Friday, March 28, 2008

Scholarly Sources

Your researched essay must incorporate at least three scholarly sources.

Just had a conversation about what "scholarly sources" might include, might refer to. I suppose it's important in the WC not to be too acrobatic with those high-load words and phrases in assignment prompts. Yet, something like "scholarly sources" does open onto a fairly loaded, dominoed set of issues. Just now: What makes a scholarly source? How do you know when you've found one? Where to look?

A clear author-institution tie is one indicator, no? Or the cast of the publication (i.e., an academic press for a monograph, or a journal, which will usually reflect specialization). But then there are all of the middled venues--journalism, business magazines, literary-styled periodicals--that confuse the category. Is an article in the Atlantic Monthly (e.g., "As We May Think") a scholarly source? What about something in Forbes? The Wall Street Journal? Does it depend more upon who wrote it or who reads it? The differences gray out; we need to consider style, citation practices, register (specialized vocabulary?), and so on. Too acrobatic?

I hope not. But this comes up fairly often. It is a commonplace in the researched essay assignment, which is featured in SU's WRT205 curriculum. I'm out of time (this small window within which to speed-blog), but the convention also calls up questions about the problem of non-scholarly sources--those surprising oddities that can add some snap and crackle to a possibly orderly (even tame) line-up of "scholarly" sources. And, granted, this is a false dichotomy, but one that is noticeably out of alignment in perhaps too many researched writing projects.

Bookmark and Share Posted by at March 28, 2008 10:30 AM to Writing Center
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