Literacy Practices Assignment

In The Atlantic of July 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In it, he writes:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle […].

[A] study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggested that we changing the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Clearly, this shift has an effect upon our literacy practices, which, in turn, has an effect on how we read, research, and write, which are basic practices of English studies. For our first assignment, I’d like you to document your own practices and compare those to the practices Carr describes.

Procedure for the Assignment

Assume that I have asked you to write a research paper one of the following texts:

• Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Renascence,”
• Andrew Marvell’s poem “Damon the Mower,”
• Jorge Louis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,”
• Jonathan Harris’ experimental text: “The Whale Hunt”
• Nnedi Okorafor’s short story, “Mother of Invention”

How would you go about writing this paper?

In a well-developed response (graduate students should go “above and beyond”), describe to me the specific steps you would take in researching this paper. Include all the actions you would perform, how you would find and gather material, what mediums you would use (paper and pencil, keyboard, visiting the library, online databases, books, etc.), the time you use and the search terms you use as well. You do not have to write the actual paper on the text — just go through the process of researching it.

As a conclusion to your response, compare your research process to the process Carr describes above. Are you the kind of researcher he describes? And what implications does your research process have for the kinds of literary study (and/or writing and/or teaching) you intend to do?

150 points

750 words

Due Feb. 1 by midnight on Bb (you can submit your Medium url if you’ve posted it there).