VOLUME 2

Volume 2 continues the work presented in Volume 1 by offering other perspectives on topics addressing academic writing for first-year composition students, including critical reading and writing, as well as research methods. For example, Janice R. Walker’s “Everything Changes, or Why MLA Isn’t (Always) Right,” and Michael J. Klein’s and Kristi L. Shackelford’s “Beyond Black on White: Document Design and Formatting in the Writing Classroom” provide students easy introductions to MLA style and guidance to effectively design a document (including fonts, subheadings, and integrating images). Both of these essays feed into the larger focus of Volume 2: critical thinking and academic research. One of the primary strengths of the essays in this volume is that they can be used for each step of research processes involved in conventional first-year composition courses, while also integrating some of the processes that students are already familiar with.

For example, Randall McClure’s “Googlepedia: Turning Information Behaviors into Research Skills” offers students a way of beginning their research via the pervasive (re)search method that many students, and even a significant number of scholars/teachers, already use: Google and Wikipedia. Rather than dismiss either of these re-search methods, McClure suggests what he calls “a blended research process that begins with the initial tendency to use Google and Wikipedia and ends in the university library” (p. 222) since they “are so much a part of the research process for writers today that to ignore their role and refuse to work with these tools seems ludicrous” (p. 223). In addition to cautioning students about the information gathered by these sources, McClure positions them as places where students can familiarize themselves with a topic/idea/concept before engaging in more rigorous academic research, and explains how integrating these sources into collaborative research that involves librarians’, teachers’, and students’ processes. Overall, McClure effectively offers students an introduction to preliminary research methods using sources they are comfortable with before “remixing” these “behaviors” to the online library. Like McClure suggests, by not dismissing Google or Wikipedia, teachers are provided with a way of beginning a research assignment that “combines technological comfort and savvy with academic standards and rigor” (p. 239).

Once students move from the preliminary research methods that McClure proposes, Karen Rosenberg’s “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” offers students an efficient approach to research-based assignments. While this essay is designed to present students with ways of approaching assigned readings, Rosenberg's strategies offer students ways of assessing the relevance of sources to their specific research projects. After explaining the importance of determining the audience of a reading, she identifies five components of an essay’s architecture to better understand its purpose: (1) title; (2) abstract; (3) introduction; (4) section headings; and (5) conclusion (pp. 215-18). These suggestions (and guidelines), as Rosenberg explains, ask students “to bring a great deal of awareness and preparation to [their] reading” that aims to help students “make wise decisions about which parts of the text [they] need to pore over and which [they] can blithely skim” (p. 219). In other words, Rosenberg suggests a form of hyper-reading that builds toward close-readings of texts, an approach that not only speeds up reading time, but that also helps ground and focus the purpose of assigned readings. Still, the methods that she suggests can be translated into research processes, especially if framed as a method for quickly assessing the relevance of the sources for research-based (argument) assignments.

In collaboration with the two articles mentioned above, and likely an essay that could be assigned alongside both, Catherine Savini’s essay, “Looking for Trouble: Finding Your Way into a Writing Assignment,” offers students ways of conceptualizing writing assignments as processes by looking “for something that troubles” them by seeking “out difficulty [to] find problems” (p. 52), regardless of discipline and/or specific assignments. The essay presents students with the following four steps to “look for trouble”: (1) noticing; (2) articulating a problem and its details; (3) posing fruitful questions; and (4) identifying what is at stake (p. 54). After briefly describing each of these steps, she works through each step by means of an example from her own research (walls and the images we hang on our walls). Still, the process (and example) that she provides leads to turning the trouble-some details of this process into productive a method of beginning an assignment, and one that parallels McClure’s and Rosenberg’s research methods. In her words, “problems can do double duty for us: articulating complex problems and posing fruitful questions is not only part of the process, but it also part of the product” (p. 63), particularly in the sense of effectively framing the trajectory of a research project. In addition, as she concludes, this strategy is extends beyond academic writing into “life’s complexities” (p. 69) and, in so doing, offers students a way to critically think about problems they will likely encounter in their personal and professional lives.

Each of these essays, and the others that constitute Volume 2, exhibit a clear understanding of academic argument and the critical thinking criteria of most writing programs outcomes, and in a way that give students an inside look at the conventions of academic writing. Gita DasBender, in her essay “Critical Thinking in College Writing: From the Personal to the Academic,” introduces students to these expectations by explaining that a “critical thinker is always a good reader because to engage critically with a text you have to read attentively and with an open mind, absorbing new ideas and forming your own as you go along” (p. 38). Volume 2 of Writing Spaces, through these easily accessible essays, asks that we, as pedagogues, do the same thing when interacting with students in our FYC courses, and it does so in a way that helps to de-mystify academic writing for students.