Argumentative Essay
English 101 as a writing course focuses on assisting students to develop and polish reading, writing as well as critical thinking skills. Such an effort is to ensure students are prepared for academic writing tasks in the future. Moreover, English 101 tends to engage students in a process that emphasizes on the audience, consistency and thought-provoking writing. The course, therefore, requires students to consult various sources to acquire the information required in ensuring good content (McClure p. 50). Such sources are meant to guide the students develop academically oriented arguments in addition to working with complex thoughts. However, there are challenges that students face with the use of sources that sometimes result in plagiarism. International students are the most affected in the use of sources in academics as they tend to plagiarize compared to the native students.
Every student in English 101 desires to emerge an established writer as well as a communicator through the learning process. Such enables the students to work hard by developing an understanding and being able to build on the academic work of others. More so, the students are able to locate and read some of the thoughtful sources done by other writers and utilize the knowledge gained in forming and supporting ideas. Furthermore, there are approaches that assist in equipping the students with the right tools to become critical thinkers and good writers such as the Advanced Placement Composition and History test. Nonetheless, the test does not influence the students in learning how to access, assess and use information from other sources appropriately. “These tests teach them to formulaically manipulate prepackaged information bites” (Perelman p. 136).
Furthermore, English 101 does not influence students in critical thinking but focus on ensuring students learns how to write an essay with summary techniques as opposed to general writing. Such includes ways to go about selecting the appropriate information, understanding and building on such information. Based on such Les Perelman argues that “…the emphasis is on composition techniques that, instead of fostering good writing and critical thinking, encourage students to embrace habits that produce mechanistic prose lacking any intellectual substance” (Perelman p. 128). The argument, therefore, confirms that English 101 is able to develop the skills necessary in making summaries, paraphrasing and citing sources while integrating information from other sources with accuracy.
Nonetheless, freshmen still face difficulty in the further stages of skill development. Such is due to their introduction to scholarly articles at a later stage of Composition 102. The approach is a problem since the students, especially the international students are not able to develop the appropriate skills to understand and build on thought-proving articles done by other writers. Furthermore, the students are not able to gain the knowledge to apply in forming and supporting other ideas due to dependency on websites and other sources of information (McClure p. 52). The introduction of articles to the freshmen students can enable lengthy and elaborate to improve decisions about the sourcing of relevant information. Perelman approves this by explaining that, “students have to read lengthy texts and identify the important information in each one” (Perelman p. 138).
Moreover, the two sources present various arguments about student undergoing the English 101 course as well as the challenges they experience. One of the key issues the students face is plagiarism when sourcing information from other sources. The problem of plagiarism is not the problem of the students but the way they are introduced to writing. McClure argues that the students are introduced to websites sources as freshmen where they get the majority of information for writing which sometimes turns out not to be relevant and though-proving thereby resulting in plagiarism. McClure says, “Students are still getting the majority of their information from websites” (McClure p. 58) Perelman, on the other hand, argues that plagiarism can be avoided given the exposure of students to lengthy texts from which they can identify and build on important information.
Works Cited
McClure, Randall. Examining the Presence of Advocacy and Commercial Websites in Research Essays of First-Year Composition Students. Journal of the Council of Writing Program, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2009, pp. 49-74.
Perelman, Les. Information Illiteracy and Mass Market Writing Assessments. College Composition and Communication, Vol. 60, No. 1, 2008, pp. 128-14.