Category Archives: in my classroom

ENGL 395: Latin@Bodies on the (Poetry) Line [session 2]

By IRIS Posted on by

As I mentioned earlier, this past term an English professor and I repeated an experiment that I’d conducted with American Studies juniors last year, wherein we integrated information literacy concepts into several key points in their seminar. By the end of the term, I met with this seminar 4 times, sometimes for as little as 10 or 15 minutes, and sometimes as long as the full class period. In every case, I worked with the students on concepts that were simultaneously part of an advanced information literacy “curriculum” of sorts as well as timed to help them accomplish an upcoming assignment.

Here’s the overview:

  1. Presearch — identifying and preparing to join scholarly conversations
  2. Bibliography as an intellectual product (Your are here)
  3. The Literature Review — mapping your scholarly conversation
  4. Creativity in Constraint

Session 2: Bibliography as an Intellectual Product

This session lasted about 15 or 20 minutes. I arrived at the beginning of the class, and participated in a discussion about readings they (and I) had done, and then transitioned into a brief discussion about bibliographies. After this session, students would be preparing an annotated bibliography as one of the initial stages working up to their final paper.

We started by looking at the bibliography in one of their readings, pulling out examples of entries there that illustrated the building blocks on which the author had built the article. Some entries gave us background information, some gave us a theoretical grounding, some pointed us to other scholars who were part of the same critical conversation about the topic.*

From there, we expanded on our notion of what bibliographies do. They are not lists, and they’re not incidental. They’re also not busy-work. Rather, they’re just as much an intellectual and rhetorical product of the author as is the prose of the argument. They map out the boundaries and the interlocutors that are part of a given scholarly conversation. They provide citations for key theoretical works that undergrads have trouble finding on their own (or knowing which will be useful for their projects). For undergrads especially, they also point toward important works that are part of the conversation but that would never come up in the search process because their titles and descriptions don’t share vocabulary (and since search is just about term matching, branching out into new vocabulary is incredibly important, particularly in the humanities where the jargon isn’t as stable or codified as it is in the sciences). “These scholars know each other,” I point out to the students. “They’ve heard each other at conferences, gone to graduate school together, talked with each other over email and Facebook… As they’re conceiving of their articles, they have all these other people’s work in their heads, so they know to cite so-and-so’s work even though there’s no shared vocabulary. Or else they know that so-and-so talks about the topic using this other vocabulary, so they can search on that vocabulary. Or else they know that so-and-so’s work on a completely different topic is relevant to their own work on this topic and can show you those connections and open up a whole new scholarly conversation to you.” This has usually never occurred undergrads. I encourage students to look at bibliographies as they would look at conversational clumps at a party — seeing who is talking to whom, then seeing what they’re saying and how they interact with each other, then joining a conversation and adding to it while referring back to the people whose points you’re expanding on or countering.

To tap into my own geekiness and the readiness of many Carleton students to revel in an honest-to-goodness intellectual geek out moment, I then pointed out that citation styles themselves, far from being arbitrary and complex hoop courses invented to make student’s hoop-jumping lives difficult, in fact reveal the epistemologies of the disciplines they serve. The styles are jargon, meant to communicate complex ideas in predictable, short, human-readable (everyone laughs) bursts of information. APA, for example, privileges dates and really only needs a primary investigator’s last name. This, speaking in generalities, reveals much about the way that science research is conducted (often a lab run by one or two stable scientists and several more temporary post-docs and research assistants, often working on sequential stages of a complex research question, publishing as they go). Providing last name and date lets readers know very quickly which major research question, and at what point along the timeline of an epistemology in which new research either test or build upon older research. MLA, on the other hand, works well for disciplines that are primarily discursive and subjective rather than sequential and objective.  It privileges peoples names and their words, and leaves dates for later primarily for people who need to know precisely what edition you were using or orient themselves in the much less granular timeline of developments in critical theory.

So, with all this in mind, the professor and I encouraged the students to see their annotated bibliographies as their chance to map out the boundaries of the conversation they’d be entering, selecting key works for theoretical foundations, background information, and the main voices in the conversation their papers will be adding to. The annotations should point out why and how each source functions in the context of their papers. And all of this will help them and their professor see the major landmarks on the emerging landscape of their topic.

* Incidentally, John Bean talks about the four kinds of sources found in bibligraphies in his book Engaging Ideas, adapting Bizup’s ideas published in Rhetoric Review in 2008. I didn’t explicitly build my work off of this at the time, but in the future I’ll work Bizup’s BEAM concept more firmly into my instruction.

Bean, John. 2011. Engaging Ideas. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. pp 236-241.

Bizup, Joseph. 2008. “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing.” Rhetoric Review 27 (1) (January 4): 72-86.

ENGL 395: Latin@Bodies on the (Poetry) Line [session 1]

By IRIS Posted on by

Last year I had my first experience being pretty fully integrated into an American Studies advanced seminar that was explicitly preparing juniors for the experience of writing a senior thesis while also tackling a particular topic within the field of American Studies. It worked fantastically, from my perspective. I’d never had as productive and collaborative a working relationship with a set of thesis students as I did with the students from that seminar. So this year I jumped at the chance to repeat that experiment with an advanced seminar in English.

By the end of the term, we will have met 4 times, sometimes for as little as 10 or 15 minutes, and sometimes for as long as the full class period. And in every case, what I’ll work with them on is simultaneously part of an advanced information literacy “curriculum” of sorts as well as timed to help the students accomplish an upcoming assignment.

Here’s the overview:

  1. Presearch — identifying and preparing to join scholarly conversations (Your are here)
  2. Bibliography as an intellectual product
  3. The Literature Review — mapping your scholarly conversation
  4. Creativity in Constraint

Session 1: Presearch

Session one went for 50 minutes, which is about half the class period for a Tuesday/Thursday class like this one, and it was almost entirely discussion-based and, after a brief introduction from the professor and from me, started with a discussion of genre. The professor had previously primed them with a quick look at MLA International Bibliography and with repeated references to and discussions about the concept of the scholarly conversation.

Key points from the introduction:

The importance of participating in a conversation according to conventional rules of conversations (i.e. not simply repeating your interlocutors, not bringing in totally off-topic ideas without bracketing them out somehow, non-verbals that all interlocutors understand, etc). Conversations are a genre of communication, and interlocutors are expected to follow the genre’s conventions or incur the displeasure of their interlocutors (and possibly being snubbed).

Genre:

The course is about Latino/a poetry. How would you describe that genre? What is it trying to do? Who are its audiences? What kinds of evidence does it use to accomplish its goals? What rhetorical moves does it make? (As we discussed this genre, the professor and I kept track of key characteristics on the blackboard.)

The other major genre you’ll be dealing with in this course is the thesis-driven paper — specifically a piece of literary criticism — and in this case you’ll be asked to produce this genre. So what job is this genre doing? Who are its audiences? What kinds of evidence does it employ? What rhetorical moves does it make? (Again, we kept track of key features on the blackboard.)

One more genre, and pre-search:

Probably unbeknownst to you, you’ll also be working with a third genre in this course: the database. (Did a quick search to reveal a result list from MLA International Bibliography.) At this point in the circular research process, when you’re choosing a topic, you have to do a lot of listening in on the scholarly conversations that are happening in order to decide which to join yourself. This will involve doing many probing searches in databases and catalogs, “reading” the result lists and maybe the full records of results that look particularly interesting, slowly building up a map of the conversations you find, learning to vocabulary of those conversations and the key players, and then using all of this to build future searches and further refine your map of the scholarly conversation(s). Thinking of the database as a genre can help you “read” result lists in this concept-mapping way, and to think of searches as expeditions on the mapping quest rather than as end-points.

So, if a result list is a genre, what meaning does a list as a whole convey? Who is the audience? What “evidence” is it using to help its audience reach conclusions? What are the rhetorical moves it makes (think of layout and privileging of certain information as a rhetorical move).

Given all of this, what might finding “nothing on my topic” mean? Are there intellectual/rhetorical moves you can make in that situation (given that you’re talking about very contemporary poetry, it’s likely that you won’t find anything on your particular poem, after all)? [We discussed making arguments from analogy, using work from another poet/poem to illuminate your topic, and we discussed creating a theoretical base on which to ground your own work.] How might you recognize an “interesting question” to pursue? What kinds of things should you keep track of in your research notes that will help you map out the various conversations you find (I provide some templates under “Keeping Useful Notes” here)?

All too soon, our time was up.

Next time: Bibliographies as Intellectual Products.

Teaching a session after they’ve written the paper

By IRIS Posted on by

So here’s something I would never have thought of on my own but turns out to have been really great.

A professor that I work with often was teaching one of the 100-level Writing Seminars that get offered with some regularity. He’d set up the class so that students would have practice doing a variety of kinds of writing (observational, persuasive, etc), and they’d be reading a lot of op ed kinds of things (as well as They Say / I Say by Graff and Birkenstein) along the way to seed discussions and to model their writing on. Pretty typical first year writing seminar fare.

He was also working in formal drafts by having papers due and graded, and then having the term’s final paper be a reworking of one of those papers, using it as a glorified draft. And here’s where things got kind of interesting.

They didn’t really need me early on in the course. He wasn’t asking for more than could be found on the open web up until the time of the final paper, so having me come early would have been a waste of everyone’s time as they wondered what they were doing with me, I wondered what I was doing with them, and we all promptly forgot about the whole thing. But then by the time they might need me, they’d already written a pretty good version of their papers.

“That’s fine!” I said, “They need to know that the research process isn’t linear anyway, so let’s really and truly demonstrate going back to the research steps after having thought critically about their papers.” And so we did. Here’s how it went (it was a 2-hour class session):

Class Discussion

They spent the first third of class discussing the days’ reading, Evgeny Morozov’s “The Death of the Cyberflâneur” from the New York Times. As they did so, I noted down the phrases from the work that they were referencing, the related topics that they were connecting this work to, etc. (I also participated in the discussion a bit, because it was fascinating and lively.)

Following Up and Website Evaluation

As the discussion was wrapping up, the professor asked me, “How would we find out more about Morozov? Is he respected? Has he written other things?”

Chalkboard after class

So I, of course, started from his Wikipedia page, which always gives us a chance to talk about the uses and misuses of Wikipedia, which leads into a nice discussion of authority and how we determine it, which always ends with us agreeing that finding out who caused something to be put up online has a lot to do with how much weight we give to whatever it is we’re looking at. As we found things, I also started a little mindmap on the chalk board of the kinds of topics Morozov publishes on as well as the related terms/topics that had come up during their discussion.

(This is actually not the best example of how this mind-map worked because we did a lot of talking and I did less writing, so you can’t really see that we were using it not just to visualize the topic but also to come up with related terms to use for later search. But more on that in a bit)

(Break)

Research and your final paper

The professor and I both talked a bit about the process of looking critically at your drafts to identify where your reader may need you to give them some evidence before they’ll be willing to follow you along from point A to point B. Evidence is like a bridge that you construct to fill the gap between where your reader is and where you’d like them to be.

Circular research process

Furthermore, this process of having a really good draft in hand, reading it critically, and then finding new evidence to fill gaps you didn’t see before is perfectly normal. In fact, it’s great! The research process is circular, so trying to hammer it out flat will often get you less great results.

See? It looks like this. You are currently re-examining your topic. Again. And ideally you’ll do it often.

At this point we had them pair off, exchange their drafts, and work together to identify places where either hard evidence or other external voices might help them make their papers more effective. Then they reported on their discussions and we all brainstormed together where those kinds of sources might have been published — books? newspapers? scholarly articles? blogs?

They were pretty invested in also talking about readability and tone and stuff, which wasn’t really the point of the exercise, but which I pointed out also has an impact on the kinds of sources you might choose. If you’re going for a very coloquial tone, you might not need an analysis of a massive World Bank data set. Maybe you could just find a journalist reporting summary figures.

Anyway, from here we went into actual searching. We listed off the major kinds of sources that people said they’d need (predictably it was newspapers, census statistics, articles and books). I told them that the strategies were were going to use to find newspaper articles and to find scholarly articles would also help them find books and more web sources (free text vs indexing searching, but I didn’t say that). We worked from their research guide and we used the Cyberflâneur article’s topic (already somewhat mindmapped and already fully discussed in class) as our example.

Taking terms that we’d already seen used in the day’s readings and in Mozorov’s wikipedia article and in our mind map, clumped them into topics, so that we could say “If I’m doing research on social networking, relevant articles may not have used that term but may have talked about the names of specific social networks, like Facebook or Twitter. And if I’m talking about individualism in this context, other terms like privacy or performativity or “personal data” might be useful.” (This part of the class is always highly interactive, with them supplying nearly all of the terms and me putting them on the board or into our search boxes.) Then I do my brief venn diagram of Boolean to show how to teach the computer what we mean by “social networks” and “individualism,” and then we do that on the screen. We talk through the weirdness of the computer not understanding words, just matching letters in a row, so our job is to come up with words that would likely appear in a useful article but would likely not appear in all articles. (If this process of using terms in our readings to help us generate searches, yes, this is the Term Economy and Instrumental Reading at work.) Then we look at our results, map the interesting ones, glean the interesting terms, and make another search.

The class wraps up with them doing this on their own topics, using the Term Diary to track the useful terms they’re finding, and then reporting back to us some of the more useful/interesting terms they found that they wouldn’t have thought to search on in the first place.

And there you have it. My first experiment with teaching for students who had already written their papers. I really have to hand it to the professor for setting things up this way, and for starting us off with a discussion the way he did. He got their participatory juices flowing and I just road that momentum, but it sure made for a fun class session.

Some 100-level information literacy concepts in lesson plan form

By IRIS Posted on by

Several people have asked for examples of my lesson plans lately, which is both flattering and terrifying. Flattering for all the obvious reasons, and terrifying because I can always see the flaws in my lessons when I write them out to share, and terrifying because my “lesson plans” are the barest sketches of outlines regardless of how many hours I’ve put into preparation, tailoring the class to the specific assignment at hand and trying to match the course professors’ ultimate learning goals as much as possible. When I get into the classroom with 2 or 3 learning goals firmly in mind, an interactive exercise or two up my sleeve, and notes about readings the students have been or will be doing and how to mesh those with my own session, the actually class is more like jazz — playing off of the outline and goals but also off of the students and the course professor.

So lesson plans are kind of hard for me to write down in a way that feels authentic. Still, with all that as preamble, it occurs to me that even sketches can help people looking for ideas. I’ve benefited greatly from colleagues sharing their sketches with me. So here goes. (I’ve chosen to focus on 100-level classes because the people asked me about those specifically.)

First, there are several modules that I’ve already written about here in more or less detail. While they shift with the given context, I love to work them in whenever relevant, and I think they help 100-level students begin to get some practice with the kind of critical information literacy that my colleagues and I wrote about in our recent article CSI(L) Carleton: Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices. Other similar modules are linked to in the lessons plans I’ve sketched out later in the post.

  • The value of book reviews
    I started toying with this before the Information Literacy in Student Writing really got going, but I’ve continued to use book reviews as valuable sources since and worked it in whenever I can because of  the useful habits of mind it helps develop.
  • Citation as a lens for interdisciplinarity
    This one really is a fleshed out lesson plan (which takes about 20 minutes) and the main points of which I’ve used over and over again in many courses with great success.
  • Turning topics into searches
    Builds off of the idea of concept mapping in ways that then generate source decisions and search terms in very practical ways. This takes about 15 minutes and it helps if you have some seeds to start with that you can lay out on the board as the students are working.

Most classes need to get at some combination of conceptual and practical learning goals, so here are two very different sessions that I’ve given recently. I chose the first NOT because it’s one of my crowning achievements. It’s anything but that and I’d love to hear ideas for streamlining it. But it does show the combination of practical and conceptual, and it’s a multi-cultural topic (which matches the needs of at least one of the people who asked for a lesson plan example). In terms of the match with the concepts we wrote about in the “CSI(L) Carleton” article, this class teach concrete search skills but emphasize the context-building nature of scholarship, the importance of watching for the breadcrumbs scholars leave for you in their writing to tell you what they’re drawing on, what related concepts are important, and the purpose of using sources in the first place.

The second is one of the sessions I did for a course that has no formal research component, building off of what I learned from the “Evaluation” section of the “CSi(L) Carleton” article. You’ll notice it looks a lot like a class for a research paper. The main difference is in the framing — emphasizing that this kind of looking and the habits involved are useful for all kinds of work.

CCST 100: Growing Up Cross Culturally (had to be taught in a room with no student computers)

Assignment: Write a paper based on one of the cross-cultural studies topics they’ve talked about in class (which follow the life-stages and study how cultures influencing each other can change the way people experience those life stages, such as birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, adulthood, old age, and death). Find a few sources (3-5-ish) outside of course readings to support your arguments. Students are encouraged to take inspiration from recent international news/culture stories.

Resources: Research Guide, New York Times article on Japanese tooth un-straightening, and a Term Diary

Introduction (10 minutes)

  • Why only a few sources?
    The purpose of your sources is not to provide an exhaustive list of everything written on your topic. It’s also not to allow you to write a report. Instead, you’re writing your own paper, and you’re using a few outside voices to help you situated your ideas within the “conversation” that’s already happening on a topic. Conversations don’t work well if you parrot back what everyone says, but they also don’t work well if you just go on in a monologue and make everyone sit back and listen. Conversations work well when you build on what people have said and contribute new ideas or perspectives.
  • What constitutes “on my topic”?
    We often look for things that are “on our topics” but sometimes it’s more interesting (or necessary, if the topic is too new) to look for related topics or analogous topics and talk about how they support or contribute to your understanding of your topic. THIS IS OK. Scholars do it all the time and for this assignment it’s almost a given that you’ll have to do the same. Give some examples. (First year students often don’t realize this is allowed.)

Brainstorming Exercise (working in small groups – 20 minutes)

  • Term economy (see this blog post)
    Computers can’t read. They match letters in a row. Consequently, we have to figure out what letters in a row to feed into the computer to make it spit out the results we want. This is why we’ll be using a term diary to record keywords and phrases as we go along today, and then using those to help us come up with new searches.

In small groups, read the New York Times article on the new fad where Japanese women make their teeth crooked. Answer the following questions and report back. We’ll use these concepts and terms for our searches in the rest of the session.

  1. What concepts is this related to? (symmetry, beauty, youth culture, individualism, etc)
  2. Who might have written more about this or related concepts?
  3. What questions might they have asked of these topics?
  4. Where might these things have been published? (blogs, newspapers, academic articles, books, etc)
  5. What are some key terms associated with these topics?

Wikipedia with a glance at Goolge (5 minutes)

  • Basic searches using key terms already generated. These will inevitably reveal a wikipedia article. Mention that this is wonderful. Watch students faint in surprise…
  • discussion: You’ve heard that wikipedia isn’t good to use — why is that? What might it be good for? (use as a jumping-off place like any other reference work, good for term gathering and to point you toward related concepts and further reading — bibliographies are wonderful things)
  • term gathering and source gathering as we jump around and follow links through Wikipedia together with students leading as much as possible– add to our growing list of terms in our term diaries (In this year’s class, we stumbled on the term “wabi-sabi” which is about the many things, including the aesthetic of asymmetry.)

LexisNexis, for the international coverage (10 minutes)

  • Point out that we’re searching “every word the journalists wrote” so think like a journalist when coming up with terms to try.
  • Try several searches using the terms we already found (letting students choose). Collect new terms, concepts, and potential authors/experts along the way.
  • Introduce the idea of concept clusters (i.e. boolean searching)

Academic Search Premier (10 minutes)

  • Explain the differences between free-text databases and indexing/abstracting databases — now we have to think like scholars/librarians when choosing terms to use
  • how to limit to scholarly articles
  • discussion of how scholarly articles differ from newspapers in terms of scope and topic coverage
  • student-lead searching as before, this time introducing the power of subject headings.

Books (5 minutes)

  • Books often contain much broader topics than articles, so now we have to zoom out and look at broader topics that might give us good foundations for our topic.
  • student-lead searching as before, pointing out the importance and power of subject headings.
  • Point out call numbers — remind students that they can ask for help, especially the first few times they use call numbers to locate books
Wrap-up
  • There is no one perfect search — try combinations of terms and write down new terms/concepts as you come across them
  • Librarians can help you, so come talk to us about your specific topics.
Some things I’ll change next time:
  • TOO MUCH STUFF — The constraints of space and the breadth of the assignment were working against us, but really it was too many things. Next time I will almost certainly cut out the books section. I just don’t know yet what to do about the rest, but this is probably double what it should have been.
  • Emphasize the brainstorming/problem-solving part of when searches fail — The students didn’t seem to understand well enough why we weren’t concerned with failed searches so next time we need to build failed searches more explicitly into the expectations.

ENGL 100: Visions of the Waste Land

Context: This course had no research component. It was important to the professor that students learn to read closely and delve into the primary source text. However, the professor and I both realized that it can be hard to find interesting things in texts if you lack the context to know what’s interesting when you see it. So we devised this context-building session and assignment to help students know how to build up their own knowledge to the point where they can accomplish the kind of careful reading the professor wanted.

Assignment: Select an article that is illuminating, write a 200-word summary to be handed in, be prepared to lead the class in a discussion of a passage in the book based on both your interpretation and the article you found.

Resources: Research Guide

Introduction (5 minutes)

  • Matching Evidence to Audience
    There are lots of kind of evidence, and in other courses you’ll be asked to find books and articles and statistics and images and who knows what else to back up your arguments. Lead a little discussion about kinds of evidence that may matter to some audiences but not others, like blogs or something your aunt said or aggregate statistics vs data.  In this course your evidence is the text itself and your audience is not interested in other kinds of evidence.
  • Context-Building
    However, all of this doesn’t mean that YOU aren’t allowed to know things other than the text. Far from it. Context-building helps you figure out what questions to ask of the text and also to see how other scholars in the field have accomplished this kind of thing so that you can model yourself a bit on their approaches.

Finding Models to inspire you and aspire to: (5 minutes)

  • Show how to search within the publication “The Explicator.”

Finding the backgrounds of words: OED (use “smashing” as an example) (5 minutes)

  • How words get into the OED
  • What’s in there (etymologies and date charts and quotes)

Scholarly articles often provide a lot of context/insight: JSTOR (20 minutes)

  • Limit to literary journals only
  • Building concept clusters
  • Brainstorm together about some concepts that might be interesting to follow up and what words might be associated with those concepts. Work together to cluster those concept (having students write on the whiteboard together)
  • Have students work in small groups to find an article and report back on why they chose the article they did (emphasizing aspects of evaluation by making them articulate a choice and discuss it together).

Following up on a citation (15 minutes)

  • Usually one of the best ways to find information because scholars index their own literature. Bibliographies are creative things build from experience and wide readings, which means you can find connections to things you wouldn’t find purely by searching.
  • Explain that book citations list a place and publisher while articles don’t, and how to follow up on book citations (catalog) vs article citations (A-Z list) – this whole thing takes about a minute.
  • Working in small groups again, use the article they found JSTOR to find a book or article that we have access to. Bonus points if you find a book citation that we have access to.
  • Go together to collect one of the found books from the stacks (have an example on hand just in case nobody found a book that’s available). Look at near-by books to talk about what kinds of context that helps them build. Mention that similar call numbers in different areas of the library (reference, periodicals, etc) will be about similar topics. Show the “Google of the book” (i.e. the index) of a book.

Wrap-up (10 minutes)

  • Group discussion about how what we’ve found today applies to what they’re reading. Any words or themes that seem more important now?

You have caught the tenor of the argument

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You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. …  You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (Burke 110-11)

This is Kenneth Burke’s analogy for academic writing, my own version of which I use in most of my classes. Composition instructors like the authors of They Say / I Say focus on the phrase “then you put in your oar” as the turning point (13-14). For me and my profession, the key phrase is “you have caught the tenor of the argument.” Embedded there I see so much about information literacy — what people are talking about, what positions have been covered already, what evidence counts as good evidence in this conversation, what terms will this group use and understand when talking about the topic, whom will you need to acknowledge as you lay out your position… You have caught the tenor of the argument.

Another thing I love about this conversational analogy is that the protagonist is never quite done listening to others and incorporating their ideas into new statements. The research process is not linear.

(Er, I’ve finished the prefaces and introduction to this book now. I promise not to write a blog post for every 5 pages of reading. Really.)

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Second Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.