Week 3

In his article What Is It We Do When We Write Articles Like This One –and How Can We Get Students To Join Us?, Michael Kleine attempts to explain to English teachers how to teach their students to do research and write on their own rather than just copying information out of a book. He argues that students are not doing enough research before they begin to write research papers. They are just looking in books and in articles to copy sentences to get the paper done. She wants students to learn to write papers themselves and to write at a higher level, as well as enjoying what they are doing.

 

I think I could connect this article with Rosenberg’s article because I think the research process could be a difficult thing to tackle and her strategies might come in handy when trying to complete research for an assignment. Kleine and Rosenberg might agree on the fact that it can be difficult to interpret different articles and thoroughly understand them. Kleine could then put into his article to teachers that maybe the teachers should explain this technique to their students. It could make the research portion of research papers an easier task to complete and then maybe students would be more inclined to do thorough research themselves, instead of just copying it.

 

I think the research plays a significant role in the interviews because as Kleine found out, many of his colleagues reported doing research before they wrote. In my understanding, research was one of the most important parts of the research writing process. I can agree for myself that much of my research was done just so I could get my paper done. I wouldn’t say I was copying the information but I was scanning the books quickly for information that I might be able to use in my writing. The differences here are that the professionals did research for the purpose of writing. They really did want to learn about the subject they were writing about. I think they did this because as Kleine said they wrote out of interest, so the research was something they wanted to learn more about. As in my writing, the paper was for school so I didn’t take the research portion as seriously as I could have. The topics weren’t necessarily something I wanted to learn more about therefore my research was not as in depth.

 

My opinion on this article is that it was a hard article to read. I am not entirely sure I understood the article completely but I felt it was interesting. At the same time, it was hard to comprehend and hard to keep focus. I think Kleine did some interesting research about the writing styles of people from different areas of teaching. He found that teachers from certain areas have different ways of approaching the research and writing processes.