Writing About Writing: Kantz

Writing About Writing: Kantz

In the article “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively” Margaret Kantz attempts to speak out to other teachers and professors about helping there students.  Kantz says that when writing a paper on a subject or a topic that requires research students often just comply with requirements and just write a paper for the grade or with a simple summary. Kantz argues that professors need to teach students how to write with “analytic and rhetorical proficiency”(Kantz,81). This meaning that students need to stop looking at writing papers as summarizing or answering one single question but instead look for gaps in there sources or try to contrive an argument about one of your sources or the topic your writing on. Also that students need to learn to look at pieces as rhetorical readings or a Reality that is being sent or brought up by a encoder and being delivered to a decoder. Kantz wants students to not focus on summarizing but instead analyzing; to look at the pieces and ask question or try to derive the whys, how’s and so what’s? She argues that the best writing is creative writing and that if students just knew how to look at sources differently than just reading what’s being stated they could have infinite possibilities.  Students could create and discover problems or questions with sources or what they are saying and they could give solutions and reasoning to these problems or questions.  In this article Kantz states “A fact is a claim the audience will accept as being true without requiring proof, although they may ask for an explanation. An opinion is a claim that an audience will not accept as true without proof, and which, after the proof is given, the audience may well decide has only a limited truth”(Kantz,76). She is saying that there isn’t ever really facts or opinions there is only claims some of which can be agreed on by everyone therefore making them true. Also with writing a paper Kantz believes that students are thrown into a fire because teachers will just give them the assignment and let them go instead of giving them step by step process to prevent them from being overwhelmed. She wants students to be able to write in a process and multiple drafts in order to help them improve their writing and become proficiently better at rhetorically heuristic reading, analyzing and writing. This article is very similar to Micheal Kleine’s article they both have common elements they believe to create the best pieces. In both articles they talk about how to go about your research how you can both gather and hunt for information and that through doing this you are influenced by the ideas around you. Kantz wants students to look at research with an open mind or an attitude of questioning everything you read or how it reads in a way. In both articles they want students to be more creative in what they choose to write about instead of just simply typing up a summary and expressing whether you agree with information or not. Also they both talk about the failure of professors to help or guide there students in the right direction of rhetorical research. Also in Kantz article she chooses to really express her feelings on facts and opinions. Most people look at the words and say facts are truths and opinions are not necessarily true but what someone feels or values. Kantz expresses that both are actually just claims made by people and the only difference between the two is that facts are claims that can be agreed on by everyone whereas opinions can be situational truths. When I say situational truths I mean that they are true in some situations but not in all. Kantz also talks about arguments are always conducted of the two and it’s actually just a matter of acceptance. Kantz says that students don’t understand how to write in a original way that students often just write in a first point next point pattern. Also she argues that students look at facts and believe them as truths and they never question how the source might be bias or that the fact is manipulated in a certain way to change the way it sounds or is expressed. Another argument she makes is that students choose to look at the paper as a whole instead of going a step by step process and going from there.  Lastly she says that students need to learn to take the research as an opportunity to find a problem and present a solution. I think she is correct with almost all of these statements because speaking from experience I have never really thought about looking at information or facts as claims instead of truths also I have never thought about developing a solution to some problem I would discover from a source.  I think this article with great to read because it really did enlighten me on all these aspects and Kantz explained them all very well. I think my idea of creativity was completely different from Kantz until I read this article in my thought process I always considered creativity in writing a research paper to be just finding a different way of presenting information but through reading this article I now understand you can actually completely change your argument on a research paper by just simply looking for gaps in the writing. I think her understanding is very influential to mine because I have a good ability at writing papers but I often struggle to find what to write about or how to get the paper started. I think in some terms it might not work because she talks about finding gaps in research but you can’t always find gaps there is sometimes papers that are truly factual. Kantz is trying to analyze how students go about their papers nd how they do research. She feels that students lack the ability or intuition sometimes to discover or realize that facts and opinions are both claims that are just made by people and some happen to be agreed upon while others can only be truthful in certain times otherwise just how someone feels on a subject or issue. I think this article is very useful because it opens up so much more paths to take on a paper or even just a single source. Overall I think this was a very interesting article in the way it was presented and also what it talked about. The article was helpful and more interesting than the past ones I feel because she used examples and set up various situations helping to make the understanding a lot easier in my opinion. Also I have never looked at sources the way she described students should I was always that Shirley she talks about in the story. I agree with her claims and I think they will be very helpful in my future when I see and experience research papers.