Q & R 5

Q & R 5: How important is the way a student uses a text in a writing-from-sources task?

When writing original papers based on textual sources, students may find some difficulties that may not allow the successful fulfillment of the task the teacher is asking for. One of those difficulties is the way students use the different sources which they are going to refer to when writing the paper. It is very important for each student to make a good use of each one of the sources; otherwise it will become an obstacle and a factor of frustration.
Most of the times, when asked to use different sources in order to write an essay on a certain topic, students tend to use the information from the sources, take a bit of information from here and another bit from there to make not a new one but the same story, the only thing that changes is the way it looks like. As Kantz stated: “a writing-from-sources task can be as simple as collating a body of facts from a few short texts…into a new text that reproduces the structure, tone, and purpose of the originals” (Kantz 76).
The way the student uses the textual sources will influence in the originality of the essay he or she is working on. In order to be original or to build original arguments one must write what one thinks. A good thing for a student to do, as Kantz suggested, is to learn to think of the sources as existing to solve problems and intended for a particular audience, by doing so it will be much easier to think of things to say (Kantz 84). That would be a good use of the sources which also would avoid plagiarism. Sometimes students do not know how to identify the purpose nor the intended audience of a text thus we get frustrated and tend to copy or reproduce in our papers what was found in the source. The problem here is not wanting to plagiarize but the lack of strategies to develop own ideas. The needed strategies had not been taught either, which is a shame because when the students face high-level writings and readings is so difficult and frustrating to fulfill the requirements of each assignment.
I think that what influences the way a student uses the sources is the will of the student to work on the task, the effort he or she wants to put on. If the students do not want to work hard, the laziness will take them to copy from others. It is easier to take other’s ideas as owns than to create original ones.
I believe that the way students use the sources available is one of the most important aspects in order to accomplish the writing task successfully. If the student uses them in a wrong way, the sources will only be an obstacle; but if a good use of the sources is done, it will be easier to be original and to create an original paper.