12018-03-16T22:45:52+00:00Susan Gardnerd75a28c6570c5c305a038bfe36f9b0334fdf86d613plain2018-04-03T23:50:38+00:00LMU7c67764c12c98f44dde9b0c909430ac1f143977fLibrarian Commentary: Learning to engage in academic discourse is difficult for novice researchers. The Citation Project, a series of research studies on source use, found students need instruction in strategies for understanding, initiating, and entering into academic conversations and arguments. Students in the study failed to summarize sources properly, instead resorting to copying and patch-writing from individual sentences and/or only the first or second page of the source.
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1media/Red_ComicBG.jpg2018-01-24T22:05:29+00:00Deciphering Academic Writing38plain2020-03-23T20:36:02+00:00Once students have found a topic, and have located specific studies about the topic, then students must read the articles. This is much more difficult than the student expects. Academic writing is written for professors and not necessarily for undergraduate students. In Christina Gallo’s comic, she captures her shock and awe when confronting an academic journal article.
In her comic, Christina represents her sense of “confusion” at the writing she encounters in an academic journal. In representing the writing as Chinese characters, she is emphasizing how foreign this type of writing is to her.
As you can see in her comic, Christina is viewing the academic journal article on her computer. In reality, students need to become even more intimate with the texts; this typically includes writing notes, or “annotating” the text either by making notes on the computer in the “margins” or by printing out the journal article and writing on the paper version of the text.
This involves finding important ideas from many different texts and putting them together to create a coherent whole. This is called “synthesis.” In Qinglan Li’s comic, the extreme difficulty of understanding academic writing is made clear. The closeup of the academic writing has been annotated in red, yellow, and blue; she shows us that she has repeatedly tried to find what is important in the academic text. And yet, she is still not able to “understand” what the words mean. Moreover, Qinglan recognizes that she can’t “paraphrase” what she can’t understand.
