A Definition of Commuter Students

Analyze how the article uses, builds on, takes a position with respect to, and adds to prior publications.

The assignment is to find a research or scholarly article that pertains to your field. The text I am analyzing isn't really either, but instead a definition of commuter students according to http://www.answers.com/. I have been using this information for research at my internship. The definition builds on other texts to define what a commuter student is, so I thought it would be interesting to analyze the intertextuality of such information.

Like any other publication, this article uses a number of sources primarily to build information. Indirect quotation, mentioning a person and document, and using familiar language are all means of building this information. Because the purose of the article is to inform, the mentioned sources include reports and studies. For example, the first sentence indirectly quotes two researchers about the definition of a commuter. The author uses this definition to define the topic, and then present his or her position. Specifically, the author presents challenges of commuting.

Another way the author uses other publications to build on the article is using words that would be common in all the sources in order to create a complete definition for the reader. These words are directly related to college life, so readers who have never been to college may not fully understand the corresponding concepts. A few of these words are "off-campus", "higher-education institution", and "residence halls".

Just as the author indirectly quotes a source in the introduction of paragraph in order to define "commuter," the author uses the same tactic to reinforce his or her point that retention for commuters is low: "A study by Vincent Tinto in 1987 indicates that students who have high interaction with their university's academic and social systems are more likely to persist in college." Because commuter students rarely spend downtime on campus, they face more difficulty in interacting with the campus life. Using studies to reinforce information with a factual purpose is an effective to convince readers of your point.