Hey guys, welcome to my blog!
As this is my first post, I’m going to go ahead and tell you a bit about myself before we get started. I’m from Albuquerque, New Mexico (any Breaking Bad fans out there?!) and I’m a first year at UBC. I’m in the Faculty of Arts, and I’m doing a specific program within that faculty called Global Citizens where I take a specific set of courses that not only relate very nicely to each other, but also specifically relate to and focus on the topic of global citizenship.
Now, I could go into what it means to me to be a global citizen, but I think a few of my classmates will cover that, so I’ll go ahead and get into the topic of academic writing, which is something we’ll be focusing on in this ASTU class (or arts studies seminar).
I have been writing research papers for a several years now, and of course, citing is a crucial component of this kind of writing. It’s something that my high school teachers made sure I knew how to do, but for the first time this week, we’ve learned a bit more about why citation is important. In high school we cited other authors to give our papers some depth and context (and to avoid plagiarism of course), but now I understand that there is a whole other component that I had never considered before.
Our text book Academic Writing an Introduction by Janet Giltrow, Richard Gooding, Daniel Burgoyne, and Marlene Sawatsky states that by citing the writer “gets to identify himself or herself as a member of the group collectively” as well as “take a turn in the conversation” and “report the current state of knowledge about the subject at hand” (28). In other words, as we have been discussing in class, we aren’t just throwing a few quotes into our papers in order to make them sound more intelligent, and to make people believe we actually know what we’re talking about, but we use the research of scholars in our writing to show the reader the “conversation” that has already been going on, and where we as authors can insert our own research and/or ideas.
In my last year of high school, I was required to write a twenty page thesis paper, and I chose the topic of body modification. Though I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time, I can now see how all of the quotes I used from the local tattoo artist, piercing master, and branding artist that I interviewed, along with the research done by experts on the topic, both pro and con, were creating an entire discussion around my argument, and supporting my contributions.
Anyway! I just thought this was a new and interesting insight into my own writing. Hopefully this post wasn’t too dry.
Thanks for reading my first ever blog post!
Olivea
Giltrow, Janet, et al. Academic Writing an Introduction. 3rd ed. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2014. Print.