The Bibliographic Essay
Your major assignment for the semester is a bibliographic essay treating 10 sources that discuss some issue of problem in writing centers. As I have noted in class, your best resource at the moment is the textbook, which very handily has provided us with a works cited at the end of each chapter as well as a brief annotated bibliography. If a topic has piqued your interest, you should get your hands on the sources listed in the textbook and see what they have to say.
A bit about bibliographic essays...
Typically, a bibliographic essay does not include your position on the issue. That is, typically, you stay out of it and merely inform us of what the sources have to say about it. I am willing to allow a little leeway with this assignment, but only so long as your position/argument does not overpower the 10 sources you are treating.
Your task in this assignment is to identify some issue related to writing centers and to provide us a kind of “survey of scholarship.” The difficult part of this is that you can’t simply slap a bunch of sources together and call it a day. You’ll need to figure out how they all connect to one another. You’ll need to figure out how they respond to one another. You’ll need to figure out, in other words, how they all fit together. In short, the difficulty of this assignment is in the organization.
The trick to this is thinking about them in terms of “camps.” Most of these pieces will make it clear how they relate to others, either directly or in terms of how they use other arguments. You should also “mine” their bibliographies for other sources. See who they cite. Get your hands on those texts, too.
The Writing Center has subscriptions of some of the materials you’ll need to accomplish this task. The online resources in the library will also be incredibly helpful (here’s a handout detailing how to use the MLA databases). As always, use the librarians if you get in a jam.
Edit: I neglected to mention page lengths. As I said in class, I am reluctant to prescribe a page length. But if it helps, shoot for 8-10 pages on this assignment. I don't see how an effective job could be done in less.
A bit about bibliographic essays...
Typically, a bibliographic essay does not include your position on the issue. That is, typically, you stay out of it and merely inform us of what the sources have to say about it. I am willing to allow a little leeway with this assignment, but only so long as your position/argument does not overpower the 10 sources you are treating.
Your task in this assignment is to identify some issue related to writing centers and to provide us a kind of “survey of scholarship.” The difficult part of this is that you can’t simply slap a bunch of sources together and call it a day. You’ll need to figure out how they all connect to one another. You’ll need to figure out how they respond to one another. You’ll need to figure out, in other words, how they all fit together. In short, the difficulty of this assignment is in the organization.
The trick to this is thinking about them in terms of “camps.” Most of these pieces will make it clear how they relate to others, either directly or in terms of how they use other arguments. You should also “mine” their bibliographies for other sources. See who they cite. Get your hands on those texts, too.
The Writing Center has subscriptions of some of the materials you’ll need to accomplish this task. The online resources in the library will also be incredibly helpful (here’s a handout detailing how to use the MLA databases). As always, use the librarians if you get in a jam.
Edit: I neglected to mention page lengths. As I said in class, I am reluctant to prescribe a page length. But if it helps, shoot for 8-10 pages on this assignment. I don't see how an effective job could be done in less.
posted by Scott Rogers at 10:02 PM
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