Page 129 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

11 6 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING

profession in which you are working or studying, underlie the identification of
these sources?

Five possible outcomes

Finding information effectively is, in large measure, a matter of understanding how
that information or knowledge is to be used in your own arguments and explan-
ations. Often we simply want some basic descriptive information to serve as claims
in our reasoning without wanting to provide extensive supporting arguments. For
instance, we read, in relation to our nationalistic advertisements investigation, that
Crocodile Dundee was one of the most popular films ever screened in Australia. We
can simply state this piece of information, either quoting exactly from the original
or re-expressing the information in our own words, giving an appropriate reference
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to it. We are simply taking a single claim from our 'source'.
We can also take an entire argument or explanation from our 'source'. We could
quote such reasoning exactly, but usually, for stylistic reasons, we express it in our
own words. For example, James's article (mentioned above) argues that nationalistic
advertisements encourage consumers to purchase a corporation's products because,
by being 'Australian' (even when the companies are often owned by foreign inter-
ests), the products are assumed to be better than others. We are, in effect, getting
claims and links (reasoning) from the 'source' (can you see the trace of linking in
'because'?). Once again, we provide a reference in order to acknowledge our debt
to the original author.
Yet very often what we want to 'take' from these sources is not that specific and
cannot simply be 'found' by looking at a certain page. Instead, we can summarise
the basic argument or explanation in a source that we have read (always in our own
words), reducing a long text to a short series of premises and a conclusion, which
we can then use in our own argument (again, with an appropriate reference). For
example, Anderson's Imagined Communities is a long and detailed work on nation-
alism that, in part, concludes that technologies that allow humans to overcome
geographical distance (for example, railways) have played a significant role in the
creation of modern nations. We could include such a summary (which, of course,
can be expressed in the analytical format in our notes) within our own reasoning.
We are, thus, taking from the source not a specific claim, nor a specific piece of
reasoning, but our understanding (analytically speaking) of the source's overall
argument or explanation.
Fourth, we can take from sources a type of information that is far more in-
definable than the information gained in any of the last three cases. This category
can be summed up as 'positions and values'. It is usually hidden within the source
and can be recovered using your judgment (based on what you read or hear) of the
underlying position that the author of the source holds. This underlying position
can be inferred from that person's own arguments or explanations, or the way in
which the arguments or explanations have been received by others. We read, for
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example, in Graeme Turner's Making It National that Australian businesses