My Writing Guide

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xs1iyqRm-2yH4UJRXOdq-qa7mPnnmAR6SJ2vAJ8Lggw/edit?hl=en_US&authkey=CKGijaUL#

Swales and Kantz

I found John Swales' article on creating a research space to be quite useful, because there is nothing worse than feeling as though you are rewriting something that has been said a billion times before (or having to read a paper like that). Finding my own niche is really the only motivating aspect of writing papers for me; to spend ten pages merely rewording what is already out there is the most dismal task I can imagine. I like that he presents us with different options for each step of the process. These will probably be pretty useful when it comes to our upcoming assignment.

I couldn't bring myself to read the entirety of Margaret Kantz's article because I know what she is getting at and I don't need to read a 10 page anecdote to understand. Most students, when they first start writing, simply summarize the information that they have found in their academic papers. They do not realize that they need to add their own original twist on the information that is already out there in order to avoid summary. I know this article because this was my own experience upon coming to college. My freshman composition teacher taught us that we needed to have an argument. Since then I have prided myself on coming up with original arguments for my paper, as well as a structure that is loosely based on logical syllogisms. If A and B then C. I get what she's saying, because my entire English degree has been comprised of writing these kind of papers all the time. If I had known this going into it, I probably would have chosen a different major.

The Source of Annoyance

Kyle D. Stedman's article, "Annoying Ways People Use Sources," attempts to point out the most common source related issues. I was familiar with a lot of these, as I have had other teachers point out how annoying a lot of these issues are, especially the "armadillo roadkill" one, in which the author doesn't introduce the source he is dropping in at all. 

My favorite of his hilariously titled annoyances was Am I in the right movie? I say "favorite" not because I like this mistake but because, in all of the peer reviews I have had to do in college, it is the most bothersome to me. Am I in the right movie? is the analogy Stedman uses to explain the feeling one gets when the quotation in a paper is not grammatically analogous to the preceding lead in. A lot of these seem like tense and subject-verb agreement patterns. His suggestion is practical: read your work aloud. If it doesn't make sense, change it. This seems like it should be logical advice for the entirety of most essays, but people don't usually have the time to go in and proofread. (or take the time, I guess, for all the non-procrastinators out there)

The annoyance entitled I swear I did some research! was somewhat bothersome for me because of its vague nature. I have taken to only citing after quotations, because it is hard to know where to drop in citations after summaries. I think that as long as the information isn't super specific, it is okay to write a summary style section without citing a specific source. It seems like a good rule of thumb might be, "if I had to look this information up, I should cite it." Perhaps our time in the library will help to make this a little more clear. 

I thought that this was a very clever, approachable, useful article. I didn't know Oprah's boyfriend was capable of such writing.  

Genre Analysis

Here is a link to my Genre Analysis paper

Food Blogs: Taking Back Authority

Bawarshi's "Ecology of Genre"

FINALLY! Finally an article that explains how writing is an ecology- through genre! Bawarshi articulates how writer and context have a symbiotic relationship in the same way that a microorganism and its ecosystem do: "a writer and his or her rhetorical environment are always in the process of reproducing one another, so that "environment" is not some vague backdrop against which writers enact their rhetorical actions; instead, the environment becomes in critical ways part of the very rhetorical action that writers enact." (70). Bawarshi boils down Cooper's rather dense theory to a few key notions, then attempts to explain "rhetorical ecosystems." He writes, "We are constantly in the process of reproducing our contexts as we communicate within them, speaking and writing about our realities and ourselves to the extent that discourse and reality cannot be separated." (71). This seems like kind of a radical notion, because we like to assume that there is some objective reality that we are dropped into, but really, I guess reality is more like this big open forum that we are all contributing to.

Bawarshi places a big emphasis on rhetorical contexts and the ways in which the agreed upon rhetoric shapes our notions of the "reality" we are experiencing. It is interesting to think that in any new place that you travel to, you will be faced with and most likely seek out rhetorical clues that might distinguish that place from another place or help you decide what your role in that place will be. People might have certain notions about what Paris is like as a city and culture, and they may try to adapt themselves based on rhetorical clues given in movies or travel guides to fit in with the "spirit" of Paris. It is interesting to try to think of a place apart from its context, its mythology, its representation in films and literature. Places are just places (physically, geographically) in the way that all writing is a collection of words into paragraphs into documents. It is the rhetoric of these things that make them mean something to us, help us figure our place within them.

It was nice to read some genre analysis examples. The girl's one about first year compositions seemed a little below register to me.

My Understanding of Genre

After reading these articles, I would define genre as an action performed with a specific context. It becomes sort of a way of categorizing things based upon noting the similarities in purpose and style and form in different pieces of writing. Dirk notes that genre thus builds upon a response to a given situation, then develops as others are put to that same task: "Once we recognize a recurring situation, a situation that we or others have responded to in the past, our response to that situation can be guided by past responses." (252). If we think about this fact, then it seems as though genre is less of a "fill-in-the-blanks" type process that Devitt and Dirk want to stay away from, but rather the kind of personal reshaping of something that we have examined closely that both articles seem to encourage.

It was interesting to read the articles in the order that I did, with Devitt first then Dirk, because it was easier for me to see the ways in which Dirk modified Devitt's information for a college aged kid. Devitt's article is written for the potential teacher of genres, and she lays down a basis for pedagogy that makes a lot of sense. Of her strategy, she says, "I suggest that critical genre awareness, rather than multiple genres of engagement, can help students maintain a critical stance and their own agency in the face of disciplinary discourses, academic writing, and other realms of literacy." (337). Her critical awareness pedagogy has three parts: teaching the genre as a "thing," teaching it as a "process," and critiquing genres in general so that students know where to make change. Devitt's approach seemed quite solid to me because it addresses both the needs of the teacher to try to make students familiar with different genres, but also the need to the student to resist and change those genres as they critique and then try a hand at them.

After working through an article with a more intense register that wasn't aimed at me, it was refreshing to breeze through Dirk's article- one aimed at me. I think Dirk's article work because it was so meta aware. Dirk used a lot of rhetoric aimed at making a college student feel interested and welcomed when reading his article, but he also admitted that he was doing this. This was a smart move because he was being honest, not talking down to us. Plus, his illustration of his awareness of how he should approach us as an audience served to illustrate how we approach new genres: by looking at what has been done before, saving what works, getting rid of what doesn't. What better way is there to teach us about modifying genres than to do so (and discuss the process) in writing an article that modifies the genre it writes in? I thought this article was very clever, smart, and informative.

Discourse Communities Complicated

In "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing," Joseph Harris attempts to look at the word "community" and see how it might be a problematic phrasing. He finds that it is too vague- that it encompasses too many different ideas for too many people. On one hand, community has a warm fuzzy connotation and can be invoked rhetorically to try to make people feel like they are a part of something good. While use of "community" in this way can be problematic, he says that it can also be a powerful way to unite people who have chosen to gather together. "The sort of group invoked is a free and voluntary gathering of individuals with shared goals and interests: of persons who have not so much been forced together as have chosen to associate with one another." (586). Overall, Harris seems to push for this idea of conglomerate personal discourses. I mean that, instead of making students jump from one discourse to another, writing instructors should encourage each student to think of writing as adding to the language that they already know. Harris says, "It seems to me that they might better be encouraging towards a kind of polyphony- an awareness of and pleasure in the various competing discourses that make up their own." Harris also challenges the idea that communities have to be consensual. He says that it is the competing ideas and beliefs that push a community to change, and that we are therefore better off viewing academic discourse communities as a "polyglot."

Johns speaks of the ways in which one's different communities might come into conflict with one another. In the first part of the article, she explains how there are different levels of communities that we belong to. In the second, more interesting part, she focuses on academic discourse communities and the ways in which they butt heads with one's other communities. In some instances, people may become isolated from their families and home cultures upon assimilating into the academic discourse communities. They may have to give up some of the ways of speaking, values, and attitudes from their old community that may have shaped who they are. She also talks about how we must encourage students entering into the discourse to seek out rhetorical strategies for establishing authority, so that they, too, might grow to have some authority in their work. She urges that discussion also be opened up about the conventions and anticonventions of a particular genre, so that students know when they should push the limits and when to hold back.

These authors don't really reject the notion of discourse communities, they just want to explore how complicated they really are. Harris seems to be seeking a sort of redefinition of discourse communities, one that everyone can get on board with, so that discussion about discourse communities might be less sporadic. Johns definitely does not argue that discourse communities do not exist, but instead that we do more to help those entering specific discourse communities understand how the power dynamics and rhetoric of these communities work, so that they can establish their own sort of authority and contribute in a thoughtful way.

These articles didn't change my feelings on discourse communities very much because I felt as though they harped more on the "definition," which is a discussion that I think the people in that field need to figure out before I read more about it. I liked that Johns brought up some of the downsides of discourse communities, because that may be something that I will face when I enter a particular discourse community.

I feel as though we have spent so much time reading these articles because they pertain to our immediate futures very directly. We are involved in the "college" discourse community, which is interesting to tear apart, but we are moving into totally unknown territory- the "professional" world. These articles have given us a lot to think about. We must think about how we will have to adapt in order to fit into this new world, and what these adaptations will mean for our identities. I have learned that just to get a job in a world that is unfamiliar to me has a lot more going on under the surface than I would suspect, and that I need to be much more aware of the way in which I am presenting and compromising who I have become up to this point in order to fit into a certain world. It has made me think twice about entering the professional world, for I hope more than ever to find a way to avoid it.