Plagiarism blog post response

Hello all: good work on your blog posts for today. I like that many of you are drawing clear distinctions between institutional definitions of plagiarism and Lethem's looser use of the term. This kind of distinction is important to make when you're talking about abstract terms like "intelligence": they can be used differently in different contexts.

Finally, here's an interesting outside source to look at when you get a chance. Slate has an interesting excerpt from a book on the history of appropriation in early rock 'n' roll music. It's pretty long, particularly as it gets into the history of the Rolling Stones' relationship to black R&B musicians who inspired them and collaborated with them. But the first part offers a really interesting counterpoint to Lethem's exuberance for collaboration. You might think about the *effects* of the collaboration that Lethem encourages: who stands to benefit? Who is able to collaborate in the first place?

Revision blog post response

I’ve had a chance to look over your original and revised paragraphs, and in some case comment on individual posts with questions or suggestions for further revision, so check your posts! Overall, I have a few suggestions to make as well. In many cases, I noticed that “revised” paragraphs hadn’t been revised so much as copy-edited and expanded with a few new sentences. This is NOT revision. The purpose of the assignment was to get you to re-THINK your claims, which oftentimes entails scrapping old work and writing entirely new sentences in their place. As added incentive, I will remind you that a paper cannot pass if it does not undergo substantial revision.

My suggestion for those of you who still need to revise their paragraphs is to work out from your examples in order to develop a more specific claim. This means looking at the evidence you’re using and asking yourself not just “How are these two (or three) things related?” but also “What distinguishes them from one another?” As you begin to articulate the distinctions between two things you’re connecting, you can use that finer description as the basis for a more specific claim. We’ll have an example to practice this on Thursday (for hybrid students) and/or look at examples of effective revision (non-hybrid students).

One other important thing to note is that when you’re developing your argument, you don’t have to agree entirely or disagree entirely with your sources. In fact, you may disagree with large parts of what Davidson, Lethem, or Johnson is saying, but that does not preclude agreeing with or finding support in smaller claims within their texts. The important thing to remember is that many of their examples or claims are open to multiple avenues of interpretation. You can use the example of ant colonies, for instance, to make any number of claims: perhaps ants are examples of systems that don’t need hierarchy, or of the fact that “intelligent” individuals are not required to create “collective intelligence.” Use interpretation (i.e. close reading) to make it clear how an example supports your argument, which doesn’t necessitate summarizing or agreeing with an author’s entire claim. Perhaps, even, you could use examples from one author to refute the claims of another. It’s up to you to figure out how to put the texts in conversation with one another.  

Special note to hybrid students: it’s been pointed out to me that you won’t be able to hand in your peer review sheets until after your final draft is due. That’s fine: just bring them to class on Thursday, October 13^th.  

RD 2 Feedback

After having had a chance to look over your rough drafts, I’ve decided that we should spend some more time talking about Lethem and revising our original arguments. In a lot of cases, I’m seeing significant progress from Paper 1 in terms of the ways you’re making connections between texts and using textual evidence. But in other cases, this somewhat broader paper prompt has led to arguments that are diffuse, disorganized, or underdeveloped.

Remember: the prompt asks you to consider how collective intelligence reflects individual agency, so you can’t simply offer a thesis that says, “collective intelligence reflects individual agency.” It doesn’t answer the question. Instead, you should try to think about the ways the texts represent relationships between collective intelligence and individual agency (or don’t), then come up with a claim that explains your interpretation of some aspect of this relationship. Under what circumstances is this relationship visible? What changes it? How is understanding it useful to solve some particular problem? The more specific the question you’re answering, the clearer your argument will be. It’s important to narrow your focus to some extent in order to ensure that you can sufficiently address it in 5 pages.

Related to that issue, I’ve noticed that a number of pages turn to dictionaries to define “intelligence” or “collective intelligence.” Remember: you should use the dictionary to clarify the way the authors are using the term if it isn’t clear from close reading, but you should start with their words first. Hopefully, the dictionary entries should show you that intelligence has more than one meaning: your job is to find which one or ones are most applicable to your discussion.

Also, a note on organization: as I mentioned before, it’s often the case that in writing our early drafts, we tend to write our way to a more specific point. I’ve seen a number of paragraphs with topic sentences that describe some feature of one of the texts. But then the paragraphs themselves will often touch on connections between texts, or the ways in which a keyword from one text applies to another. As you revise, try to identify the specific contribution of each paragraph; your topic sentence should reflect that. This is especially important in papers about 3 texts: since you now have to balance a number of perspectives, you really need to focus on connections rather than devoting too much time to a single text. Don’t feel obligated to cram in examples from each text in every paragraph: let the topic of the paragraph determine what texts are most relevant to bring up.

In the coming days, I will compile another Google Document with examples from rough drafts that we can workshop in class. If you want more individualized feedback, consider attending office hours or emailing me to set up an in-person or online meeting to discuss your work.

Lethem post response

Thanks for trying out this experimental blog post assignment with me. I wasn’t sure what you might find, but some of you had very insightful things to say about the differences between Lethem’s concerns and those of his sources. Of course, the purpose of this assignment was twofold: one, I wanted you to begin to familiarize yourselves with library research tools, and two I wanted you to continue to work on your close reading skills, particularly your ability to make connections while simultaneously drawing distinctions. I hope that, in addition to looking for the title of the source that Lethem used, you spent a bit of time trying to figure out where you might locate that source. It sounds like some of you were able to find books and articles online, but I’d also encourage you to find out where you can go in the library to get physical copies of such things, since not everything you’ll want to research will be available online. We’ll work on that more when we hear a Rutgers research librarian’s guest lecture in October. Regarding close reading, I think you all would benefit from even greater specificity when you explain the significance of a quotation. Matt does an excellent job of explaining how Lethem’s use of President Truman’s speech turns Truman’s advocacy for preserving natural resources into a metaphor about treating ideas as resources. One could go even further to think about the distinctions between natural resources (which are finite) and ideas (which can be shared without risking depletion). Pointing out such distinctions puts you into a better position when you’re trying to explain the significance of a connection. In your blog posts and your papers, you should be answering the question “so what?” Why does this point matter? For instance, is Lethem pointing out the absurdity of treating ideas as property by drawing a comparison between ideas and physical objects? What does it mean to “own” an idea? Is it even possible to be original, according to Lethem?

Both of my classmates agree that my thesis needs to be improved upon. Overall I do understand that my introduction needs to improved. I went too quickly into the “meat” of the essay rather than explain my thesis well. Alana pointed out a couple places where I missed connections that I could have made as well. I could have connected predictability and organized complexity better, as well as improved my connections between organized complexity and the classroom, which were not clear. She pointed out the question to think about, which makes me realize that though I thought the connection I made between them was clear, to the reader it was not clear at all. Also I need to be clear with my quotes and explain them fully. I did not spend enough time explaining connections that I believed were evident. Also Aakansha pointed out places where I repeated myself without meaning to. I need to go back to those places and add new ideas and connections instead of relying on other thoughts I had expanded upon elsewhere in the paper. Also not only did I repeat ideas, I also repeated connecting phrases and word choices, rather than vary my sentence structure. Also, an off-handed comment of how I forgot to contradict Davidson at one point in my paper lead me to a whole new topic as well, which I have used to build my paper further. Finally, I was also surprised that my classmates did not remove more of my paper through deletions. Going through my paper again, I removed even more of repeated thoughts and making other arguments more concise. Perhaps they were more lenient on sentence length, but I feel like my paper had too much fluff that even my classmates missed some.

Paper 1 Rough Draft & Sample Paper Response

Thank you all for both your reflections on the peer review process and your comments on the sample papers, which I found very insightful. Judging from the survey results, there was definitely clustering around the assigned grades, which is exactly as it should be. As a number of you mentioned, the grading criteria is pretty nuanced in the distinctions between things like a B and a B+, so there’s definitely room for discretion. I actually think that a number of you were right to point out that Paper X/C seemed like a C+ more than a C—looking back at my records, it seems that it received the lower grade because it was handed in late. So, good job for pointing out that discrepancy!

As you can see, Paper Z/A does something quite different from the other two, in part because it’s dealing with three texts instead of two. This example, not from my own class, shows the way that working with multiple texts forces you to move beyond comparison and contrast between others’ arguments and instead makes you place emphasis on using the texts as support for your own independent, original argument. I particularly like the way the example of the yogurt, for instance, doesn’t seem connected to the writer’s topic sentence except in the way that the author interprets its significance. It’s not an obvious connection, in other words, and is all the more interesting because of that.

Hopefully this exercise, along with peer review, has given you some direction for your own paper revisions. I’d also like to offer you a few suggestions based on what I’ve noticed from reading your rough drafts. Judging from your blog posts, it seems that a number of you have noticed a need to cut down on summary—I agree wholeheartedly. In many cases, students were summarizing the arguments of Johnson and Davidson before turning to their own claims, which is unnecessary. As someone pointed out in their comments on the sample papers, the A paper has a “captivating” argument, whereas the B paper’s thesis is somewhat obvious and/or broad. Given the amount of prefatory material that was in some papers, you might find it most effective to take the claims at the end of your paper and make them the starting point for a new, more specific thesis.

Another area that needs work in many of your papers is organization. As you can see from the sample papers, strong papers make connections within the paragraphs organized around a particular topic. As you go through your rough drafts, you should be isolating each paragraph and asking yourself, “what is my claim here?” If it’s a claim you develop in another paragraph, consider linking those paragraphs together. You can also try isolating your topic sentences and quotations from each paragraph in a separate document. Then, in a few sentences, explain why you need those quotations to support your topic sentence. Both of these techniques are a version of what’s called the “Post-Draft Outline.” We’ll have time to talk about it more in the future, but feel free to try it on your own for this paper.

Response to Johnson posts

Hello class, and thanks again for your latest round of blog posts. Many of you have done a much better job of including quotations (and analysis of them) to back up your points. Keep it up! Once again, many of your points could be made even more convincing by the citation of a particular example. In some cases, for instance, students said that the way Johnson used a term like “emergence” or “complexity” changed, but didn’t cite representative examples to illustrate the differences from different parts of the essay. This brings me to my next point: connections. You all did an excellent job of making connections within Johnson’s text and, in many cases, between Johnson’s text and Davidson’s. For example, Amish mentions the possibility that the education system could be understood in terms of “organized complexity,” however, I would ask him to consider whether this is really a bottom-up organization, at least as currently practiced.  Also, Matthew makes an excellent comparison between Johnson and Davidson in terms of the way she and Johnson organize their articles to leave connections implicit. The next skill to focus on (particularly in your papers!) will be to qualify these connections, or in other words, to draw distinctions within the broader connections you’re making. That is, it’s not just important to notice that the two texts are doing similar things, it’s also important to think about the limits of that similarity, because oftentimes the differences within them lead you to a significant insight. For example, Max does an excellent job of discussing the term “emergent” in its specialized, scientific context, which seems to align with the way that Johnson uses the term, except, Max claims, that people are different from ant colonies in that they have individual goals that might not align with one another. He’s beginning to work through the limitations of the connections that Johnson makes. Continue to work through the logic of the connections you make as you begin work on your rough draft: where do distinctions emerge? Why might these distinctions be important? What do they tell us about the limitations of the concepts Davidson and Johnson are dealing with? I look forward to reading your drafts!