Rhetorical peer review | Quick Homework Help

I’m stuck on a English question and need an explanation.

Requirement is on the bottom of the page, around 300-400 words (not include annotation) by answering two out of three questions, with annotation. The topic is provided in the next couple paragraphs.

The CP prompt requires you to have at least 3 scholarly sources, which for our purposes include peer-reviewed journal articles or books from academic publishers. This requirement is not meant to suggest that scholarly sources are the only ones that can be validly cited in a research paper; rather, it’s meant to familiarize you with how information is shared within academic discourses and prepare you to engage with research in your own fields.

So today’s assignment will ask you to work with a peer-reviewed journal article. Journal articles vary widely in their format, approach, and substance, but what they have in common is that they are written by people who have done research in the field, submitted to a journal in the field, and reviewed for accuracy by experts in the field. This process is called “peer review,” and you can read more about it here.

Journal articles are intended to be read by people familiar with the language and methods of the discipline, which means they are often hard to understand for outsiders like us. The key to reading a journal article in an unfamiliar discipline is to read rhetorically—practice the reading tools we learned about in class (set goals, research, preread, look up words, make marginal notes, skip, summarize) and use the following strategies specific to journal articles:

• Know what you’re looking for. If the title is “Changes in Parenting Practices and Adolescent Drug Abuse During Multidimensional Family Therapy,” you’ll be looking for evidence that therapy has an impact on both parenting practice and teenagers’ drug use. Skip over things that don’t offer that sort of evidence.
• Make good use of the abstract. Most journal articles begin with a paragraph called an “abstract,” which summarizes the article and its findings. You should read the abstract first to determine whether the article will be useful to you and to get a general sense of what the article is about.
• Learn the acronyms. Many studies will use abbreviations to keep their discussion shorter and avoid having to repeat long phrases. Any acronyms discussed in the introduction or conclusion sections are worth learning, and you should be prepared to add others to your lexicon; they will ease your attempt to understand the conversation happening in the paper.
• Focus on the introduction/background and the discussion/conclusion. The first one or two sections will tell you what kind of problem the article is trying to address, and the last one or two sections will summarize what they found, often in terms a general audience can understand. They may go under different names (i.e., they may not be labeled “introduction” or “discussion”)—in fact, some articles may not be explicitly broken into sections—but first few pages and the last few pages will almost always have the most important information you need.
• Skip over parts that are too technical to understand. The material in the middle of the paper may be a technical description of how they arrived at their results, which you would have to be an expert in the field to make sense of. They will often include complex equations, tables, or statistical language. Unless you have the appropriate knowledge, don’t spend too much time trying to understand these parts; you may assume that their methods were solid if the results were published in a peer reviewed journal article.

Note: not all journals are peer reviewed, and most of the ones that aren’t should not be trusted. Peer review is the mechanism by which we ensure that published research is as correct and thorough as possible; journals that are not peer-reviewed are often disreputable for-profit ventures that will publish any research, no matter the quality, if the author is willing to pay a fee.

Reading

Now that you’re familiar with what a journal article is and how to read it strategically, here’s the one I want you to practice on:

Expertise and Individual Differences by Anders Ericsson

Annotation

Create an annotation for this article using the format we discussed in class:

• summarize what the source says, focusing on the information you might include in your (hypothetical) CP
• evaluate its currency, relevancy, authority, and accuracy
• explain how it’s different from your other sources—what it contributes that they don’t (since you don’t have other sources, don’t worry about this one)

Reflection

Once you’ve read the article, write a response of around 300 words that reflects on TWO of the following three questions.

Respond to this one (required):

1. What main conclusions does the author draw at the end of this article? How would you define the specific social, cultural, or political problem they point to? (In other words, if you were to use this article as evidence in your CP that a particular problem exists and should be considered significant, what problem would it be?) Why is the evidence offered by this article convincing or unconvincing?

Then respond to ONE of these two:

1. Newspapers and other media will often report on the content of peer reviewed journal articles, as in this piece from CNN. or this one from the New York Post. Though you may learn of a study from a media outlet, you should always go to the original source for your information and cite the journal article in which the study was originally published. Why do you think this is? What risks do you run if you choose to cite the media outlet rather than the original article?
2. Briefly scan the Wikipedia articles on the Sokal Affair. and the Grievance Studies Affair, hoaxes in which authors managed to get absurd fake articles past peer reviewers. What weaknesses do these incidents expose in the peer review process? Am I, your writing instructor, justified in continuing to require you to cite peer reviewed articles if such shoddy work can still be published? Should we automatically trust a journal just because it’s been peer reviewed?