ABSTRACT
The foregoing study units might culminate in an assignment, for the preliminary stages of a term paper, of an annotated bibliography and working outline, described below and designed to teach you how to locate and analyze articles and books with opposing partisan viewpoints on the chosen topic. These exercises are intended to help prevent you from simply picking American Spectator or In These Times, a book published by Regnery Press or South End Press, a report from American Enterprise Institute or the Institute for Policy Studies, off the library shelf to use as a source and quoting it as gospel, without a critical understanding of the sponsor’s habitual viewpoint. Following the procedure illustrated here should enable you to avoid assertions in your papers like “Reaganomics was hugely successful” or “Reaganomics was a total disaster,” and instead to use phrasing like “Holly Sklar, writing in the leftist Z Magazine , presents a socialist argument that Reaganomics vastly widened the gap between the rich and poor in the United States”; or, “Ed Rubenstein, in the conservative National Review, refutes statistics presented by leftists like Sklar claiming that Reaganomic policies have widened the gap between the rich and poor.” You can then go on to explain how the source’s general ideological viewpoint applies to the particular issue in question, analyze the rhetorical/semantic patterns accordingly, and evaluate the source’s arguments against opposing ones. In this way you can get beyond the parochial mentality of those who read and listen only to sources that confirm their preconceptions while deluding themselves that these sources impartially present a full range of information.
