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ENGL 1007 Course Guide

First-Year Writing at UConn

About Collecting & Curating

The ENGL 1007 syllabus describes habits of practice around collecting and curating as:
  • Determine principles of selection and organization.
  • Create a meaningful assemblage using collected artifacts.
To help you develop these habits, this section of the guide presents information about understanding audience expectations (here, assignment guidelines) and establishing composing and revising practices that work for you. There are also sections dedicated to learning how to assemble and describe multimodal texts and use them effectively.

Understanding Your Assignments

Writing in a course can seem detached from life beyond the classroom -- we may write something to fulfill an instructor's requirements, receive a grade, and never think about it again. However, ENGL 1007 is designed for you to write in real rhetorical situations: to reach an audience for an intended purpose.

Because this process -- finding questions, purposes, and audiences that are relevant and meaningful to you -- is something that you can develop, it is important to review carefully the assignment expectations of this course. They aren't simply "essays" that you can write on auto-pilot, but are multimodal compositions that demand care in your design and construction.

Below is a resource for interpreting assignments from the UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center. They provide detailed strategies for understanding what instructors (and other readers!) are expecting with your texts, but we'll highlight their two fundamentals:

  • "Read the assignment carefully as soon as you receive it."
  • "Ask the instructor about anything you do not understand."

Developing and Using Interviews

Conducting an interview may not seem like research -- but it is! Often referred to as a kind of "primary" research, interviews are commonly used in a wide variety of academic and popular writing that would benefit from a particular person's perspective.

The difference between a primary and secondary source usually has less to do with the characteristics of any given text and more with what you're doing with it. The authors of The Craft of Research describe primary sources as a kind of "raw data" to inform an inquiry, whereas secondary sources provide interpretations or analyses of data relevant to an inquiry (pp. 53-54).

Despite being common, interviews are challenging to conduct effectively, particularly without practice. Careful preparation and developing a sense of purpose in communicating with your interviewees will help set you up for success. See some of the resources provided below for more detailed information and suggestions.

There are also important ethical concerns whenever one is working directly with others (often referred to in this context as "human subjects of research"). It is necessary to receive informed consent from your interviewees -- that is, they know they are being interviewed and why, and they understand their rights. There are different expectations here in different contexts -- reach out to your instructor with any additional questions.

While your interviews are literally conversations, it is important to keep in mind that, to paraphrase the ACRL's Framework for Information Literacy, we should understand scholarship as a conversation and research as an inquiry.

Making sense of your group of interviews will depend upon your ability to see connections, shared themes or keywords, and divergences or differences of experience. These may jump out at you right away as you review your transcripts, but they may also be subtle or challenging to work with.

One strategy that can be useful here is the use of a graphic organizer or other concept map. Visualization tools can help you compare and contrast the different perspectives encountered. There's no one right organizer to use -- your choice should be informed by your material and your approach to it. See below for some examples.

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