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>> We're looking at a paper
where everything is done correctly.
And let me try and review what that means.
This is the introductory paragraph to a paper
on saving the Colorado River Delta.
And, in fact, the title already tells me something,
and that's good.
I really appreciated, and all faculty do,
when a student actually thinks of a title because it means
that they are thinking about the topic, and they have something
in mind for their paper.
So advice to you is don't just put Paper 1 or Paper
on the U.S.-Mexico border.
You've written a paper on something more specific.
Try to use the title as a place
to tell the reader what's coming up.
Now, this introduction is really good for several reasons.
And since we've been talking about writing in your own words,
plagiarism and using quotes, and sliding sources,
I'll just address that first, and say that in this paper,
there's nothing plagiarized.
There's nothing at all plagiarized,
so everything has been written and attributed correctly,
but more importantly, there aren't any quotes.
And so this student has actually thought through the material
and written it up in her own words.
And that is a much stronger paper than a paper
that has quote at all.
This particular assignment, and in most of the assignments
in my classes, there just isn't really any need
for quotes anywhere.
And when I see quotes, what I think is the student didn't want
to take the time to think it through themselves,
so they just stuck in what someone else wrote.
When I don't see any quotes, and also the writing is clear
and clean, I know the student has thought
through the material.
Because she had to gather research.
She's got a bibliography with 5, 6, 7 items in it,
and she had to read stuff that other people wrote,
and she had to think about it.
And she did.
And I see this in a number of ways.
So she starts off with kind of taking a bit of a distance
from the topic, which is saving the Colorado River Delta,
and that doesn't even appear in the first two sentences.
First she says, water is essential
for not only survival, but for prosperity.
So that, sort of, tells us, oh well, okay, so this topic
about the Colorado River Delta matters
because water really matters.
Okay. And then in the Western United States,
many take for granted the abundance
of this natural resource that is not necessarily native
to their states.
And now she's also saying that people tend
to take water for granted.
And a suggestion would be I think you would agree with me,
that maybe her paper is that we shouldn't.
We shouldn't be doing that.
And so we already got that.
We got this is a topic that matters
because water is essential.
And we got that it's taken for granted,
but we really shouldn't.
And that's just in two sentences.
So this tells me that she has really.
She's just thought about it.
And I like that she's been a little bit creative,
and she is situating her paper in something bigger
than just the topic itself.
And now she comes to the Colorado River.
She's narrowing down as you see.
First with water, then the Western U.S.,
and then the Colorado River.
The paper's not about the Colorado River.
The paper's about the Colorado River's Delta.
That's what it's about.
But here she narrows down more, and tells us something
about the Colorado River that it provides water
to over 30 million people in 7 different states,
and here's this number 1, which is her reference.
And so she has used her own words,
but she's citing the source.
Where did she get this?
She got it from Ward 2001.
And we can go to her bibliography
and we'll find what that is.
Is it a book?
Is it an article?
We'll discover that in the bibliography.
Now she says in addition to these states,
the river also provides water to Mexico, where the lower basin
of the river creates the Colorado River Delta.
This is really a perfect introduction because she's gone
from the most general, coming down within five lines,
to the topic of her paper.
Now we can situate it.
We know that the Colorado River Delta is the delta
of that river.
That the river flows through 7 states in the United States.
That it serves over 30 million people.
She's done this in her own words.
And she's done it in 6 lines.
It's really, really well done.
And now that she's come to the delta,
she starts to tell us more about it
because after all, why do we care?
She needs to make us care.
It's the introduction.
So she says that this delta creates the largest
and most critical wetland for avian and aquatic species
of concern, and even in its depleted states,
is the largest wetland in Southwest North America.
Well, okay, that makes me think the delta's important.
And there's a citation again.
And then here's the problem.
The delta, however, is being devastated
by the heavy diversions
to its water source, the Colorado River.
So now she's brought me in more
because now she's not just telling me it's an area
that matters, but it's an area that matters with a problem.
And she continues to explain
that the delta receives only a fraction of its natural flow,
and even that has high salinity.
Okay. So she's setting up that there's a problem.
And now she turns it around and she says,
yet despite the delta's shrunken and contaminated water supply,
there is still hope
of recovering its endangered wetlands.
The Colorado River Delta can be restored if the U.S.
and Mexico recognize the delta as a stakeholder
in the battle over riparian rights.
So she's taken us from not knowing anything
about the topic, into where it's located, what the problem is,
and the fact that there is some hope for it,
and here's how that will come about.
This is a masterful introduction,
and it was all written by the student,
and could only be written because she thought
about her different sources down here, what the material was,
and she brought them together in her own way
to create a really nice introduction to her paper.