Primrose Road

I teach my freshman comp classes with three goals in mind for students:

1. Gain a working understanding of the rhetorical triangle, especially in terms of how they need to adjust their writing to the specific rhetorical situation (i.e. audience and purpose);

2. Learn how (and why) to write essays and term papers that engage specific examples as opposed to general clichés, and

3. Understand appropriate forms of evidence for different rhetorical situations as well as the how, when, and why of citation.

I've taught a handful of 200-level literature classes and have found that the major lingering issue that remains unresolved from freshman comp is #3. Students regularly hand in papers that cite essay mill essays (i.e. sample essays on the Web that serve to entice students to purchase pre-written essays that they can then turn in as their own) and often-random websites as support for their arguments.

While it would be naive of me not to attribute this to "English class doesn't really matter"-itis, I've decided that this semester, I'm doing what I'll call the "What The Heck Am I Looking At?" exercise with my two Fiction survey classes. Each group (50-student English classes being taught by lone adjunct = lots of group work) will receive printouts of the following Web pages, reached by Googling "baldwin sonny's blues" (one of the stories we'll be reading in class):

- Lecture notes from the UC Davis website;

- "Summary and Study Guide from enotes.com;

- Essay on biblical allusions in the story from findarticles.com;

- JSTOR article that they won't be able to access via their school's computers;

- 123helpme.com's essay (see two entries back for my 123helpme.com lamentation);

- Wikipedia entry on the story.

Then each group will discuss the sources in terms of (1) function (i.e. why does the site/page exist?), (2) credibility, and (3) ethical use.

Of course, "ethical" in this context probably means "not making yourself look like someone who is unaware that the teacher, too, has access to Google."

We'll see how this works out. The Freshman Comp / Business Writing Crap vs. Not Crap exercise is still going strong.