What real-life situation or personal experience do they make you think about?

•Start by summarizing at least two of the week’s readings – this shows that you’ve read and synthesized the material.A good summary is a gift to your future self. It helps make your thought process easy to reconstruct later, and it can serve as a basis for the literature reviews and analyses of relevant research you will produce in longer-form writing. A useful summary will have some or all of the following elements:•Some biographical information on the author/creator•Some context for the resource (its time/place/interlocutors)•Main takeaways or messages•A distinctive detail or memorable quote•Where you encountered it, what led you to it•Why you think it’s useful for your work• Next, put those readings “in conversation” with one another.A research paper is an entry into the scholarly discourse about a particular problem or phenomenon. In order to make a credible contribution, we have to first show that we have mapped out the shape of the river and taken note of the current before we “put in our oar”. To do this, try to answer some of the following questions:•What do the readings have in common (setting, methodology, theoretical or epistemological grounding, etc.)? Where do they overlap?•How do they differ? Where are the gaps?•Does another source pick up where one leaves off? Together, what questions do they raise, or leave unanswered?• Finally, enter the conversation.Here’s where you get to put your own spin on things. If you were able to engage in a dialogue with these authors, what would you say to them? It might help to think about these ways to engage:•What context can you apply the readings to? •What real-life situation or personal experience do they make you think about? •What are your lingering questions, problematic reservations, or helpful suggestions? •Where would you extend, challenge, or fill in the discussion between the authors and/or their arguments?As researchers we are all attempting to enter a conversation that was going on long before we arrived, and we hope to leave something useful for those who arrive after us. A classic description of this phenomenon comes from Kenneth Burke:“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. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. 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. However, the discussion is interminable.The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.” — Kenneth Burke,The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)