Incorporating Secondary Sources

Reading done in preparation:

•     Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler’s “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons.” Students will have completed a first draft on their own projects using political cartoons.
•     Composing Inquiry chapter 6: Working on Writing from Texts

Class discussion/activity:

Objective: students work in small groups to examine and revise paragraphs that make use of secondary source material.

Task: Provide students with the directions and sample passages lifted from their own drafts or those provided in the handout below.

Time: Give groups at least 20 minutes to work on their individual paragraphs, then have a spokesperson from the group explain what the group discussed about the passage. Try to generate a list of suggestions or strategies that could serve as a guide when incorporating a secondary source.

Next step:  Students should revise their own papers, paying particular attention to the places where they incorporated secondary sources or summarized source material.

Notes/ Variations: Consider dividing this activity into two class sessions. After the group work on day 1, have the groups post on a class website the revised paragraphs as homework, and have everyone read the original and the revisions before the second class period when you will discuss the difference. If you don't have access to on-line technology, collect the revisions at the end of day 1, type them up and duplicate for discussion and comparison on day 2.

Incorporating Secondary Sources

 

Read through the passage you have been assigned. Discuss with your group:

1.      has the writer accurately represented the source material? If not, what changes need to be made?

2.      is the incorporation of the source material grammatically correct – i.e. do the sentences work to create a correct and understandable English sentence? If not, how would you fix them?

3.      what questions do you have as you read that you think the writer needs to answer – either here or later in the paper?

 Be prepared to present your questions and your revisions to the rest of the class. You should be able to explain why you’ve made the revisions you’ve made.

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Passage 1:

Michael McGee created the idea of an ideograph, “a word or group of words, such as “liberty” or “patriotism,” that serve to rhetorically create communities according to ideological constraints and beliefs.” (Edwards and Winkler 205) In other words, an ideograph can only be thought of as words which have a meaning based on a particular culture or group of people. McGee also formulated a set of specific criteria that help to better define an ideograph:  an ideograph can support or oppose the government, can have a flexible meaning, can turn a negative image into a positive image or vice versa, and can be understood by different cultures and groups of people. Janis Edwards and Carol Winkler on the other hand, agree with McGee’s criteria for an ideograph, but go beyond his definition and argue that a visual image in the right context of a political or editorial cartoon can also function as an ideograph, and be even more effective and persuasive. (205-209) In agreement with Edwards and Winkler, the image of the bald eagle within a cartoon can also function as an effective ideograph.

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Passage 2:

According to Edwards and Winkler, “The ability of cartoonists to alter visual images arguably distinguishes the verbal from the visual ideograph. Unlike the verbal version, visual ideographs can appear to members of the culture in a variety of forms through the addition, omission, and distortion of their component elements.” (pg. 212) This is evident in the five cartoons presented. Each cartoon contains the image of the bald eagle, but is altered in a way so that different elements such as political figures, captions, and other symbols are also used to depict past as well as current affairs in the nation and the world. An ideograph should be able to incorporate these elements together to convey an effective message that is understood by all, and the bald eagle within different cartoons is an example of this. 

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Passage 3:

After reading Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima in Editorial Cartoons, By Edwards and Winkler, it became apparent that political cartoons are much more then merely an abstract, comical view of an icon, but rather a more complicated analysis of how society reads into different events and symbols based on their cultural beliefs and personal ideals. Edwards and Winkler explain how ideographs are used in many political cartoons, rather than just in written communication, and show how icons are misinterpreted by many, and lead us to thinking more black and white rather than looking for a deeper representation of an image.

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Passage 4:

To begin, we must try to understand what an ideograph is and how political cartoonists use them to create political cartoons. In Edward and Winkler’s essay they explain how in 1980 Michael C. McGee came up with the idea of an ideograph. He explained it as, “Culturally-grounded summarizing, and authoritative terms that enact their meaning by expressing an association of cultural ideals and experiences in an ever-evolving and reifying form within the rhetorical environment”(204). As one can notice, McGee was clearly not talking about cartoons, he was insisting that ideographs are to be used while reading or writing. His reasoning lacks a strong stance to why only actual words can assume the position of an ideograph, and why a cartoon for instance cannot form an ideograph.

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Passage 5:

It seems that ideographs can very well be used in political cartoons. When a cartoonist uses an icon but abstracts the way the audience looks at it, he is on his way to creating an ideograph. Ideographs are multidirectional in the way that they can go against power, but can also go for it. Instead of univocal, ideographs are equivocal, in the manner that they are flexible, ambiguous and can have multiple interpretations (Marshall Lecture). Edwards and Winkler use the icon of Iwo Jima, when the soldiers are pushing the flag up into the ground. This icon represents patriotism, American pride, and loyalty to our nation. When Edwards and Winkler give examples of the icon used in political cartoons, the cartoons purpose and abstraction makes an image that was once an icon representing concrete manner, to an ideograph with flexible, powerful meaning overshadowing the icon that once was. From soldiers trying to keep the closet door closed, to soldiers trying to raise a baseball bat instead of the flag, cartoonist have been using ideographs to depict a controversial image that once was an icon but now has different interpretations and meanings.

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Passage 6:

According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, the term ideograph means “a picture or symbol used in a system of writing to represent a thing or an idea but not a particular word or phrase for it; especially :one that represents not the object pictured but some thing or idea that the object pictured is supposed to suggest.” Michael McGee has used this to reference ideographs to words as Edwards and Winkler has associated the term with images. It is my belief that a significant event possesses the same characteristics of an ideograph as the aforementioned.

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Passage 7:

            An ideograph according to McGee is a “one-term sum of an orientation, the species of ‘God’ or ‘Ultimate’ term that will be used to symbolize the line of argument the meanest sort of individuals would pursue if that individual had the dialectical skills of philosophers, as a defense of a personal stake in and commitment to the society” (McGee as qtd. in Winkler 12). In modern times, political cartoonists often take on the role of the philosopher with their skills of dialect being used in animations, caricatures, one-liners, and satire. Through the use of their cartoons, they attempt to shift an image or a situation in a way that it causes the reader to see the point of view (line of argument) the cartoonist is trying to make.