Rhetorical Summaries

Grace Combs

Villanueva, Victor. ​Bootstraps: from an American Academic of Color​. National Council of

Teachers of English, 1993.

In this excerpt from ​Bootstraps: from an American Academic of Color​, an autobiographical and
education book about writing, author Victor Villanueva uses his personal experience to express
to students and writers the importance of writing styles and rhetoric. Villanueva proposes that
learning to write is a long process that involves lots of discovery along the way.
This connects to my and my writing through the idea that writing styles and ideas can change at
any moment, and that there are always new ways to write and new things to learn about writing
and reading.

Sommers, Nancy. “​​Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers​.”
College Composition and Communication, vol. 31, no. 4, 1980, pp. 378–388. JSTOR,
JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/356588.

In this essay, ​Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers, ​author and
writing professor Nancy Sommers uses essays and interviews from student and experienced
writers to explore and illustrate to scholars the differences between the revising strategies of the
two groups. Sommers explains that student writers write in a linear form and revise small details
while experienced writers revise as they write and as a whole.
This problem is seen very clearly in the kind of writing I did in high school where the teacher
gives certain guidelines in order to grade the paper fairly, allowing students to revise small
details according to those guidelines. This worries me because I know that really writing and
revising like an experienced writer takes a ton of time but if I care enough I think I can do it.

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” ​Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing​, vol. 1, 2010.

In the article ​Navigating Genres ​from the textbook writing series ​Writing Spaces: Readings on
Writing, a​ uthor Kerry Dirk writes to college students, in order to explain the concept of a genre,
and to open their eyes to the more abstract ideas genres encompass. Dirk does this by giving
examples of different genres, and expresses how students will get much more out of “genre
awareness” than actually trying to learn every genre.
This helped me understand the idea of genre way better, because I honestly was not sure what
really qualified as a genre, or how a genre is classified.
Walker, Sheila O., et al. “Nature, Nurture and Academic Achievement: A Twin Study of
Teacher Assessments of 7-Year-Olds.” ​British Journal of Educational Psychology​,
vol. 74, no. 3, 2004, pp. 323–342.

In the article ​Nature, Nurture and Academic Achievement: A Twin Study of Teacher Assessments
of 7-Year-Olds​ from the ​British Journal of Educational Psychology,​ authors Sheila O. Walker,
Stephen A. Petrill, Frank M. Spinath, and Robert Plomin document and interpret the results of
their studies to present to other scholars of psychology. They support their position that academic
achievement is largely influenced by genetics, nature rather than nurture, with evidence collected
during their study.
This helped me get an idea of what the genre of scholarly writing in the field of psychology is
like, which is mostly presenting the process and results of an experiment in order to support or
refute a claim.

Carson, Shelley, et al. ​Writing for Psychology: a Guide for Psychology Concentrators​.
Harvard University, 2012.

In the book ​Writing for Psychology: a Guide for Psychology Concentrators, ​authors Shelley H.
Carson, Jeanne Fama, Kate Clancy, Jeffrey Ebert, and Adrienne Tierney outline the basics of
writing for psychology, in order to inform aspiring scholars of psychology of the best ways to
write in their field. They do this by drawing on their personal experience and examples from
scholarly psychology articles to convey the rights and wrongs of writing for psychology.
This source was super helpful to my understanding of what psychology writing looks like and
what typical examples I will be able to find, like experimental outlines and result interpretations.