‘Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively’

SUMMARY: In her article ‘Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively’, Margaret Kantz attempts to help students to better understand text, how to use it and how to identify it. She argues that facts aren’t so much true statements, but they are claims because facts are established when most of the audience agrees on something. 

CONVERSATION:

All of the readings have a common topic. They all deal with communication in a way. They all deal with people, using people as examples. They all are also geared towards high school to college students. They all give advice to students to help them with their writing.

BEFORE YOU READ:

I define the word fact as something that has been proven to be true. To me claim means that there is an overall agreement. Opinion is something that someone believes in, or how they feel about something. Everyone has different opinions. Argument can have more than one meaning. When I think of argument I think of a fight or disagreement on something. Argument can also be you stating your opinion backing it up with factual information.

QD:

1. Kantz says that facts are actually claims. By that she means that a fact is established when majority of the audience agrees on statements that are true. In a way that means that facts can be based off of opinions.

2. Misunderstandings on how text works:

-textbooks and other factual texts aren’t inherently true but instead simply represent a consensus of opinion.

-misunderstand sources because they read them as stories

-the expect their sources to tell the truth, the equate persuasive writing in this context with making things up

-many do not understand that facts are a kind of claim and are often used persuasively 

-commonly misread texts as narratives 

-expect factual texts to tell them the truth

I think she’s correct because normally I believe most things a book says because you expect it to be true. I feel like I mostly understand most of them now.

AE:

2. I don’t see a relationship between creativity and research. I feel like creativity is being yourself and using your imaginaton to create things. Research is using what other people have said or done to help you create something. Kantz talks about it from a different view. She says creativity is what research should be about. If she writes a creative paper it can be used to share as a solution to a problem. Our ideas overlap because I feel like there can be things you find researching that are creative. After reading her views, it made me understand where she is coming from and it makes sense that there is a correlation between the two. I just didn’t think of it as that before. 

MM: Kantz is trying to help students use textual sources persuasively. She is teaching the importance of claims. She analyzes what it means for something to be a fact. A fact is more of an agreement of a lot of people that decide what something is. It’s good to understand what factual information actually is. It’s also good to learn creativity and to put it into your research.

OPINIONS: The reading was kind of interesting. The way that she described facts was new to me. I liked how she used someones personal experiences to explain the point she was trying to get across. It might be helpful to me because I can use her advice and what not to do to make my papers better. I think they compare to my own experiences because she is providing examples of kids around my age, doing the same types of things I’m doing. However, one thing I didn’t like about this article is that it was kind of hard to follow in parts. It wasn’t really divided into sections, it was just ongoing paragraphs and words.