Informal Writing: Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively/ Margaret Kantz

In her article Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively, Margaret Kantz attempts to discuss the struggles of composing original arguments and research texts by combining numerous sources. She points out that it is much easier to use the claims and theories from the sources than to create a new purpose and abstract ideas of your own. Kantz's tells the story of a sophomore in college to relate the story and help the audience understand this struggle.

At first read this article doesn't relate to much we've read. But after reflecting I realized the ideas behind we she is saying is the entire purpose of Kleine's article. You can put facts upon facts upon facts into a research paper, there are millions of those out there. That's easy. A real research article has those facts but has arguments and claims of your own. Those arguments shouldn't come out of a book you get at the library but between the lines of those books you get at the library and the discussions you have with your peers. It's not very self explanatory but I feel like this is one of those ideas that is better said with few words and left the audience to ponder and figure out on their own.

I'm not sure if I feel like this article relates well to any of the texts we've read up to this point. We've read about inspired writers, shitty drafts, writing processes, the perception of beauty and now this. This article reminds me of high schoolers doing a shitty job of trying to half ass a paper the night before it's due. I understand though that is not the point she is trying to make. Creating original claims from facts upon facts, doesn't give you much room to be original. Discussion within facts takes practice because you have to keep the facts but manage to intertwine your own ideas into those "facts."