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On My Own
Teaching Writing as a Research Librarian
Kaeley McMahan, Wake Forest University

ABSTR AC T For two years, I co-taught the research portion of both 
introductory and advanced research and writing courses at the 
Wake Forest University School of Divinity, along with their academic 
skills instructor. When my co-instructor left the University in Fall 
2018, I was asked to continue teaching the introductory course on 
my own. While I felt confident in teaching about research, I had 
never taught writing in a formal way. In this presentation summary, 
I discuss the student learning objectives and course syllabus, as well 
as ideas for writing-focused course readings, assignments, class-
room exercises, and lecture topics. Finally, I explain how changes 
to the major course project were inspired by ideas shared during a 
2019 Atla Annual session. 

Full course syllabus, assignments, reading list, etc., along with the 
2020 conference presentation PowerPoint, can be found at: tinyurl.
com/y9y4bt28

OVERVIEW OF CDS512: INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH AND WRIT-
ING

CDS512: Introduction to Research and Writing is a one-credit elective 
course taught within the School of Divinity at Wake Forest Univer-
sity. The course consists of eight 90-minute class sessions during the 
Fall semester. While my experience as a librarian and instructor is 
weighted towards research topics, I have attempted to maintain even 
coverage of both research and writing skills across the class sessions, 
assignments, and readings in the course.

The course learning objectives are for students to be able to:

• Access and select appropriate reference books, scholarly books, 
and academic journal articles based on research needs.

• Incorporate research into written work and cite resources prop-
erly.

http://tinyurl.com/y9y4bt28
http://tinyurl.com/y9y4bt28


216  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

• Think and write critically about research sources.
• Practice effective reading strategies for comprehension and 

retention.
• Create an outline and craft a strong thesis statement for longer 

papers.

Because these learning objectives are in pedagogical language, I also 
include more straight-forward objectives, with specific examples, in 
the syllabus: 

My intention with this course is to introduce you to the variety of 
resources available to you at the ZSR Library, and equip you with the 
skills to locate, evaluate, and incorporate them into your work at the 
School of Divinity.  In order to accomplish this, we will:

• learn about the different types of resources used in biblical studies 
and theological research

• learn how to construct search strategies that can be used in the 
library catalog and important databases, such as Atla and JSTOR

• learn how to evaluate the resources you find in the catalog and 
databases, and what resources are best for different types of 
projects

• learn how to quote or paraphrase the most helpful pieces of 
information you find for appropriate use in your writing

• learn how to write citations in the Turabian 9 format and the ethical 
considerations surrounding proper citations

STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING WRITING

Readings about Writing
A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 
9th ed. (Turabian 2018), is the required citation style guide for the 
School of Divinity, and it has proved to be a valuable text for the 
course. Between the research and writing portions of the course, the 
students are assigned almost the entire first section of the book, as 
well as several chapters that cover citations and writing style in the 
second and third sections. As many of the students in the School of 
Divinity are embarking on their second or third careers, the thor-
ough overview of writing that Turabian outlines frequently helps 



Listen and Learn Sessions  217

to lessen any writing anxiety they might have brought with them 
into the program.

The other explicitly writing-focused reading is a chapter from 
The Seminary Student Writes, “Reading to Write” (Core 2000, 29–46), 
which gives good, practical advice on dealing with the significant 
amounts of reading students will engage with during divinity school. 
Importantly, Core focuses on how reading well can set students up 
to write well, too. 

Writing-oriented Assignments
Close Reading, Article Analysis, and Peer Review: Students are 
assigned the article, “Which God is With Us?” (Reid 2010), which has 
been placed on course reserve, and they must complete an analysis 
of it based on a close reading guidelines handout. A hard-copy rough 
draft of a two-page article analysis, comprised of one page of discus-
sion and one page of analysis, is then brought to class. As a group, we 
discuss the article, and then the students are paired and exchange 
rough drafts for peer review. After reading each other’s drafts, the 
students share constructive feedback, with explicit instructions 
that they are not to look for grammar or punctuation mistakes, but 
rather emphasize their classmate’s evaluation or analysis of Reid’s 
argument. The students then have two weeks (including Fall Break) 
to complete and turn in a final paper.

Writing Center Report: This assignment is designed to make 
students aware of the student support services that are available to 
them on campus. They are to meet with one of three services: a tutor 
at the Writing Center, the academic skills counselor for the School of 
Divinity, or a counselor or coach at the Learning Assistance Center. 
Their meeting is not required to be about an assignment for this 
course, but can cover any academic issue they may be having, such 
as test or writing anxiety, general study skills, note taking, or paper 
outlining. After their meeting, the students must write a two-page 
reflection paper describing their experience and what skills or tips 
they learned (or didn’t learn) from the session. This assignment is 
given in the first class meeting and the students have until the last 
day of the course to turn in their reflection. During the last class 
session, the students share what was helpful about their individual 
meetings, though I remind them that, because of privacy concerns, 
they are not required to do so.



218  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

Academic Plan: This assignment contributes to both the reading 
and writing aspects of the course. Students are required to fill out 
two sets of calendars. One is a weekly calendar that reflects their 

“normal” recurring weekly activities: classes, internships, church 
work, study groups, student organization meetings, sleep, etc. The 
other calendars are for each month in the semester. These are filled 
out by consulting their course syllabi and filling in the due dates for 
tests, papers, projects, and other course activities. The students are 
then encouraged to include incremental due dates for rough drafts, 
outlines, or research time so that they can keep their projects on 
schedule.  Along with these calendars, they write a two-page plan 
that discusses strategies for successfully completing the semester, 
where problems might occur, and previous academic challenges 
or successful strategies that may impact their new course of study. 
As this plan will surely change as the semester progresses, we have 
verbal check-ins twice during the rest of the course.

Research and Writing Reflection: This assignment also combines 
both course topics. At the end of the course, the students turn in a 
two-page reflection on how their approach to library research and/
or academic writing has changed during the course. They can discuss 
any aspect they would like, but I do provide some prompts they can 
consider, such as:

• New resource(s) discovered or used.
• A change in anxiety around research/writing.
• A change in planning or organization around the research or 

writing processes.
• Did reviewing a classmate’s writing impact or change your own 

writing?
• Did the concept of “scholarship as conversation” change how 

you viewed either the research or writing processes?

Lectures and In-class Exercises
Class Two — Getting to a Research Topic and Free-writing Exer-
cise:  The reading assignment prior to class two is to read the first 
two chapters of the Turabian text. For the lecture portion of the 
session, I summarize the process of defining a project that Turabian 
outlines in chapter two and we discuss what that might look like for 
their semester projects. Then we move into a free-writing exercise 



Listen and Learn Sessions  219

that gets them to start thinking about possible research topics. The 
exercise is based on the idea that you must start writing something, 
even if it is the wrong thing, so that you can then correct and expand 
it into what you actually want to say (Elbow 1973, 26). The exercise 
is composed of these five steps:

1) Write (five minutes): lists, questions, words, names, places, 
pictures, etc.

2) Underline (two minutes): what was interesting or thought-
provoking in what you wrote?

3) Write (two minutes): can you come up with a starting topic 
statement or question?

4) Share (five minutes): pair up and share your question with 
your partner. Do they have any new questions or ideas you 
hadn’t thought of?

5) Share (5 minutes): share your revised question with the class.

There are several benefits of this exercise. It is a fun, low-stakes way 
for students to start writing and get some ideas for their topics, which 
also gives them a strategy that they can use again on their own when 
they need to. Additionally, they have a record of what they thought 
about their topic before they did any research. This can help them 
remember what ideas were theirs and what ideas they gained by 
reading and research as they incorporate citations into their papers.

Class Seven — Writing Process, Paraphrasing and Footnotes 
Exercises: The lecture for class seven begins with a discussion of 
one strategy for the writing process: plan>compose>revise. Using the 
Close Reading and Article Analysis assignment as an example, I walk 
through how to read the assignment instructions and create a plan 
for what is required to complete the assignment. Next, I summarize 
composition ideas from Core (2000, 20) and Turabian (2018, 76–7), 
and offer tips on revision, such as reading your paper out loud or 
having someone unfamiliar with your topic read it for understand-
ing. The lecture portion ends with an overview of how to incor-
porate quotations and paraphrases into writing. We look at a few 
examples, and then move into an exercise. I share a paragraph of 
text and then two examples of how to paraphrase that text, one that 
is only paraphrase and one that includes a direct quotation as part 
of the paraphrase. Then the students have the opportunity to prac-
tice writing their own paraphrases. The last exercise in this class 



220  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

session has them working on a section of footnotes from one of two 
journal articles to see if they can find the resources listed (we have 
access to them all, so they should be able to!). The resources in the 
footnotes are a mixture of books and journal articles, in English and 
in other languages, and using various abbreviations, so this is a good 
opportunity for the students to practice the very important skill of 
reading footnotes.

CHANGES TO THE RESEARCH PROJECT

Prior to Fall 2019, all of the research projects for any course I taught 
were an annotated bibliography, consisting of three resources on 
a topic (reference, scholarly book, scholarly article), with a search 
strategy, citation, and annotation for each source. After attending a 
session by Sarah Bogue and Erica Durham at Atla Annual 2019, I was 
inspired to change this project to utilize a resource chart requiring 
the collection of ten resources on a topic. The students also had to 
write a citation for each resource but only had to write a full anno-
tation for one of them. There were several positive reasons for this 
change, including:

• requires more citation practice;
• gives the students a visual reminder of what to look for in schol-

arly sources;
• allows students to incorporate other types of resources, such as 

video lectures, primary sources, digital humanities projects, or 
podcasts;

• helps students see all of their sources at once and can help them 
see either overrepresentation or gaps in resource type, authors, 
or publication dates.

After trying this new approach in Fall 2019, I think there are a few 
changes I might make to the chart, such as more explicit instruc-
tions in the column headers, but on the whole I think it was a good 
update to the course.



Listen and Learn Sessions  221

WORKS CITED

Bogue, Sarah and Erica Durham. 2019. “Two Research Courses, Two 
Miles Apart, Two Completely Different Approaches.”  Presented 
at Atla Annual, Vancouver, BC, June 13.

Core, Deborah. 2000. The Seminary Student Writes. St. Louis, MO: 
Chalice Press.

Elbow, Peter. 1973. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford 
University Press.

Reid, Barbara. 2010. “Which God is with Us?” Interpretation 64, no. 4 
(October): 380–9.

Straub, Richard. 1999. “Responding—Really Responding—to Other 
Students’ Writing.” In The Subject is Writing: Essays by Teach-
ers and Students, edited by Wendy Bishop, 136–46. Portsmouth: 
Boynton/Cook.

Turabian, Kate L. 2018. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, 
Theses, and Dissertations. Ninth edition. Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press.


