After successfully completing this week's Learning Module, you should:

• Know what writing with an informative purpose is and how it differs from a traditional thesis-based argument

• Recognize when informative purpose is used in college coursework and in writing outside the classroom

• Understand the concept of information literacy and review the four main elements you'll write about

• Learn a basic structure to follow for this essay and start creating an outline

• Begin seeing how to effectively do research, evaluate sources, and incorporate quotations

• Review the Essay #3 assignment sheet, scoring rubric, and samples

This week you'll begin the third essay assignment which is due on November 24th. The essay will focus on creating a guide to teach college students about a concept commonly taught at colleges all across the country: information literacy. That means this essay will be informative rather than persuasive, and it will use sources documented with MLA citations (more on citation next week). This kind of writing is both practical since you're going to spend time explaining a skill essential for success in college and useful since it'll help you learn skills like informative writing, research, and citation that will be helpful in a wide range of writing situations.

In an essay with a strictly informative purpose like this one you're responsible for helping readers learn more about the topic without including your own opinions or point of view. Along the way, you have to provide enough highly credible evidence so readers believe the guide you make, explain clear exigence so they know why you're writing, and explain the benefits if readers learn this skill to make your work significant for readers. 

By the end of this week you should be familiar with the essay assignment, have looked at the assignment sheet and some samples, learned more about information literacy, thought about an outline structure to guide your work, and had an introduction (or re-introduction) to the MLA source documentation requirements. Next week we'll continue developing the outline and reviewing how to get, integrate, and cite all the sources we need. 

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You can see a video walkthrough of this week's assignments and where to submit them here.

Key Features of Informative Writing

Other key features of informative writing, which is likely most familiar to us when we think of instructions or guides, are:

• Maintaining neutrality by always attributing debatable statements to others with signal phrases

• Being detailed, clear, and using examples so that the widest audience is able to follow our points

• Moving away from a thesis (which states your claim on a debatable issue) to a purpose statement (which tells readers what information you will cover)

• Focusing on presenting information from other experts, almost like you're an emcee bringing different people on stage without commenting on their performance

You can see a little more detail about informative writing from The University of Maine here, but you'll also see a clearer picture as we work through the assignment and offer samples to review. 

To be clear, most of the writing you do in college is persuasive; that includes any time you take a position on an issue, analyze or respond to assigned reading, or answer a prompt on a topic from your course. Informative writing in college is most commonly seen when writing lab reports or site observations, but it can also happen if you're asked to write instructions or describe a process. 

First Steps: Creating an Outline

Though this week is just an introduction to Essay #3, sometimes it's helpful to get a sense of how you might get started on the work. Most of the time we use an outline to help focus our writing on specific rhetorical needs readers would have at specific points in the essay. Here's how I'd suggest starting this assignment using that approach. 

INTRODUCTION

Give a definition of information literacy from a credible source

Explain the exigence (a problem or current event) causing you to write, like students struggling with this skill

Present a purpose statement telling readers which of the four areas you'll cover (Ex. The purpose of this essay is to...)

BODY (2-3 depending on the number of sources used per paragraph)

Cover one element of information literacy per paragraph, and establish it in the topic sentence

Look to find more than one source (usually a college library website ending in .edu) speaking on each element

Use signal phrases, quotation, and MLA in-text citation

Explain what something means and connect to other sources, but stay neutral and avoid your own opinion

Give examples to make complicated ideas easier to understand

Offer a concluding sentence to establish the one point you wanted to cover matching your topic sentence

CONCLUSION

Restate the purpose statement from your introduction but switch to past tense

Explain benefits if readers learn the skills covered in your essay

Finally, make sure you plan to include a separate Works Cited page for citations after the conclusion. We'll go over this in more detail next week, but it's good to have in mind as you start the assignment so you can keep track of any sources/quotations you find as you get started. 

How to Do Research Efficiently

This essay will require you to do research. Lots, in fact. Most students in previous semesters have used a minimum of two sources per body paragraph (more is even better) and at least one for the introduction where you offer a definition. Since you know you'll need 5-10 sources, it's worth spending some time learning how to make the search faster and more effective. 

Because of the audience and the subject for this essay, the majority of your sources should be credible websites. This means mostly college and university websites since they've spent so much time trying to help students be successful with information literacy skills. So how do we limit the search results to avoid page after page of stuff that doesn't work?

First, we make sure our search terms are specific. That can sometimes mean a good first guess, but more often it means learning from others--especially their terminology--as we search and search again (hence the word re-search). For example, instead of searching for "information literacy" try searching for "evaluating sources."

Aside from search terms, the next best move is to limit the search domain. That means cutting out .com, .org, .gov and any other domain that won't provide us with sources that are a good fit. You can do this by using the Google Advanced Search tool, or easier for most people, add "site:.edu" to the end of your search terms. 

Remember, for this assignment you don't need to find books or scholarly journal articles; though there is an extended guide you could use as a source or just to learn about the topic that is available from SUNY Open Textbooks.

Preview: Integrating Research into an Essay

We'll do more in depth work to review how to use sources in the essay next week, including activities to practice MLA in-text citation and Works Cited page citations. 

Keep in mind, you are required to use MLA for your source documentation in Essay #3. This is the most common citation style in 100/200 level college courses, but we do begin explaining another common style, APA, in ENG 102. Keep in mind, even though we'll focus entirely on MLA in this assignment, the basic idea is the same if you're choosing another style, and a good guide (like Purdue OWL) can help you navigate the differences. Just make sure you let your professors know if you're not finding what you need. 

Signal Phrases

Signal phrases introduce anything you borrow from outside and give attribution to the source. They're not hard to do, and remembering to do them is the best way to protect yourself from plagiarism. They also help you avoid a writing error called a dropped quotation. 

The basic formula to use as a starting point is: According to ________, "..." 

But I also want you to think of signal phrases as how we communicate credibility in our writing. And since credibility is necessary for persuasion, it's worth remembering. So rather than giving a title in your signal phrase, something that only communicates credibility if the reader has heard of the source, I want you to tell readers the author's credentials. Credentials can be a simple statement of where the person works and what they do:

According to Christopher Ferguson, Kimberlee Salmond, and Kamla Modi, university researchers who study child psychology, "the influence of reality television on adolescent behavior is complex" (1175). 

Even though this is a bit vague in terms of their credentials, it's still better than giving a title since it helps readers see these people as experts in this field. Note, too, that you only need to use the full name(s) and credentials the first time you use the source; after that, you would refer to them by last names only. 

Quotation

Remember, quotation is when you borrow someone's exact words. Those words go inside quotation marks and cannot be changed without indication in[side] of square brackets. To see more rules for quotation marks, including where to put punctuation, review this handout from the Purdue OWL. 

And remember, every time you use a quotation you need a signal phrase and you'd want in-text citations. You'll need one every time, too, not just once at the end of a paragraph. 

Paraphrase

Paraphrase is treated the same as quotation, but instead of using the exact words you'd reword the source's ideas into your own structure and language. This is hard and it increases the risk of unintentional plagiarism, but it's a mark of more advanced writing. 

You can find some review of the specific techniques, expectations, and examples from the Purdue OWL here. 

Activity: Practice Research and Source Integration

To help you get started strong on this essay, I'd like you to do the following things:

1) Search Google for a definition of information literacy. Use our discussion of perceived credibility to make sure you've found something your readers would recognize and trust. 

2) Review signal phrases, which is how we bring a source into our writing while giving credit and leveraging the source's credibility as our own. Start a Discussion Forum post where you write a signal phrase and paste a definition of information literacy in quotation marks. 

3) Explain in a line or two a) why you think this definition is a good choice, and b) why you think the source you found is credible for your readers. 

Keep in mind, this activity will give you the first line of Essay #3 since you'll need a definition to start. You can see more detail below. 

Essay #3 Materials

Essay #3 Assignment Sheet

Essay #3 Scoring Rubric

Process Portfolio Assignment Sheet

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Essay #3 Student Sample

MLA Quick Guide from Appalachian State University

Key Takeaways

• Informative purpose is different than a traditional college essay with a thesis; instead of trying to persuade readers, it offers a neutral presentation of information. 

• Because of this different purpose and audience, other features of the writing will change, including: formal tone, presentation of sources, and essay structure.

• Learning how to find sources efficiently can save time, especially for long essays with lots of research; one tool to make the search faster and improve the perceived credibility of your sources is to limit the domain using site:.edu to focus on work hosted by colleges and universities. 

• Like we saw with the editorial essay it's important to use a signal phrase every time you bring in an outside source; you'll also want to focus on using quotation and paraphrase for the exact words of experts. 

The Information Literacy Users Guide from SUNY Open Textbooks