Balancing Your Voice with Others
Purpose: Students will focus on finding and strengthening their own voice and balancing their source material/incorporating their source material more effectively.
Description: This workshops works best after you (the instructor) have covered how to use source material. For this workshop students will need at least 3 different colored highlights/colored pencils. Students will highlight all the material that comes from outside sources, whether paraphrased or directly quoted. Most students are not aware of how much or how little source material they use. Afterwards, students will work on improving how these sources are incorporated and strengthening their own analysis and purpose between sources so that their own argument and voices are dominant.
Suggested Time: Entire class
Procedure:
1. You might begin by asking students how much of a research paper should be their own voice/words -- this also allows you an opportunity to communicate your expectations here. Working with their most recent draft, students should highlight (if in a CWC, the highlighting tool in a Word Processor would work just as well) in this manner:
All outside material that is paraphrase should be colored green
All directly quoted material should be colored yellow
All block quotes should be boxed orange
2. For the remainder of the period, students should draft their revision plan, focusing on how to make their purpose/argument more clear in paragraphs overpowered by source material or how to support their position with source material in paragraphs that have none. Student should address each paragraph of their paper in their revision plan, indicating what the PURPOSE of the paragraph is and their key SUPPORTING POINTS as well as how they will improve their use of source material to make their purpose and key points more clear. Students must be very specific
3. Finally, students will swap their draft and revision plan with a peer
Each partner should consider the reasonableness of the revision plan and weigh if it will correct the issues in each paragraph, offering additional feedback
Each author should then make any necessary additions to their revision plans to include the advice of their peer
4. Revision plans should be turned in to instructor at the end of class. This is a good way for instructors to learn about students’ drafts without reading all the papers. These plans should be returned the following class