I am analyzing a paper I did for a United States History: Women in History class I did for a final project about two years ago at another university. I do remember that we were supposed to use many different sources as we wrote these papers, including a video we watched, the class presentations, the lecture the teacher gave beforehand, and the assigned readings we had to complete.
It's kind of foggy now, but I'm pretty sure I based most of the paper around the video we watched, because reading back through the paper, I refer to it more than any other source and it seems that the main subject of the video coincided with that of the paper. I remember throwing in a little of my own little phrases and ideals based on my own opinion, because while the paper was based on the women suffrage movement and needed to have a clear and strong background in readily available material, you were also supposed to entwine bits and pieces of your own opinion.
I'm honestly not sure that this was a "novel" paper-I read back over it now and it sounds more like I'm just regurgitating some dates and facts. While I do add in a little flavor here and there, this paper could have been written by anyone. It is my own-but then again it comes from a mill and is in some respects mindless.
I think it would be very hard for me to write a paper solely on facts alone, with no personal interjections whatsoever. It would be almost completely impossible. Well, I don't know I guess if I had to I could..science papers and such aren't really based on emotions and I've done those before.
I'm not exactly sure what this question is asking. I know I didn't plagiarize and I know I created it myself, but I'm not sure of the how-maybe it has something to do with the way I read/saw/heard the information given to me vs. how others saw it differently?
I believe my own contribution to the paper was telling it from my perspective-they say that it is almost impossible for two people to write the exact same paper at the exact same time because everyone is different - even if they're writing on the same subject and using the same references. Everyone has a different writing "voice" and everyone will see videos and read books and get something different out of it.
The professor who assigned the paper was more concerned, I think, with making sure we understood the literal facts of the information-the names, the dates, and etc. I think she enjoyed reading our own take on the times, but she was more interested in making sure we had learned something-not that we had an opinion to share.
FINAL Creative Gallery
16 years ago
1 comment:
Nice work here. I'd be interested in hearing you say more about how you "added flavor" into your paper. That is, you were injecting your own opinion, but an intertextual analysis might try to trace what exactly you were injecting. For example, were you pulling in some commonly used phrases or ideas (kind of "common knowledge" type of stuff)? Were you echoing key words or phrases that did appear in the material you directly quoted or indirectly referenced? Also, on a different tangent, what materials did you decide to directly quote, what did you indirectly reference, and why did you decide to do one versus the other in any particular case? Answering these questions can help us to understand how you exerted agency in using intertextual referencing to achieve a specific rhetorical purpose.
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