "gathering" after how ancient humans lived.  "Hunting" is searching out specific information while "gathering" is collecting all of the information around you.  After interviewing eight of his colleagues about how they went about doing research he found that they all wrote because they wanted to, not because they had been told to.  Their inspirations to write had come from interactions with peers.  After his interviews he came to the conclusion that the writing process was too complex to describe with a linear model.  One cannot characterize how to do every research paper, nor can one characterize every writer based on their field.

He concludes that like professors, students should not just write for their teachers but also their peers.  This would cause more teamwork and cooperation among students and inspire them to write better.  Students should also research in multiple different ways, including procedures relevant to them and "hunting" as well as "gathering."

This article relates to Stuart Greene's article "Argument as Conversation" because in both articles the author is trying to get the reader to change how they view a part of writing.  Greene stated that argument is more a debate or conversation about a scholarly topic and how it should be used in papers.  Kleine's argued in his article that educators need to get their students to change their research tactics from copying text to actually learning the information in their sources and incorporating it into their paper.


Questions for Discussion and Journaling
1.  In high school whenever my English class would go to our school's library most of what would happen would be students sitting at computers next to their friends, talking while searching through wikipedia and other webpages.  Rather than copying encyclopedias we would do the 21st century version and print off pages from the internet.  That is the way that i have researched in the past, but i hope to change that with this course.

3.  With the professionals Kleine interviews many sources are used in researching.  They read lots of sources, analyze it, and then sift through to find what they need.  They combine that with info from many other sources to write their document.  In my past efforts I have used fewer sources and used more information from each one.  I do not break down each source as much as a professional, I just use the somewhat crude form of information it gives me to write my paper.

4.  If i changed my research tactics to what Kleine talks about I would spend more time researching but it would end up being much more fruitful because it would result in me having more sources to use and more (and possibly better) information.  It would also make my papers sound more professional.