When I first taught first year writing in Arkansas, I took a cue from my literature background and required the students to write a bibliographic essay in order to establish the distinction between research and opinion. I expressly forbade offering excessive opinion about their sources; I wanted them to place the sources into some relationship with one another. The results were mixed. I got a lot of opinions.
I changed my approach just a bit this time. One of my grad instructors in Minnesota last year required an annotated bibliography and I was confused—I wrote a bibliographic essay instead, and was forced to revise it to fit the alternate form. It dawned on me that an annotated bibliography is a completely different animal that is noticeably easier to write than a bibliographic essay. No relationships are required; an annotated bibliography is simply a string of summaries. When we organize things, opinions seem to be the requisite glue to hold things together. I could more easily eliminate the opinions by eliminating the creative possibilities inherent in structure.
Though it might seem redundant, I required that the students write both. The initial annotated bibliography was of four sources; the bibliographic essay was to include at least six sources. This worked extremely well. Part of the reason is that it allowed me to make the first four source effort due quite quickly, while allowing a little more time to stretch out in the second—because the second effort was meant to give them the time to become an authority about the material available on their topic. When the opinions appeared in the bibliographic essay, they were more critical and well thought out—based on the relationship between the sources instead of the relationship between the sources and their own heads. The redundancy and extra time paid off.
While not everyone got it on the first pass, most of them figured out that becoming an authority on a topic means that you are able to tell a story about that topic and the conversations that surround it. An authority almost always begins by constructing a narrative account, either thematic or chronological, of the available material. It isn’t a natural talent, it only comes when you achieve a certain level of comfort when talking/writing about a particular topic. More than anything, it takes time—time that can elapse simultaneously with learning how to write more effective sentences, create correct citations, and all that other rote stuff that FYW should achieve.
I think that telling stories about research is often neglected. I have come to believe that whoever has the most compelling back-story is likely to win the argument, at least if you can get them to buy your account. In proposal writing, this is generally labeled as a background statement. In research writing, it is the literature survey. But ultimately, these components of the essay are always stories (narratio).
My key research questions have been converging on the problem of how normative agreement is achieved. More and more, I think stories hold the key—which provides a unique challenge for people involved in visual rhetoric. Images do not, and some would say cannot, convey stories. Nonetheless, are compelled to tell stories about them. I think that images and image-making practices hold a central place to the conditions of normative agreement—but it may not be through the information or agency constrained within the images themselves.
What may be most important is not necessarily information, but rather the acceptance of a common reading of the stories attached to the information provided. To become an authority, particularly one who aims at normative agreement, storytelling ability seems essential. Acceptance of a common back-story seems an essential precondition to successful agreement. The students, I think did embrace this in the crafting of their essays.
*this is a continuation of a class postmortem that began here
