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Solved by verified expert:Please complete the Brainstorming Worksheet about the two texts in Unit 2
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Due: Tuesday, October 24 at 11:00 am
Brainstorming is often an effective way to prepare for essay-writing. To
prepare for Tuesday’s class and for your next essay assignment, please
follow the steps below. (Note: In this next essay, you will summarize,
compare, and contrast key topics found in two of the sources that we have
discussed in Unit 2. You will also speak from personal experience about
any gaps these authors have in their arguments.)
1. Record your notes below.
2. Select at least two texts from Unit 2 that you see discuss a similar idea, though
perhaps in a different way. Write the title and author of your chosen texts
below:
Text/Author#1:___________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
Text/Author#2:___________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
3. In the space provided below, now write a 2-3 sentence summary of each
author’s argument. Follow the sentence model below to help get you
started. In the essay
“______________________________________________,” (author’s
name) argues, claims, suggests, reflects upon… Toward the end of (author’s
last name)’s essay, he/she suggests that we can solve this problem by…
Brief Summary of Argument from Text #1
Brief Summary of Argument from Text #2
4. Now, think more about the texts you’ve just summarized. What is one
theme or topic that you have noticed discussed in BOTH of your
chosen texts?
Possible Topics
Value of paraphrasing/summarizing.
Why students plagiarize.
Students’ use of sources.
Ineffective or unclear assignments.
Fostering student creativity and originality.
Your Chosen Topic:
______________________________________________________________
____________________________________________
5. Consider how your authors treat this topic similarly(comparison).
Then, consider how they treat the topic differently(contrast). You might
organize your ideas following the chart below:
Topic SIMILARITIES
Examples of topic from
text #1:
Examples of topic from
text #2:
Can you identify anything
that the authors are
missing from their
discussion of this topic?
Do they not understand
something about student
writers, for example?
Topic DIFFERENCES
Information Illiteracy and Mass Market Writing Assessments
Author(s): Les Perelman
Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Sep., 2008), pp. 128-141
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20457047
Accessed: 27-09-2017 17:04 UTC
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CCC 60: 1 / SE PTEM BE R 2008
WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Writing Study Group of the NCTE
Executive Committee. “NCTE Beliefs
Composition. Council of Writing
Program Administrators. Available at
about the Teaching of Writing.” Urbana,
IL: National Council of Teachers of
www.wpacouncil.org.
English, 2004. .
Information Illiteracy and Mass Market Writing Assessments
Les Perelman
Long before it was launched, the College Board hailed the new SAT writing
essay as a major step in improving writing instruction in America (McGrath
24). Their literature continues to report that the new test is placing a new em
phasis on writing skills in American High Schools (Mattern, Camara, and
Kobrin). It and its sister College Board tests such as the AP Language and Com
position Test are placing a new emphasis on writing, but, unfortunately, the
emphasis is on composition techniques that, instead of fostering good writing
and critical thinking, encourage students to embrace habits that produce
mechanistic prose lacking any intellectual substance.
Using training samples and other sample essays all published by the Col
lege Board, I developed a cynical but effective formula for coaching three high
school seniors retaking the SAT. I told them to follow the rigid structure of the
five-paragraph essay, fill up both pages of the test booklet, include lots of de
tail even if it is made up or inaccurate, use lots of big words, especially substi
tuting “plethora of” and “myriad number of” for “many,” and to insert a famous
quotation near the conclusion of the essay even if it is irrelevant to the rest of
the essay.
My formula appears to work. All three students who followed it improved
their raw scores on the essay section by at least 2 points out of the 12 possible.
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SYMPOSIUM
Here is part of one of the student essays that was scored as a 5, out of 6 possible
points, by each of the two College Board readers1:
A major reason why cooperation is a preference to competition is because com
petition induces civil struggle at a time of crisis while cooperation reduces ten
sion. In the 1930’s, American businesses were locked in a fierce economic compe
tition with Russian merchants for fear that their communist philosophies would
dominate American markets. As a result, American competition drove the coun
try into an economic depression and the onlyway to pull them out of it was through
civil cooperation. American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for
civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting “the only thing we
need to fear is itself,” which desdained competition as an alternative to coopera
tion for success. In the end, the American economy pulled out of the depression
and succeeded communism.
The College Board’s Scoring Guide states that an essay receiving a score
of 5 “effectively develops a point of view on the issue and demonstrates strong
critical thinking, generally using appropriate examples, reasons, and other evi
dence to support its position; is well organized and focused, demonstrating
coherence and progression of ideas; and exhibits facility in the use of language,
using appropriate vocabulary” (“How the Essay Is Scored”).
The student who wrote this essay, however, knew it was badly written
and that it did not exhibit mastery of anything. He told me that his current
English teacher would have graded such an essay as a D. He was amazed that
the College Board could be so easily fooled. He knew that his explanation of
the Great Depression was wrong, but he could not remember the correct facts
quickly so he just made some up. One could argue that with my small sample,
the scores on the essays were just mistakes and do not represent the way most
essays are graded. The College Board, however, does not admit that their scor
ing process can produce any errors. The College Board’s “Essay Score Verifica
tion Policy Guidelines” state that their regular scoring process “already includes
a built-in validation of the reader’s scores:’ and, consequently, essays scores
will not be rescored nor can they be appealed” (Hand Scoring).
I do not have space in this article to enumerate and discuss all of the bad
habits reinforced by these tests and evident in the above passage, such as the
consistent use of inappropriate vocabulary, meaningless sentences, and non
sequiturs. See the NCTE Task Force on SAT and ACT Writing Tests, The Im
pact of the SAT and ACT Timed Writing Tests, for a more comprehensive dis
cussion of the deficiencies in the new SAT Writing Test. Instead, I focus
primarily on one deficiency, which I define as “information illiteracy:” Infor
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CCC 60: 1 / S EPTEM BE R 2008
mation illiteracy not only makes it more difficult for individuals to find infor
mation, but it makes it more difficult for them to differentiate between truth
and falsehood. Indeed, information illiteracy often retards the desire to do so,
reducing all assertions to the equal status of someone’s opinion.
I derive the negative term “information illiteracy” from the positive form
“information literacy,” a term developed by librarians over the past twenty-five
years as “the abilities to recognize when information is needed and to locate,
evaluate, effectively use, and communicate information in its various formats”
(State University of New York Council of Library Directors). In 2000, the Asso
ciation of College and Research Libraries (a division of the American Library
Association) published Information Literacy CompetencyStandardsforHigher
Education, which defines “an information literate individual” as someone who
can:
* Determine the extent of information needed
* Access the needed information effectively and efficiently
* Evaluate information and its sources critically
* Use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose
* Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use
of information, and access and use information ethically and legally.
(2-3)
Information literacy is an inherent component of almost all writing and, as
such, constitutes part of general literacy.
Information literacy permeates all phases of the writing process. Discov
ering what information is needed, how to obtain it, and then evaluating it prop
erly are, in most writing situations, part of Invention (or Prewriting). First a
writer needs to assess which facts constitute information. As James Kinneavy
in A Theory of Discourse (93) notes, “To be informative a statement must en
able us to relate the factual basis to some explicit or implicit system about
which information is desired. In most instances, data are needed to help in
form and refine a thesis, as well later to be used as evidence in supporting it:”
The writer of the SAT essay at the beginning of this article did none of these
things.
In addition to using information effectively when writing informative and
persuasive documents, writers need to learn the complex rules that govern
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SYMPOSIUM
the appropriate use of information. In most venues, information is most effec
tive as paraphrase, when it has been internalized by the writer and reformu
lated in his or her own words. Writers, however, also need to determine when
direct quotations are more appropriate and how to identify information that,
in a particular context, needs to be acknowledged and cited. When revising, a
writer may discover that information is incomplete, inconclusive, or contra
dictory. Then, either the information has to be reinterpreted or additional in
formation needs to be obtained. Finally, editing involves all the mechanics of
proper citation and formatting as well as checking on the accuracy and ethics
of how the information is reported.
Data Smog
Curiously, as our ability to access information online is increasing exponen
tially, our ability to use information effectively is decreasing dramatically. In
pharmacology, a similar phenomenon is termed a “paradoxical effect”: a large
dose of a drug produces the opposite effect of a smaller clinical dose. The para
doxical effect of too much information is almost the same as having no infor
mation at all. Daniel Shank defined the consequence of too much information
as “data smog:’ There is so much information coming at us, from so many
directions and so quickly, that it is difficult if not impossible to differentiate
good information from incomplete, biased, misleading, or just incorrect infor
mation. Moreover, the speed of the information coming at us produces the
contradictory feelings that we need to make decisions quickly while being anx
ious because we know that there is still more information out there that we
have not processed. Information literacy provides us with the skills and strat
egies necessary to cope with data smog.
Large-scale national tests are now incorporating what they define as docu
ment-based writing exercises, yet the specific formulations appear to test how
comfortably students can function within data smog rather than how to emerge
from it through information literacy. The SAT Writing Essay is the most egre
gious example. Graders of the essay are specifically instructed to reward the
quantity of detailed and specific information but to ignore the quality of infor
mation. Blatantly false data is just as good as true information. Consequently,
the student author of the passage above did not waste time trying to remem
ber what were the real causes of the Great Depression. Instead, he brings in
some notions from the Cold War to frame a detailed narrative that makes a
strange sort of sense but has no connection with the real history. But within
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C CC 60: 1 / SE PTEM BE R 2008
the data smog-filled universe of the SAT, in which the rapid inscription of in
formation is much more important than its accuracy, such a strategy is re
warded.
Document-Based Essay Questions
The College Board and the Educational Testing Service pay lip service to the
notion of information literacy, and during the past several years they have in
corporated Document-Based Essay Questions (DBQs) into the Advanced Place
ment Composition and History Tests. Completing one of these DBQs, however,
has as much to do with displaying real information literacy as completing a
child’s eight-piece jigsaw puzzle has to do with painting a portrait.
The sample DBQ for the English Language and Composition Test given
in the May 2007 and May 2008 Course Description (College Board, English), for
instance, presents the reader with six sources, five texts and one chart, all of
which are concerned with the topic of the relationship between American tele
vision and U.S. presidential elections.
The prompt reads:
This question requires you to synthesize a variety of sources into a coherent, well
written essay. Refer to the sources to supportyourposition; avoid mere paraphrase
or summary. Your argument should be central; the sources should support this ar
gument.
After introducing the topic of the influence of television in presidential
elections since 1960, the prompt gives the following assignment:
Assignment: Read the following sources (including any introductory information)
carefully. Then, in an essay that synthesizes at least three of the sourcesfor support,
take a position that defends, challenges, or qualifies the claim that television has
had a positive impact on presidential elections.
The first source is a three-paragraph excerpt from an encyclopedia; the
second source is a one-paragraph excerpt from what is listed as an online ar
ticle but is actually an online version of an article from the Museum of Broad
cast Communication’s Encyclopedia of Television. Moreover, the excerpt
contains a typo: the date on the website is ‘April 1993,” not ‘April 1992,” the
date listed in the College Board Guide. This typo is not trivial. Because the
incorrect date is before Clinton’s victory, a student could argue that Clinton’s
association with MTV helped his election. Moreover, the date is part of the
subheading for this section of a larger article, ‘April 20, 1993-Bill Clinton’s
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S Y M P OS I U M
MTV Appearance”. Although the excerpt mentions that President Clinton was
interacting with a “member of the MTV Generation;” there is no indication
that this event took place on MTV. Moreover, there is no ellipsis indicating
missing text. The third source is curious. It is listed as an article by Louis
Menand, but it is actually a review by Menand of two new books. The excerpt
consists of three paragraphs, the first two largely paraphrasing and quoting
from the section on the Kennedy-Nixon debates in Theodore H. White’s The
Making of the President 1960. The third paragraph consists of two sentences
quoting “one commentator.” In the original review, these two sentences follow
a detailed three-paragraph summary of a 1961 book by Daniel Boorstin, the
“one commentator.” The last paragraph also omits Menand’s following sen
tences, which place Boorstin’s comments in historical perspective: “In 1961,
this observation seemed alarming or alarmist. Today, no wisdom is more con
ventional.”
The last three sources consist of a chart of the Nielsen Ratings for the
1960 and the 1976 through 1996 presidential elections, and then short excerpts
from a book on television and politics and from the memoirs of newscaster
Ted Kopel. While the chart containing the Nielsen data lists the number of
people watching presidential debates, it does not list the overall U.S. popula
tion or represent the audience watching presidential debates as a percentage
of that number. Because the American population increased dramatically dur
ing this thirty-six-year period, percentages rather than raw numbers would
provide a much better basis of comparison. In addition, although there were
usually several presidential debates in each election, the table presents data
for only one. Finally, the table displays Nielsen Rating numbers without any
explanation of what these numbers represent.
These passages and data are to real sources of information what “sound
bites” are to complete arguments. Rather than teaching students how to work
with information, incomplete, misleading, and incomprehensible word bites
such as those included in this exercise teach students to be comfortably lost in
the data smog.
The DBQ essay prompt also encourages students to use information im
properly. That the prompt calls for a minimum of three sources is probably not
arbitrary. Three sources fit nicely into the three body paragraphs of a five-para
graph essay, the College Board’s favorite textual form. Even more disconcert
ing is that the prompt tells the students to avoid “mere paraphrase” but does
not say anything about using too many quotations. Indeed, several of the
sources have been edited down to be largely an author quoting other sources.
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CCC 60: 1 / SEPT EM B ER 2008
Yet we teach students to seek, when possible, the original source of a quota
tion rather than just citing a secondary source quoting the original. Students
writing this essay in forty minutes are going to quote their sources quoting the
original rather than merely paraphrasing the essential information. The as
signment invites students to mindlessly patch together groups of quotations
around a topic sentence to form each of the three paragraphs. Moreover, there
is nothing in the prompt nor …
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