This article details an assignment sequence asking students to apply an adaptation of Swales and Feak's (2009) model of social sciences abstract writing to articles in the humanities. This model works as an exploded diagram of the article, explicitly identifying research questions, data, methods, results, interpretations, and implications. The assignment provides students, first, with a reading tool for exposing the articulated construction of academic research articles. Second, as a writing tool, it allows students to practice comprehensive synthesis; the breakdown of multi-part claims; concision and clarity; and selective quotation. Finally, it facilitates the next step in students' research process: framing new inquiry by identifying uses and limitations in prior scholarship. This assignment sequence has been used in first-year composition and upper-division WID/WAC courses in the humanities; it can be adapted for courses in social and natural sciences and for graduate courses.

Joseph Bizup's BEAM schema establishes a rhetorical approach to research writing pedagogy, articulating four distinct ways writers use sources: for background, exhibit, argument, and method. This article rechristens the framework I-BEAM, identifying a fifth category: instance source use, a constitutive function that establishes the need for the writer's argument. Instance source moves appear in numerous locations––introductions, textual asides, footnotes/endnotes, and epigraphs––and can situate the writing in both academic and popular contexts. Attention to this exigency move highlights the problem of authenticity in school-based writing and raises questions about sources formative to the writer but invisible to the reader.