CONTENTS

MATERIALS NEEDED

LEARNING OBJECTIVES / OUTCOMES

INSTRUCTIONAL PLAN

ASSESSING FOR UNDERSTANDING

RESOURCES, REFERENCES, & PERMISSIONS

AUTHOR INFORMATION

MATERIALS NEEDED

MATERIALS NEEDED Lesson 2: Source Use is Rhetorical Reading Lesson plan overview with administrator scripts “Training #2: Source Use is Rhetorical Reading” PowerPoint, including directions for two activities Example Alice/Shirley paper and scripted tutorial Reminder: tutors should bring a source-using paper of their own

LEARNING OUTCOMES/OBJECTIVES

By the end of this workshop, tutors will: 

• understand source use as a rhetorical act, shaped by context and purpose

• understand that how students read and think about their sources impact their intentions for source use

• practice recognizing rhetorical strategies for source use

• reflect on personal source use practices

INSTRUCTIONAL PLAN

Introduction

Note to Administrators Before Getting Started 

• Review the “Assessing for Understanding” ticket out or freewrites from Training #1 to refamiliarize yourself with how tutors are thinking about reading as a rhetorical and contextual act. 
• Remind tutors to bring a piece of their own academic writing (that they have completed recently) to the workshop. 

In Training #1, tutors learned about how they recognize features of texts and draw upon prior knowledge and language to create meaning–aspects of “meta”-level knowledge about how reading works. Training #2 is meant as an introduction to rhetorical source use and the following training will continue to build on the knowledge gained in the third workshop. 

As you prepare for leading training today, be prepared for tutors to gradually acclimate into thinking more deeply about source use practices and their literacy learning experiences of using sources. Remember, it's common for source use and citation practices to be connected during learning experiences, and that students may gravitate to citational concerns rather than thinking about how sources were read and intentional preparation of sources for use in writing. 

If any of the tutors would benefit from doing activities again or with different texts, it is okay to spend more time on the activities to help them make these connections. This information may be the first time your tutors are thinking about sources in this way. 

Lastly, we recommend that you personalize the PowerPoint to fit your presentation needs. We’ve chosen to provide a PowerPoint that presents what we see as the “bare-bones” essentials of the lesson, so as to encourage flexibility and appropriateness to individual writing center populations and goals

A Note about Timing

In the script below, we’ve included some suggestions for how you might consider the timing of the session. Of course, your own feelings about what you want to provide greater or lesser time during the session should take precedence. We merely wanted to provide some guide-posts for how we originally organized the experience.

• Warm up & free write (10 minutes)

• Mini lecture on “Joining the Conversation”  (5 minutes)

• Shirley/Alice scenario activity (10 minutes)

• Debrief (5 minutes) 

• Mini lecture - “Reading Struggles” (5 minutes)

• Activity: Personal source use (15 minutes)

• Reflection (5 minutes)

A Note about Using Activity Handout

You may create a handout for use during the lesson by removing much of the Administrator’s Script moments, and with some additional judicial editing for clarity and for your purposes. 

Additionally, this training reimagines a scenario first written by Margaret Kantz, in her 1990 College English essay. To create the handout, we suggest that you read Kantz and grab the original student paper she supplies, as that is what is referred to in our Shirley/Alice conversation (see our handout).

Warm-Up [Slides 1-3]

Administrator’s Script: Remind tutors that the workshops are continuing to focus upon developing understanding of how rhetorical reading is an essential tool during consultations—both for them to use as they work with students, and for them to guide students in thinking more deeply about source use.

Today, we’re going to focus upon thinking more deeply about source use and how sources must be used rhetorically. This means, as part of reading, we have to be thinking about the role and work sources can do in our projects; when we write, we also need to be thinking about if our relationship to the source is shown clearly to our readers– have we successfully positioned the source to do rhetorical work in our projects? So, to get our brains warmed up today, let's start with a free write to reflect a bit upon our own habits and intentions when we’re reading and writing with sources.

Free Write Instructions [Slide 2]

Think about the last research assignment you completed (and you can take a look at the sample of your own writing you brought if you need a reminder). 

• What was it about? (topic)

• What did you have to do? What was your purpose? (to inform about the topic, to argue, something else?) 

• How did you use your sources? To present information? To demonstrate a position? To argue with/against them? Other? (You can choose one place you used a source for this freewrite to focus on).

Share Out [Slide 3]

Use this slide for the share out of the free write activity. This can be helpful to jumpstart the conversation if needed. In the editing mode of PowerPoint or Google slides, you can move the boxes with writing genres around and place them on the spectrum. We’ve also added several blank boxes to add ideas the tutors have. 

Body of Lesson

Overview

Introduce Joining the Conversation [Slides 4-6]

Administrator’s Script: Remember that we’re always using "meta-knowledge" about texts (Slide 4 throwback to Training #1, slide notes for a recap if needed), but we need to develop our constant awareness of when and how this knowledge is at work— it strengthens our ability to do things more strategically, like rhetorical reading. 

Introduce Slide 5: Quote from Burke on “Joining the Conversation”[Slide 5]  In particular, a huge part of "joining a conversation" is about knowing the expectations of the discourse community-- the 'kinds of texts' they write (meta-textual), the issues and knowledge they're writing about (meta-contextual knowledge), and the ways they talk to each  (meta-linguistic knowledge).  When we're centered in a conversation, as a part of the community having that conversation, then much of this knowledge is used implicitly and we're not thinking specifically about "activating” it. But usually, for us as for students, we're not yet centered and we need to activate it as much as possible!

Administrator Note: Depending on your tutors’ engagement and the time you have, this can be a place for extended discussion. You might even want to ask for an example of how tutors have recognized growth in how they can understand or trace a conversation.

Shirley/Alice Mock Tutorial Activity [Slide 7]

Administrator's Script: Now that you’re warmed up and we’ve talked about joining the scholarly conversation, let’s think about how we’d approach a tutoring session with a student. 

Instructions & Link to Text 

1. Provide handout with the example excerpt of student paper and a brief ‘script’ for what has happened in the tutorial “so far.” You can choose to break this up into two chunks or as one conversation starting the tutorial.

2. Students can work individually or in pairs/small groups to develop their intentions for “how they’d respond to Shirley” [example 1]

Discussion of Activity [Slide 8]

Administrator’s Note: Guide discussion of appropriate responses to Shirley towards asking questions related to meta-contextual and meta-textual knowledge. Point to how knowledge about how texts work (meta-contextual and meta-textual knowledge) is what Alice is emphasizing. When Shirley focuses only upon “meeting directions from her teacher” regarding scholarly, credible info, Alice is focussed upon how  meta-textual knowledge of genre informs how you should approach and read (e.g. for argument, not merely for information). Discuss ways and practices that tutors use to focus upon “recognizing argument” versus reading for ‘facts.’ 

Shirley is performing a rather classic version of a “data dump” where information is just neutrally presented, but no critical argument is being formed. Shirley has ‘done research’ but without a stated purpose beyond “doing the assignment.” Essentially, she’s operating as an a-rhetorical reader and writer. Rather than jumping into immediately working on the paper, it might be better for tutors to practice asking questions about how Shirley approached and understood her sources. Questions related to rhetorical reading (first, identifying the source’s purpose, context, genre, audience, etc) would be appropriate, before working towards synthesizing sources into a paper and focused argument.

Guiding Questions for Discussion

Administrator Note: these are example questions only. You may not even need them if tutors are already ready to talk. You may choose to use as many or as few as needed. 

• How does Shirley’s initial approach to reading her sources shape the way she wrote her paper?

• Alice points out that Shirley’s sources present different perspectives rather than just facts. Why is this an important realization for research writing? 

• What do you see as the difference between summarizing multiple sources and synthesizing them in a research paper? 

• Shirley asks, “Should my thesis be that the sources disagree?” How would you help her move from this question toward a stronger argumentative stance in her paper? 

• How does the academic context of the assignment influence Shirley’s approach? What does this situation suggest about the ways students might interpret assignment expectations? 

• How could you encourage a student like Shirley to engage in rhetorical reading where she considers who is writing, why they are writing, and how they are presenting their claims?

Debrief of Activity [Slide 9]

Administrator’s Note: We recommend using this part of the activity to assess how tutors are feeling about the material thus far and how comfortable they would feel working with a student like Shirley. You can choose to have tutors write responses or keep this discussion-based. 

Guiding Questions:

• What was hard about coming up with a response to Shirley?

• What do you feel like you need to know more about to support Shirley ‘re-examining’ or re-reading her sources, so as to be prepared for writing this paper?

• Do you feel like you read sources for their argument? Or more for facts that you hope to support your arguments? How do we differentiate between these?

• What kinds of information do you try to take note of, to situate sources rhetorically (e.g. author, genre, audience, context/issue responding to, purpose, evidence used).

Mini-Lecture [Slides 10-12]

Administrator’s Note: after the initial discussion of the mock-tutorial, it's helpful to call back to “why students may struggle with reading” [Slide 10]. The administrator can either provide a mini-lecture on these documented issues, or can invite students to hypothesize on these struggles based on their own observations. Essentially, you want to guide the conversation to the take-away that these difficulties are all symptoms of the larger problem: uncertainty about “why and how” to read. Such uncertainties in reading lead to similar uncertainty about writing (because both reading and writing are rhetorical acts).

To respond to the lack of “how and why” knowledge, we can build rhetorical reading awareness (but this is a lengthy process!). The material on Slide 11– pulling from Carillo’s 2016 article in Across the Disciplines–details several approaches to helping students more rhetorically attend to source use. Essentially, however, we want to move tutors towards considering more specific questions about genre and intention of purpose with the source (or the relationship between their intended source use, their audience, their genre, and their purpose for writing) than merely encouragement of students to “read actively or critically.”

Slide 12 works back from the rhetorical reading connection to source use, to remind students of the meta-knowledges they already are employing to make sense of texts.

Self-Assessment of Tutor Paper [Slides 13-14]

Administrator’s Note: Encourage tutors to use their own piece of writing for the activity so they can reflect on themselves as writers/readers. This is an individual reflective activity; encourage written responses so tutors have something concrete to refer back to during discussion. You can also consider collecting these reflections as assessment.

Activity Instructions: 

• Look at your first 2-3 pages 

• Look at the context: What did you want your audience to take away from this? What is your argument? 

• Highlight or mark where you’re using sources. For each moment, what do you want your reader to ‘notice’ or take-away about that source there? What was your purpose in using the source at that moment?

• • Reflect: is your use of the source connected to what you remember about reading the source? 

  • Do you notice any patterns in your own use (like, you used your favorite source the most, or you introduce every source the same way with the title, etc)?

Discussion Guiding Questions: You may choose to use these based on time and/or active tutor engagement. These are meant as possibilities for facilitating conversation and none of them are required but may produce useful discussion. 

• Did you notice any habits in your source use (e.g., over-relying on one source, always quoting instead of paraphrasing)? How did that impact your draft?

• Thinking about sessions you've had with writers: have you ever noticed similar patterns in how they use sources?

• How might your own habits or experiences influence how you talk to writers about using sources?

• When a writer struggles with integrating sources, what kinds of questions do you usually ask to help them think through it?

• What do you think it means to use a source rhetorically? Can you point to a moment in your own writing where you did that effectively—or not?

• What strategies can help writers move beyond "dropping in" a source toward using it as part of a conversation or argument?

• What kinds of activities or questions could you use in a session to help a writer reflect on how they’re using sources?

Wrap-up & Reflection

Note to Administrators

Meant to help prime tutors for conversations in the next training and allow you to assess where tutors are. 

Ticket Out

• What did Shirley’s example help you understand about source use?

• Did you learn anything new or interesting about your own source use?

• What concept or idea from today still feels fuzzy or confusing?

• What kinds of tutoring situations do you feel less confident navigating when it comes to source use?

Preview Next Training 

• Remind tutors to bring that piece of writing to the next workshop as well.

ASSESSING FOR UNDERSTANDING

• Shirley/Alice Activity Written Responses 

• Written responses to Personal Source Use Activity

• Discussion/Debriefs for both activities 

• Ticket Out

EXTENSIONS AND ADAPTATIONS

• Shirley/Alice activity could be extended by looking at another sample essay and asking tutors to roleplay looking at sources specifically. 

• Discussion/Debriefs can be shortened or extended depending on how talkative tutors are and questions tutors have. 

• All activities can utilize handwritten or typed responses according to preference and need. 

• All activities can be done in a completely online synchronous environment, utilizing shared documents and both voice and chat features in audio/video call platforms. 

• We would recommend having both digital and hard copies of slides, the Shirley/Alice activity document, and discussion questions available for tutors that may benefit from having them. 

• We would also recommend having the Shirley/Alice document available to tutors prior to the workshop in case reading in advance would put them at ease and allow them to be more engaged in the activity during the workshop

REFERENCES AND ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

References

Carillo, E. C. (2016). Engaging sources through reading-writing connections across the disciplines. Across the Disciplines, 13(2), 1–19. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/articles/carillo2016.pdf 

Kantz, M. (1990). Helping students use textual sources persuasively. College English, 52(1), 74–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/377413 

Additional Resources & References 

Bizup, J. (2008). BEAM: A rhetorical vocabulary for teaching research-based writing. Rhetoric Review, 27(1), 72-86. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350190701738858  

Carillo, E. C. (2017). A writer’s guide to mindful reading. WAC Clearinghouse. https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2017.0278 

Stedman, K. (2011). Annoying ways people use sources. In C. Lowe & P. Zemliansky(Eds.), Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2 (pp. 242–256). WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/writingspaces2/stedman--annoying-ways.pdf

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Carolyne M. King & Megan Boeshart Burelle

Old Dominion University

Carolyne M. King is an assistant professor (English-Writing Studies) and also the director of WAC/WID and STEM Initiatives for the Writing Center. Her research focuses upon the reading-writing connection, specifically, seeking to understand how students read and work with sources as they write source-based papers. She particularly encourages attention to making reading perceivable—using methods like screen-casts of reading behaviors in action—to explore texts' materiality as part of reading. 

Megan Boeshart Burelle is a senior lecturer and Writing Center director at Old Dominion University. She teaches general education writing courses. Her research interests include writing centers, online tutoring, and multimodal feedback. She is currently working on her PhD in English and her dissertation is about online writing tutoring and asynchronous screencasting feedback.

King & Boeshart Burelle, Center Moves, no. 4, 2025.