11 Evaluating Sources Rhetorically

Information Need and Source Rhetoric

The “BEAM” model helps to think through what kind of source you need and how you are going to use your source in your own argument. It can also serve as a framework for evaluating a source, because it encourages you to think beyond simplistic markers of “credibility” like website extensions, or even peer review. Instead of classifying sources as “good” or “bad,” we can consider whether they are reliable for our purposes, and how they make use of their own sources. For example, Duke Ellington’s autobiography is a published book, but it is not published by a scholarly press or by a known scholar. It does not give much background information, does not discuss research methodologies, and does not make an explicit argument. He draws on almost no sources other than his own memory, and a few conversations with other musicians. However, if we want to discuss events in the musician’s life, his attitudes, or the history of his works, it’s clearly a source of interest. As a primary source, it’s something we may want to use as an “exhibit” or where we may find “evidence” to support our argument. On the other hand, Mark Tucker’s biography of Ellington provides extensive background detail and explains his methodological approach, and was written by a well-known jazz scholar. You might find some “evidence” in there, but it will all have come from other primary sources, like the autobiography. Since the goal is to reconstruct details of Ellington’s career, there is also not a strong argument here. Finally, …argument source.

Of course, we also need to evaluate the source itself to decide what kind of evidence we can draw from it. Can we rely on what Ellington tells us in his autobiography? How can we sort through what is useful about the source and what is not. Some ways to think about the source are to consider its:

• purpose
• audience
• relevance
• authorship
• bias
• currency
• writing style

(Based on a lesson from the Indiana University Libraries)

Duke Ellington’s memoir does not seem to have been written with the goal of providing evidence for historians. The writing style is very informal, conversational, and sometimes boastful, and there is no involvement of a scholarly editor and researcher to support him. His audience appears to be expected to have a fair amount of context for the kinds of music discussed, the other names dropped, and the historical context. We might guess from all this that his audience was fans and jazz listeners who were interested in the life and stories of their favorite musicians. The author here clearly has some authority to speak about the subject– his own life– but he clearly also has a specific perspective on this story, and may want to give us a particular view, or even to hide certain details. Should we take at face value the claim that he “drank more booze than anybody ever” (p. 94)? What might he be leaving unsaid when he writes simply:

 After that, we made yearly tours in the southern part of the country, spreading out to include Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina. In order to avoid problems, we used to charter two Pullman sleeping cars and a seventy-foot baggage car. Everywhere we went in the South, we lived in them. 

He makes no direct reference to incidents or threats of racism or violence, which might distract from his main narrative or even alienate certain readers. Without some background knowledge of race relations in mid-20th century US, and especially the South, a reader might miss the role that racial tensions played in his touring decisions. But with that knowledge for context, we can now use this as evidence for a discussion of how he dealt with some of these issues. Historian Harvey G. Cohen uses that detail, as it was expressed by Ellington’s bandmate Sonny Greer, as evidence in an argument about Ellington’s history of subverting racial barriers:

Such measures provided powerful nonverbal messages concerning the cachet of these African American musicians. The privacy of the Pullman car sheltered them from the struggles for hotels and meals that African American musicians often faced on the road, and provided them with security against the physical and verbal attacks often directed against traveling African American performers. (p. 295).