Why you should vary sentence length:

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.

Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

                                                                                                 -- Gary Provost

TED talks for SPACE CAT analysis

America Ferrera:  "My identity is my superpower-- not an obstacle"

Baratunde Thurston:  "How to deconstruct racism, one headline at a time"

Kelly McGonigal:  "How to make stress your friend"

Pamela Meyer:  "How to spot a liar"

Brene Brown: "The Power of Vulnerability"

Jon Ronson:  "Strange answers to the psychopathy test" 

Kimberlw Crenshaw: "The urgency of intersectionality"


Directions: 

• We will watch most of these in class; others you will need to watch for homework.  Start watching and looking for SPACE CAT elements in class today (9/17).  No homework aside from working on your perspective journal.

• We will continue watching on Thursday.  If you don't finish all the TED talks in class on Thursday they will be homework for next Monday.

• Once you have watched all 7, label one your FAVORITE and one your LEAST FAVORITE.

• Re-watch your chosen TED talks carefully and read any speaker bios and/or transcripts you see.  Then, complete a thoughtful SPACE CAT chart for those TED talks.  They will be turned in for a grade AND they will be used in both small and large group discussions.

The Harris Moves: Looking Deeper

Harris (2006) suggests that there are four genre “moves” in academic writing:

·       coming to terms

·       forwarding

·       countering

·       taking an approach

·       the binding (transitions)

Coming to terms

The first move, coming to terms ,refers to the process of reading, getting to know content, concepts and issues. When you come to terms in writing, you restate the work of another writer. The mechanisms for achieving this are: summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, and writing descriptions. In annotatong a reading, you would be looking for the writer’s purpose (what they intended to do in the text), the writer’s main argument, the evidence provided for the claim and how this relates to your own argument. One misunderstanding about academic readings is that we all read and receive the same message when we can really all interpret the same article quite differently. Academic writing is often about explaining how you read a paper and what you interpret from it. Your annotations need to explain what you understand from the source text, what your interpretation is, and how it relates to your argument in your own writing (Harris, 2006).

Harris (2006, p. 24) argues:

“academics seldom write in an all-or-nothing mode, trying to convince readers to take one side or the other of an argument. Instead their work assumes that any perspective on an issue (and there are often more than two) will have moments of insight and blindness. A frame offers a view but also brackets something out. A point of view highlights certain aspects and obscures others. And so, in dealing with other writers, your aim should be less to prove them right or wrong, correct or mistaken, than to assess both the uses and limits of their work. That is to say, academic writing rarely involves a simple taking of sides, an attack on or a defense of set positions, but rather centers on a weighing of options, a sorting through of possibilities.”

Forwarding

Once academic writers are familiar with the substance of the topic at hand, they then move into a process of forwarding. Harris (2006) argues that asymmetrical conversations happen in academic writing. Academics do not write to the people they are writing about, they write to fellow readers. Forwarding is the process of recirculating, repurposing or re-contextualizing meaning from texts. The mechanisms for this are:

·       Illustrating – using other texts as examples to explain your point (anecdotes, data, scenarios).

·       Authorizing – when you use an author to support your thinking, this is the “quick appeal to another writer as a voice of authority” (Harris, 2006, p. 44).

·       Borrowing – drawing on terms or ideas from other writers to explain your point. Here you use other texts by borrowing a term or idea to relate to your own argument.

·       Extending – when you put your own meaning on an idea drawn from another text to advance your own argument. Extending a text can be difficult. You feel you may not feel confident about extending on an authority’s ideas but this is what makes the writing your own.

Countering

The next move is countering or arguing against a text or author. This is a critical part of academic writing. It’s not enough to understand the topic and to extend on others’ ideas; academic writing always includes counter arguments. Counter arguments, however, are often not the opposite side of the debate, as Harris suggests: “countering looks at other views and texts not as wrong but as partial – in the sense of being both interested and incomplete” (emphasis in original). In other words, you will not need to refute an author’s argument but rather add to the conversation or perhaps take it in a new direction. The mechanisms for this are:

·       Arguing the other side – since all academic writing is centered on argument, this would mean taking another side to the one the writer is putting forward. It may even be a counter argument in this author’s own writing. This would require a justification of why the other side of the argument is worthy.

·       Uncovering or explicitly surfacing values – all writers write from a point of view or perspective which is value-laden. Some writers explicitly state their framework or theoretical stance but others do not. What is “unmarked or unquestioned” (Harris 2006) in the text? This is not easy to do and sometimes can only be done by comparing one reading to another.

·       Dissenting with concepts, authors, texts or issues. Harris (2006) explains that dissenting often involves working out where there is agreement first: “There is a kind of template for many academic essays in which a writer says something like this: Until now, writers on this subject have disagreed on points a, b, and c. However, underlying this disagreement, there is a consensus of views on point d. In this essay, I will show why point d is wrong” (emphasis in original). In education and other professional contexts, dissension can also come from experience in practice and it is especially powerful if you can provide published evidence to back up your experience. A further way of exploring dissension is to use two authors from different perspectives to show the differences between them and either align your own argument with one author or take the conversation in a different direction (Harris 2006). Although Harris does not add this to his list, you can also pose questions as a way of dissenting.

Taking an approach

The final genre move, according to Harris (2006), is when the writer takes an approach, which is fundamental to intellectual writing. This can be done through adopting the approach of another author or developing your own thinking in relation to another author. Taking an approach means taking a stand on your argument. What Harris means here is that you do not focus on ideas from an author but rather on the author’s whole intellectual contribution. Harris (2006) identifies the mechanisms as:

·       Acknowledging influences – this is showing how an influential author(s) has affected your own thinking and has led to your different approach.

·       Turning an approach in on itself – using the questions an author asks to question him/her yourself. This is an appreciative/skeptical way of viewing a source text/author.

·       Reflexivity – is the critical self-awareness of one’s own assumptions and an understanding in relation to an author. Where the new approach you have taken is different but where you have looked at all sides, weighed up options and evidence and well as one’s own biases and then moved to a new approach or idea.

The binding

Harris (2006) also mentions the glue that holds all these moves together which is known as metatext. You might have also seen this mentioned as signposts or transitions. These are the sentences that show your reader what moves you are using and when in the paper. Phrases like: “In the first section of the paper, I will discuss…”; “The purpose of this section is to…;” “While the literature is broad and complex, I would like to focus on three key authors/issues that are relevant to this discussion/my argument…”

“I’ve argued throughout this book that the goal of academic writing is to form your own position on a subject in response to what others have said about it” (Harris, 2006, p. 95).