Tags
facts, Margaret Kuntz, opinions, original ideas, primary and secondary sources, questions, research, school experiences, summary, writing style
Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively ~ Margaret Kantz
Question:
Do you think Kantz’s ideas will change your own approach to doing research and writing with sources? If so, how?
Response:
In my public school experiences, I have always been taught by rote dates, names, places, events, and other memorable elements from history that were drilled into my K-12 years as “Facts.” Everything I ever read from my History, Math, and Science textbooks and everything I ever heard in those respective lectures were sure to show up on major examinations, in the attempt for every student to learn every minute detail about that core topic. Because of this structured system, I never felt prompted by myself, my instructors, or my peers to question this information. They had happened, had been proved with evidence, were verified with primary and secondary sources, and therefore were facts. When doing research I never questioned why these so called “Facts” were given their superior title, I merely used them to prove I knew the details that had been drilled into me for thirteen years of my life. Just like Shirley in Kantz’s article, research never included gaining “an original argument and purpose” (Kantz 71). A person’s research simply proved how well he/she could obtain a collection of facts and use them to “[tell] the story clearly and more completely than [any of his/her] sources had [previously] done” (Kantz 70).
Finding an original idea is truly foreign to me—correction, was truly foreign to me. After reading this article, it became very clear that research needs a greater purpose than “retelling.” It requires me to question, not just take whatever a teacher or a textbook hands me as the truth of the matter. Reading Kantz’s article was confusing at first until I grasped the concept of finding an original argument. It definitely makes sense; we cannot simply continue writing summaries of our primary and secondary sources our whole lives because there is only so much information to include. I guess it’s something that will come with practice. Come to think of it, in high-school, our instructors were teaching us how to do research by giving us that cookie-cutter format and those 6-8 page summary reports. Now that we have the tools we must begin to include our own ideas, our own questions. Reading this article definitely helped me understand that concept better.
Posted by Nicole Chirico | Filed under Questions for Discussion and Journaling