May 11th Response

I like Swales' three "moves" of research introductions, I do believe that they will help me to understand research articles (hopefully they will come in handy when I'm doing research for and writing this enormous paper due on May 23rd).

Swales did a nice job of organizing each move into a few key steps. Next time I am reading or writing a research article I will keep in mind Move 1: Establishing a Territory, Move 2: Establishing a Niche, and Move 3: Occupying a Niche. These steps may even help me as I'm editing my genre analysis paper.

Kantz seems to be doing something similar to Swales by breaking down different parts of a research article. She uses the learning experiences a fictitious college sophomore student, Shirley, to discuss the importance of context, argument, claims, and audience. She uses Shirley to exemplify many of the common problems students face when writing articles based on fact.

The example that Kantz used is a paper Shirley wrote on the Battle of Agincourt. When she came upon discrepancies in opinions from different sources on certain facts about the event, she just assumed that someone must have gotten it wrong and looked for a better more legitimate source. Shirley's friend suggested to her that instead of just thinking it was a mistake, she should have looked into who was saying what and what their reasons may have been for doing so. Instead of just taking these facts at face value, she should have dug deeper to find out the true meaning. She also needed to pick a perspective and create her own opinion about the facts in her writing.

The Kantz article would have been useful for me to read before the genre analysis instead of after, I think I made some of those mistakes with that paper. I will use this information while I am editing my genre analysis and while I am writing my final paper.