Читать книгу Engaging Ideas - John C. Bean - Страница 56

Both “and then” writing and “all about” writing have discernible organizational plans—chronological in the former case and encyclopedic in the latter. Data dump writing, by contrast, often has no discernible structure. It reveals a student overwhelmed with information and uncertain what to do with it. Commonly encountered in research papers, data dump writing patches together quotes, statistics, and other raw information without an apparent purpose or a coherent organizational plan. It takes all the data the writer gathered about topic X and dumps it, as it were, on the reader's desk. Data dump writing is particularly facilitated by the internet because it is so easy to cut and paste material from websites; students often lift material word for word without assimilating it into their own language. Data dump papers can create nightmares for teachers with their exasperating mix of incomprehensible structure and possible plagiarism. Because data dump writing is familiar to all teachers, it needs no specific illustration here.