The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines

The book is a textbook designed for college students. It contains many exercises and there are many text examples in the book, which are fine given its purpose. This review is written from the perspective of library and information science (LIS), which is about the utilization of information sources. In the new electronic environment the traditional role of LIS is weakened, and many find that one way of survival for libraries is to teach information seeking and use. That is one reason I find this book important also for the LIS profession: It is basically about how writers should seek and use information. -----The book has important new ways of looking at the problem of information seeking. Firstly, it recognizes that different disciplines or domains are not identical but put different demands to users. It is in a sense non-reductionistic. This does not imply that it cannot teach student something general about how to write, to read and to use information sources. It implies, however, that the different nature of different kinds of writing in different disciplines is taken into account. Secondly, it recognizes the social character of writing and seeking information. Thirdly, it emphasizes the reciprocal nature of writing and reading (and using information). When you read, you have to seek information, and you are confronted with different views, which forces you to consider your own position. In this process, the reader is converted to a writer, whether or not he writes or publishes his own ideas. I like this view about the active role of the reader, and I like the remark on p. 23: "The cure for real boredom is to find a more advanced book on the subject; the only cure for pseudo-boredom is to become fully and personally involved in the book already in front of you". -----The book is informed by an advanced theoretical knowledge of scholarly research, documents and their composition. Because it is a textbook for college students such knowledge is only communicated indirectly. For example, chapter 6 is about "Recognizing the many voices in a text". The practical advises given are of course based on textual theory (Bakhtin and Kristeva), but this is not explicated. -----Chapter 8 is titled "Evaluating the book as a whole: The book review", and the first heading is "books as tools". Although I like this approach very much it is not clearly pointed out that knowledge is always formed by some epistemological assumptions, and that this is important when evaluating it and when one is going to find one's own opinion on an issue. Bazerman has written about this (e.g., 1988). The reason that this is not addressed in the present book must be that it is too difficult for the target group of the book to handle (although chapter 12 "Creating Knowledge" contains some important comments on such issues). -----In chapter 14 ("Reading and Writing About Events as They Happen: Observation in Social and Natural Sciences" there is (p. 444-445) a remark on the lang