Kim Fahle Peck
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
Kenneth Burke’s famous parlor metaphor presents a picture of academic research as a conversation between ideas and perspectives:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about…You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance… (110-111)
Yet novice student writers often struggle to enact this concept in their own writing. Nancy Sommers and Laura Salz suggest that novice student writers “have difficulty synthesizing sources to see the ‘big picture'” (133). Additionally, research on source use and citation practices, like that done by Sandra Jamieson and Rebecca Moore Howard as part of The Citation Project, highlights practices such as sentence-mining, or quoting or paraphrasing from a single sentence (127), and a pattern of students citing information from primarily the first or second page of a source (128). Findings like these bring into question how much or how well students read their sources in the first place. This activity is meant to help writers better understand the sources they have found for a research project, be able to summarize ideas and positions from these sources into their own words, and think critically about where their sources align and diverge. This activity can help students understand their sources and think about where they themselves fit into the “conversation” of their research by writing an imagined dialogue of a conversation between their sources, literalizing what Burke describes metaphorically. This activity serves as a bridge between students collecting sources and then writing a draft of a research assignment. Even if students have completed scaffolding assignments like an annotated bibliography, this activity will help students see the connections between sources and the patterns of views, evidence, and arguments related to their research topic.