May 11

I find myself to be a lot like Shirley, because I too struggle with assignments that require me to write original papers based on textual sources. I find it easier writing opinion base papers because then I can add personal experiences in. Unlike others in this class reading these articles didn't make me feel like I could do this assignment now. I'm still a bit confused on what we are doing and I am finding myself a bit overwhelmed by it.
I do however like the fact that Swales gave you step by step directions in order to come up with a good research introduction. I think the Create a Research Space model (Cars) is pretty helpful. I never really found it hard to write introductions for papers, but that mainly is because they were opinion and personal base papers. But now that I'm in this class I see how the Cars model can help me to write a great introduction.
Even though Kantz didn't help me to come to a realization about what you want for the paper I do feel as if the article was very informing. A quote that stuck out to me was "reading sources rhetorically gives students a powerful tool for creating a persuasive analysis." She goes on to say that there is no proof that this is true, but I believe that it could actually be true.

Annoying Ways People Use Sources

The opening of this article made me want to read it. I love how he compares slow driving to sloppy writing. I for one HATE slow drivers, so I can imagine how irritated he is. I like the quote he used as to why people don't use quotations right. "There are two explanations for why some don't use quotations right. they don't know how, or they don't care" I really believe this to be true, because unlike people that drive slow; when it comes to writing in college majority of people have been writing papers all of there lives. So knowing where to put quotations is something that is learned. So when it comes down to writing the paper if you don't put them in the right spot, I think of it more as you don't care or maybe you just really didn't know. But if it's something you don't know you can always look it up, so you can look at it as them not caring where the "quotations" are. I like how he included examples of the wrong way to place quotations and then provided the right way to do it. All and all I thought this was a great article and it kept me engaged.