Page 153 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

140 SMART THINKING: SKILLS FOR CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING & WRITING

technical directions that lay out the appropriate steps needed to reference their
work.
i. If everyone can follow the technical directions, then some peoples failure to
follow them indicates that technical matters are not the problem.
6. The problem of some students struggling with the methods and skills of correct
referencing is not merely a technical one.

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The third paragraph is not reasoning:
As just indicated, there are three main reasons why referencing is impor-
tant in essays, reports, presentations, theses, articles, and all the other
kinds of scholarly writing in which students engage both at university and
then, as graduates, in their professions. Without seeking to assign a
priority to any of them they are: first, that referencing enables a reader to
seek out more information on the topic of the written work, based on the
references given; second, referencing acknowledges authors' ethical and
academic debt of thanks to those sources which they have used to create
their own 'source' of information; and third, referencing provides a method
by which authors can establish the validity and strength of their claims by
relying on the authority of the source to which they are referring. Let us
examine these reasons in more detail.
It identifies the three reasons and then says that the paper will examine them. Since
there is no attempt to argue or explain why there are three reasons, or why the paper is
looking at them in detail, and so on, there is nothing to be cast. Then, in paragraph 4:
[The process of effective scholarship (finding, analysing and communi-
cating information) involves an almost-constant acquisition of ideas,
knowledge, views, and general contextual understanding.]9 [One
method of finding the material from which to acquire this information,
used mainly at times of intensive research, is to follow the leads
provided in an article or book via the references to find, quickly and with
a high degree of reliability, additional valuable, relevant sources of
information.]10 [A well-constructed piece of scholarly writing will
contain both information in its own right and information that assists
readers in further information acquisition.]11. Thus [an author needs to
see referencing as a service to the reader of their work.]12 and, [using