The Tale of Two Stories

After reading Margaret Kantz’s article entitled “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively” I made a few observations about the article. One point in the article is about imaginary characters that have different approaches when compiling information for research papers. The thing that I felt was incredibly relatable was the acknowledgment of sources. During my sophomore year in high school one of my teachers retired and he was replaced by this new teacher who forced everyone into citing their papers and would fail anyone who did not cite their sources. This was a very monumental moment for my career as a student and as a writer for I had never cited my sources before and I thought it was a total waste of my own time. If I didn’t understand the difference of accepting fact as I read it and seeing opinions for what they are, I would be just  like how Shirley does her research during the story, because she takes a piece of information at face value and doesn't think about who it is who is telling you the information. I feel this is completely like how the news is today, because if a story happens the slants that each news company will be completely different and sometimes even completely opposites. I have seen it hundreds of times, I will see some news story on MSNBC or Fox then I will change the channel so I can see what the other station is saying and nine times out of ten they will be completely different approaches on the subject (as you can see from the video above). To be better when taking information you must do as Alice does for she has a complete understanding on the biases of articles knowing that using more than one source will make your paper better and will give you a more rounded understanding on the subject. Understanding that when you see a piece of information that it is not always true and that you probably are seeing a biased version of the information given. Recently a group of friends of mine were talking and brought up to me  that they read an article that said the broncos had thrown the super bowl in order to make money. The conversation quickly turned to anger as they realized how unreliable the source they were reading was, because the same website had many other satirical articles presented as true.