a. In “Information Illiteracy and Mass Market Writing Assessments: Turning Information Behaviors into Research Skills,” Les Perelman’s main argument is that students have become “information illiterate” because of how they are taught to follow the formulas laid out for them by the teachers, rather then have the leeway to unreservedly construct their own forms of writing. Although College Board claims that their new forms of writing instruction (e.g., new SAT writing and AP Language and Composition essays) are reliable ways of refining how writing is taught, he criticizes that notion by explaining to his audience that these essays are encouraging “students to embrace habits that produce mechanistic prose lacking any intellectual substance” (128).…show more content… College Board gave them 5 out of 6 because their essays are accurate. In this passage, Perelman suggests that students, which includes the students in our class, do not critically think about the information; rather, students carelessly incorporate distorted information, without understanding it and “making it work.” McClure expands upon this idea by saying that, “Despite my concerns, and perhaps your own, their Googlepedia-based research process can provide the terms they need to complete the research in more sound and productive ways, and the process can be easily replicated in an online library” (“Googlepedia,” 236). The idea that students should not use Googlepedia as a primary source of research strikes me as common knowledge because teachers have come to engrave this idea within our brains, but they tell students that it cannot be a source at
