From Note Cards to Paragraphs: Drafting Your Research Report

Wednesday 23 May 2018 for Periods 5 & 6 and Thursday 24 May 2018 for Periods 1, 2, & 7

Mr. Stone began class by reading excerpts from a box of forty poetry books he recently won in a silent auction from the A. K. Smiley library.

Students finished making paper flashcards to study the stages of the research process if they hadn't finished making them during the previous class period.

Mr. Stone read and discussed Ecclesiastes 3 and Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" if those works were not covered during the previous class period.

Mr. Stone then modeled how to incorporate researched material into the student's writing using the poet Anthony Hecht as an example:

According to Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, editor of The Poets Laureate Anthology, Anthony Hect's early poems sounded like song lyrics (344).  Hecht was a formalist poet when most poets were abandoning traditional metered forms for free verse (344).  The Poetry Foundation says, "Hecht is known for his masterful use of traditional forms and linguistic control" ("Anthony Hecht").  Hecht stayed a formalist throughout his career (Schmidt 344).

First, to move from note cards to a paragraph, begin by sorting your note cards by secondary keywords.  Place all the "life" cards in one pile, all the "works" in a second pile, all the "reputation" cards in a third pile, all the "represents"/"representative" cards in a fourth pile. (You might consider using additional rubber bands or paperclips to keep your cards separated by secondary keywords.

Second, spread out your stack of "life" note cards and organize them into subsets by tertiary keywords, e.g. born, family, school, work, etc.  Arrange the cards in the order you want to use them in the paragraph and then begin to write sentences.  You may write a sentence from one note card, or you may need to incorporate several cards to write a sentence.  Avoid making your sentences overly simplistic to the extent that you sound like a grade school student, while also avoiding making your sentence so complex or overloaded with information that they are not easily understood on a single reading.

MLA Parenthetical Citations
You will be using the Modern Language Association (MLA) style of in-text parenthetical citations.  In other words, you will be sharing where you found your information each time you use it use a pair of parentheses usually at the end of a sentence.  The parenthetical citations in the MLA style use an author-page system.  Your citations should ideally contain the author's last name and the page number so if one of your readers wants to look more at the source you used, they can go to your works cited list and find the full bibliographic information they need to locate where you found it.

If you are using an online source, your citations will not have page numbers because websites do not have fixed page numbers. If you are using a source that does not have a stated author, you will use the first key word of the works cited entry (often the title of the webpage you are using).  Remember to place the title of articles inside quotation marks and to italicize the title of a book or a website.

Introduce* a source the first time you use it.  Provide the full name of the author and a fact about them that will make your readers find them authoritative or respectable.  In the sample paragraph above, I used Elizabeth Hun Schmidt's full name (Don't worry if you don't have the author's middle name.) and the fact that she is the editor of The Poets Laureate Anthology to introduce her.  Because I used her name in the sentence I only needed to include the page number in the parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence.

After you introduce a source, let the source speak. State the facts the source provided as you have paraphrased or summarized them.  If you are using the exact words of your source, place them in quotation marks.

Be sure to cite when your use of a source's information ends.  This is often at the end of every sentence, but it may be that you use information from the same source and the same page over more than one sentence.  If so, then place the citation at the end of the sentence where your use of that source's information stops.  If you switch to a different source, be sure and make that clear.

Since you are reporting information in the majority of the paragraphs of this assignment, you will likely not include any personal comments, but if you were writing an argumentative paper, you would want to be sure to comment on how the information you used from a source (called evidence in an argumentative paper) supports the claim you were making.

In the sample paragraph above, the second sentence came from the same source as the first sentence, so I did not have to provide the author's name in the parenthetical citation, but I did include the page number even though it was the same as the first sentence to make it clear that I was still using Schmidt as a source.  In my third sentence, I switched to a different source so I stated its name.  Since the Poetry Foundation is a source well-known to the readers of our reports, we don't have to provide authoritative information about it.  Stating its name at the beginning of this sentence is making it clear to the readers that I have switched sources.  At the end of the third sentence, I used the first key words of the title of the Poetry Foundation's web page on Anthony Hecht, which logically for a biographical article is his name.  I did not include a page number in this citation because the source is a web source.  In the fourth sentence I returned to my use of Schmidt as a source.  Since I didn't use her name in the sentence, I included both her last name and the page number in my citation.

Third, once you have used all of your note cards for the "life" question to write sentences, look back over the paragraph you have written and see if it makes sense. Make corrections as needed. 

Is there any missing pieces of information your readers might need? If you have time, locate that information and add it.  If you don't have time, safe that for when you make revisions.

Does it meet the five-sentence minimum requirement for this assignment?  If it doesn't, you'll need to find more information and lengthen your paragraph.  Notice the sample above is too short.

Once you have drafted your life paragraph, draft your second paragraph on the major works of your poet.

Homework:  Draft the first two paragraphs of your poet report.  Your first paragraph is about the poet's life.  Your second paragraph is about the poet's major works.

*The primary terms I use to describe your approach to integrating source material are the language of my colleague Danelle Taylor Johnston.  I have used them here with her permission.