I was kind of left wondering about the practicality of the I-search paper. It seems like a great idea as far as getting students into writing and familiarizing them with their own voice and writing style, but an I-search paper can not replace a research paper. Writing in depth research papers has helped me immensely in my development as a writer because I really have to know my stuff. Not only do I have to know it, I have to make sure that everything in there is valid so that anyone who wants to check my sources can see that I knew what I was doing. The I-search paper reminded me a lot of journalistic writing. In the hand out when the girl is investigating becoming a firefighter, it felt like I was reading an incredibly well written newspaper article. This is an important style of writing because it has a very personal feel. You feel as if you are there with the author, or having a conversation with an author that you can trust. I just wonder how this type of paper could work in the classroom other than a starting point for understanding one's own writing. It seems as if a teacher could build off of this exponentially, but the actual way to do this is escaping me at the moment.
I also liked Swoger's article and how she chronicled the progression of the learning disabled student. I think that once you get a kid writing, a great strategy would be to save copies of all his or her work so that they can physically see the progress that they made as a writer. This is because someone's personal writing is much more important to them than anyone else’s and being able to see the results of your efforts works as an incredible motivator.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Blog 7
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1 comment:
Nate, I can see where your're going in the first paragraph about the i-search not replacing the research paper. But I'm not clear on why you feel this way. Is it because you feel that a research paper requires the monotone and frequency of additional scholarly sources or could it be because you feel the sources (as in the firefighter story) are not reliable, such as scholarly resources would be? I know I feel this way sometimes too, but then it leaves me wondering if that "personal feel" which makes these papers so much more interesting to read, necessarily has to be eradicated from research papers altogether. I still have problems separating the "personal" from research papers for this reason. But I also feel that although a source from a scholarly journal may have it's advantages, it may not give the depth that a "real person" in that situation could bring to the experience. It's definitely a good discussion topic for class. See you there!
--Christine
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