WAYS 102 - What's the Use of Stories? - Fall 2024

Position Paper

Proposal for position paper – This preliminary assignment will require you to come up with a proposed response to the question at the core of our course – “What the use of stories that aren’t even true?” – that goes beyond simply stating a personal preference, but rather engages with a range of other individuals’ voices in formulating a reason why reading fiction is important…or, why the Mr. Senguptas of the world are right and it actually is not important.

Annotated bibliography for position paper – This complements your proposal in presenting a set of at least three external sources that you anticipate using in developing and defending your argument about the value of fiction. They do not all need to be sources that support your position, as it may be useful to include a contradictory position that you refute in the course of building your own argument. Not only will you need to correctly cite your sources in the format most commonly used in your major (or your likely major, if you haven’t declared one yet) but you will also need to include a paragraph for each source in which you summarize its position and briefly explain how and why you think it will be useful to you in making your case.

First and Final drafts of your position paper – We will collectively workshop a draft of your position paper in class, meaning that you will receive feedback from multiple readers who have been deeply engaged in thinking about the topic of your paper for months by the time they read it. Once you’ve gotten their feedback, you’ll also have a one-on-one conference with me in which you outline your strategy about how to incorporate their responses into your revisions for the final draft of your paper.

Writing/revising/editing process journal – Although you won’t turn this in until you submit your final draft, you will need to keep a journal with entries describing how you decided to approach each of the writing assignments and what ended up working well (and not-so-well) for you in regard to those decisions in order to assess the effectiveness of the presumptions underlying your own writing process. 

Step 1: Brainstorm a topic and craft a position statement.  Start jotting down ideas.

Step 2: Find 3 RELEVANT sources THAT YOU CAN UNDERSTAND (if you can't follow the abstract, don't choose it)

Step 3: For each of the 3 sources, write an annotation per the directions in the bibliography assignment.

Step 4: Look for the commonalities in your annotations.  You can craft your essay around these commonalities,

Step 1: Topic Analysis

Step 2: Choose a database

Decide whether you need a:

• General Database that covers lots of disciplines.
  • The quick search box on the library home page
  • Academic Search Complete
• Or a focused database that narrows in to the sources for just that discipline
  • On the library home page, click on "choose databases by subject and type"
  • Choose the subject and type of sources you want and see what databases are suggested.

for this assignment, a focused database will be more effective because you need discipline specific scholarly articles.

Step 3: Search the database effectively

• Use the four main search techniques
  • AND - to connect different ideas 
    • fiction and perspective
  • ( OR ) - to contain synonym in a group to be searched together 
    • (fiction or novels or stories) and (perspective or stereotype)
  • quotation marks - to keep words together that express a single idea
    • (fiction or novels or stories) and (perspective or stereotype or "point of view") and "self improvement"
  • Wildcard character - to catch multiple endings of a word.
    • (fiction or novel* or stories) and (perspective* or stereotyp* or "point of view") and "self improvement"
• Use the limiters on the left side of the results lists to hone in on useful items, e.g.
  • Recent
  • Articles from Academic Journal
  • in English

Step 4: Evaluate your results and revise your search as necessary

Step 5: Retrieve the articles you choose

A Periodical is anything that is published regularly and includes newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, as well as some less well-known categories.  You will be required by faculty to use articles from scholarly sources and  peer-reviewed journals in your academic work.  What does that mean?  How do you know that what you are finding is acceptable?

• name of the periodical (journal, bulletin, quarterly, review...)
• more pages in the article than in a magazine article
• abstract present in the article (not just the database record)
• author affiliation given
• presence of a bibliography or references

And how do you find them in the first place?  The best way is to use a database designed to locate scholarly articles in your field of interest.

1. Try a title or keyword search
2. Some databases have a list of suggested subject words on the initial results page. Look at them and copy the useful ones. If there is no list, then look at a number of potentially useful records and copy down words and phrases from the "subject" or "descriptor" area of single record. Some databases provide a thesaurus of terms which can lead to broader, related, or narrower terms you may not have thought of.
3. Go back to the search screen and search BY SUBJECT/DESCRIPTOR using the words you learned about as a result of your first search.
4. Be sure to connect search terms correctly using the following techniques

• Boolean connectors
  • AND connects different concepts and narrows a search: Fish AND chips
  • OR, with parentheses, combines synonyms/related terms and broadens a search: Fish AND (chips OR fries)
• Use quotation marks for phrases: Fish AND (chips OR "french fries")
• Use the asterisk as a wildcard character to retrieve variations on a common stem: educat* retrieves educate, education, educating, educated, etc. Very useful for capturing plurals