Takeaways from Cadle Article by Jen Michaels

Lessons from Cadle’s “Fighting the Fear: Plagiarism and Technophobia”

Original article: http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/Cadle/splash.html

·      Draw on common values between one’s existing discipline and the data set with which you are working.  Indeed, when you identify a potential conflict between the values being expressed in your analysis and the disciplinary audience, point to how the values could still come together.  In my case, that would be composition studies/teacher-educators and the social media literacy sponsors being portrayed in these narratives.  So for example,

·      If you are going to use a term like literacy sponsor, you must convince your reader of its use value as an analysis tool.  You can do so by mentioning how it has been useful to other similar projects before yours (in my case, that would be Deborah Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives and Selfe and Hawisher’s Literate Lives in the Information Age). One can also suggest how the term’s use makes it possible to see something that is already valuable to the field—for example, to point out that our work as composition instructors is already about literacy sponsorship before it’s about any particular genre or classroom practice.

·      A concise list is the sign of a preceding section that was already persuasive, meaning one need not beg the point with an elaborate list or a list that gives lots of justification

·      Return frequently to the so-what factors about how a certain metaphor or way of seeing things affects classroom practice.

·      It’s okay to have a multiplicity of how a phenomenon manifests.  For example, Cadle doesn’t shy away from listing various metaphors of plagiarism.  I should perhaps be less worried about having varied ways that metaphors of social media literacy sponsorship manifests.

·      Your reader wants to know where the story ends.  It’s okay to tell them early in a section why you’re talking about something and what the big punchline is, then circle around to show them how you got that.