9/13/2023

The Bedford Book of Genres Reading Discussion

This reading was done at the beginning of the semester from the book The Bedford Book

of Genres: A Guide & Reader for Florida State University by Amy Braziller and Elizabeth

Kleinfeld. Our class read chapters eleven and twelve which focused on how to properly organize

and evaluate your sources. This was relevant to what we were learning in our class because

Project 1A, our annotated bibliography for our research paper, was due just that week.

In chapter eleven, an aspect that stuck out to me was thinking about your audience in

rhetorical situations. As we become more well-versed in our topic and its lexis, the chapter

explained that we may forget that the readers or audience does not have this same amount of

information or knowledge on the topic. Asking yourself the question, did I know this piece of

information before I started researching? may help you as the writer determine if further

elaboration is needed on the piece of information. Even if you did and thought it was common

sense, your readers might not have that same understanding. This chapter also talked about

finding relevant sources for your topic by identifying keywords. When we began our research for

project A, the number of sources was overwhelming. For my topic of human trafficking, there

were a multitude of sources, and learning which ones were significant to the Latinx discourse

community I was focusing on was important in narrowing down my options.

Chapter twelve dove more into reducing the number of sources and evaluating the

sources on credibility. The reading gives a good example of a student's annotated bibliography.

One of the points that the example bibliography states is evaluating the credibility based on

whether the content and the author are still relevant. The student stated that the author was still

contributing work to his organization making his work relevant. It also proves some credibility
because it shows people are still interested in the author's work and the organization is posting or

has posted multiple of their works. Another detail mentioned was that your source should

generate more research questions relating to my own. I think this is important because if the

source does, it will be efficient for more in-depth research, and if it is not, then the source might

be a dead end.

This chapter continued with finding bias in sources and eliminating those to avoid having

a bias in your research paper. A good idea brought up in the reading was that we may

subconsciously deem an author credible because we have the same viewpoints or perspectives as

the authors, however, this does not establish credibility. When looking for bias you should find

the purpose of the text. An unbiased source should not be trying to convince or persuade you but

rather inform you.

This reading overall was very helpful at the beginning of the semester when we first

started our research. All the components needed to write a good research paper with proper

sources were overwhelming but this source simplified all the necessary parts. It showed how to

establish credibility and sources to avoid because of bias or lack of relevance. We did many

readings from this book throughout the semester, but this one impacted my writing the most.

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