This research and citation exercise measures your mastery of ULO 3.1.
Your Expository Essay assignment requires that you use at least one academic source from the CSU Online Library, so this assignment will help you navigate the CSU Online Library’s webpage and resources in order to improve your information literacy, or your ability to find, evaluate, and utilize credible and relevant information. Begin by viewing the CSU Online Library’s webpage that addresses researching for English Composition courses:
Develop Research and Information Literacy Skills library guide
Next, view the following short video about researching for English Composition courses. Closed-captioning is available once you access the video.
Video How to Conduct Research for English Composition Courses
View the following short video about how to find peer-reviewed articles. Closed-captioning is available once you access the video.
Video How to Find Peer-Reviewed Articles
Practice navigating the CSU Online Library’s resources by finding and summarizing an academic source. Your source should be a peer-reviewed academic journal article published within the last 5 years. Use the tips in the video to narrow your search results to fit these parameters. The source you find should be related to your planned topic for the Unit VII Expository Essay. If you struggle to find an appropriate source, you should reach out to the CSU librarians for assistance. In your assignment submission, include a reference citation for your source. Use the journal article example references in the CSU Citation Guide to help you.
Then write a short summary of the article (roughly 150 words) that includes some of the article’s main points and what you think is the article’s thesis or main idea; be sure to use in-text citations if you paraphrase or directly quote from the article. This short assignment will not only allow you to develop your research skills and comfort with the CSU Online Library, but it will also help prepare for the Annotated Bibliography assignment you will complete in Composition II.
Example:
Summary:
Jennifer Pooler Gray’s article analyzes composition students’ time constraints and the effect these pressures have on their ability to complete and revise solid papers. She uses the phrase time poverty to describe a general trend toward business and hectic schedules in all sectors of a person’s life, including learning, necessitating that each task be completed as quickly as possible, even at the sake of quality: “Writing students are time impoverished as they rush through papers” (Gray, 2021, p. 39). To complete the article, Gray surveys 98 composition students to determine their perspectives about their schedules and ability to devote time to producing solid written assignments for class. Ultimately, she posits that the composition classroom must not simply ask students to churn out a certain number of pages of material as their ultimate goal; rather, the composition classroom must model “slow writing approaches to courses” that allow for intentional instruction, discussion, drafting, feedback, revision, and questions about the writing process (Gray, 2021, p. 45).
Reference:
Gray, J. P. (2021). Slow writing: Student perspectives on time and writing in first-year composition courses. Currents in Teaching and Learning, 13(1), 39-47.
