This study explores whether or not a Writing about Writing (WAW) course de-sign has a positive bearing on students’ use of summary in their researched ar-guments. It hypothesizes that students will draw more on summary in their re-searched arguments, since students in WAW actively interpret a shared group of texts through the lens of the discourse community and thus have a higher level of comprehension of the source materials than if they sought out the source materials on their own. Borrowing the source-coding methods of the Citation Project (CP), the study provides data in response to the following questions: How do students use sources when asked to compose a written for-mal research project in the context of a course in which the sources they draw on are assigned as part of the course material? How does student source use, particularly with respect to summary writing, compare with available CP data in which students may or may not have drawn on assigned texts? Ultimately, it finds that students in the WAW course draw on summary at a significantly higher rate than in the CP.
Cite this paper
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