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.

Identity and Authority

Wardle talks about one's identity as a newcomer in the workplace, and the struggles one encounters in trying to decide how much of themselves they are willing to augment. She says, "As we encounter genres mediating new activity systems, we must determine whether we can and/or must appropriate those genres, thus expanding our involvement within those systems. We must also consider whether expanding involvement in one system forces us away from other activity systems we value-- away from 'activity systems of family, neighborhood, and friends that construct ethnic, racial, gender, and class identities.'" (523). When I read this bit, I though immediately of our discussion about discourses. We talked about how it is unnatural sometimes to enter and second discourse and how you might get around that, but we didn't talk about the resistance one might feel in trying to do this and how it might influence one's success in their chosen field. I really like the direction Wardle's article went in because I feel as though this is the main issue for people on an individual level. I thought about the blog post I had written about the resume- how angry and full of contempt it was towards trying to adapt myself into this new genre. Wardle says that, "participation in new communitites requires accepting for onesself identities that are at odds with the values of other communities to which one belongs." (525). It seems to me that one will inevitably feel this sort of "rebellion" as Wardle calls it, but the difference among people will be to what degree they are bothered and how easily they will tolerate these imposed identities. People are always saying that you need to do what you love, that you need to be "true to you," but, unless you are highly self motivated and talented, or maybe even inevitably, you will be forced into having to compromise your idealized identity in order to survive. We cannot all get paid to express ourselves in the way that we want to; so we must adapt. Our success, however, will be in negotiating a compromise between our identities as we see them and the identity that our employers seek from us. As far as how this has influenced writing in my profession, this article made me feel even more motivated to make sure that whatever profession I decide to get involved with is one in which I will have to be on the same page as my employer. I think a lot of the tension involved in this rebellion is in the insecurity involved in trying to adopt an identity that you don't even really understand at all. As I've said before, trying something new is terrifying, and I think it is especially for me. I have a lot of anxiety about fitting some sort of professional mold, because I've found throughout my life that when I was forced to be a certain way that I didn't want to be, I became seriously unhappy. I have found that there is a way to live life in the way you want- it is just a matter of reorienting priorities. What I mean is that you can prioritize your life in a way that secondary discourses aren't your primary focus. You can make a living in a way that doesn't involve your creative identity, but you can still be creative. You can have a family. You can make friends. You can be happy in the ways that matter, that don't involve compromising your identity. As Wardle says, "Identity is dynamic." (525). more to come on the rest of the question...

Discourses, Ecologies, Rhetoric

I think that you had us read these articles together because they seem to be three ways of going about looking at how to approach learning/ writing. Janet Boyd teaches us about employing rhetorical strategies- about how to change our writing strategies according to our purpose/ audience. Gee introduced the concept of discourses- ways of being- in the world and the ways in which we might approach entering into discourses that we are not born into. Cooper introduced this idea of writing ecologies, in which our writing should have more of a social purpose.

Gee claims that "You cannnot overtly teach anyone a Discourse, in a classroom or anywhere else." (7). He differentiates between primary and secondary discourses. One's primary discourse is the environment in which one was born, or, as Mr. Whicker put it, "how one acts at home." Secondary discourses relate to the way we behave in any other environment, where we do not have a natural notion of how to behave. The only way we can enter into these discourses in any way, according to Gee, is either by faking our way into it or by having a meta knowledge of how getting into discourses works.

Gee seems a bit extreme to me. I feel like he is comparing discourses in a way to the concept of old money versus new money. New money can never be old money because it cannot be inherited. But is the difference between old and new money really of matter anymore? Have we not come to the consensus that it is more admirable for a person to make their way against odds than to be handed something? This mentality doesn't really translate to the concept of discourses too well. I think that Gee forgets that the experts in certain fields of discourse didn't just pop up that way. They had to be acclimated, just like everyone does, into their field. Sure you have to fake it a little, and to fake it a little requires extensive meta knowledge. But what is the difference between "faking it" and merely "trying" to become a part of something? Gee sounds a bit like a man scorned. I think that taking this attitude of "oh, i'll never be genuinely part of this discourse- my life will be full of faking it" is really negative and will only hinder a person's progress. All new things are scary and you feel uncomfortable. The secret is to not get too overwhelmed by feeling like an outsider.

The difference between Gee's discourses and Cooper's ecologies is that, while the discourses divide into "in" and "out," the ecologies explore the way in which all writing affects the audience and the writer. She says, "The metaphor for writing suggested by the ecological model is that of a web, in which anything that affects one strand of the web vibrates throughout the whole. Cooper encourages collaboration in writing. I was taken by her description of the centuries old notion of the student- one who studies and writes in private, and comes out smart as all get out but isolated in his purposes. She proposes that, since we will all end up working with others anyway, that we should write and learn interactively with others. She proposes a new sort of consciousness for writers- that a writer should think about how his/her writing will affect that genre as well as those who read it.

The Resume as Genre

The article begins by explaining that the resume is an excellent "genre" to teach in schools because it actually has a place in the real world. The authors seem to think that in showing students that there is more to a resume than filling in some blanks, that there is some rhetoric behind the task, they will be breaking a creativity crushing attitude towards writing/life in general (the attitude that rules are good because they are easily followed). They assume that rules are easy to follow for everyone, which I am at odds with. It was interesting to read this article after being blindly thrown into the world of resume writing because I was placed in the same situation as these students. Except I found that building a resume was not just about a set of rules, but about hyping onesself up, deciding which information to include or to not, and trying to figure out these conventions that are so completely foreign to me.

Peagler and Yancey say, "discursive practices position forms of identity that can be at odds with the identity of the student, and in the case of the resume, there is the tension between the still-in-formation student and the fully formed professional. As a genre, the resume would allow us to speak to that tension in helpful ways." They are spot on about the existence of this tension, but they may not realize how damaging the tension can be to one's psyche. I felt like an idiot creating my resume, feeling as though I didn't know what to put on there because my jobs have been not at all in my profession (however a necessity) and because in having a job and rejecting the phoniness of clubs and sororities I have not had much extracurricular work. In my field, the resume does nothing to speak of what I've done. I need to show portfolios and recommendations, so building my resume was kind of crushing to my conception of my self worth within the "professional world."

They say that the teaching of resumes would "speak to that tension in helpful ways." I am not sure of in what way they mean this. One "helpful way" I guess would be if they then read and workshopped your resume to teach you how to fake your way into professional good graces. It reminds me of the article we read on Discourses. The professional world is not a primary discourse for me, so my only option is to fake it or to gain meta knowledge about it. Okay, well, my resume can be workshopped and someone can tell me how to fake it. So I guess that is helpful. Another helpful way I guess would be for the teacher to acknowledge the downfalls of the resume, to acknowledge its ass kissing phoniness at times.

For me, "learning" to write a "successful" resume is just another lesson in glossing one over for the man, in selling myself, in having to boil myself down to a few experiences that do not show my talents at all. I hate formalities; I resist the resume.

Klein and Shackleford's Design Approach

Klein and Shackleford have a similar design approach to Robin Williams in that they both focus on the basic principles of design: contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. In fact, the writers acknowledge that they have gotten their information from this book. So it is quite similar.

The difference between the two texts is that, while Williams' text focuses almost entirely on professional documents, Klein and Shackleford attempt to help college students understand that design is an important element in student writing- particularly academic. They seem to focus a lot on how to insert images and graphics into academic papers in order to give a visual representation of the issue at hand in order to strengthen its impact. I agree, but the problem I had with the article is that all of our papers have to be in MLA, usually, and graphics, at least in my field, are discouraged. The article went on and on about what MLA is supposed to look like, but I've had that shoved down my head since the seventh grade. MLA is sort of an afterthought now. And if the design rules are already decided for me, what's the point of thinking about design at all?

I think that design elements are useful to know if you are the one in control of the design. But if you have to follow a certain formatting, these style skills don't get utilized.

The rhetorical purpose of MLA is consistency. If everyone formats their documents in the exact same way, it is no longer the design that influences the reader's perception of a document, but the text only. With all the writer's necessary information in comparable places, the reader can focus more on the body of the text itself. Style wise, the title is centered in MLA so that it stands out from the rest of the text. Titles are very important in academic writing: they can either be creative or can give the basic gist of the paper before you dive in. The writing is double spaced so that you can read a large chunk of text more easily. This also leaves room for notes and editing by the reader. The name and page number at the top of each page are there for organizational purposes. The header brings consistency and equality to writers, as well as providing pertinent information.

Why Study Design?

The concept of design seems to be related, generally, to one's general concept of taste and style. The basic concepts of design don't have to do just with making nice business cards and resumes, but extend into all areas of life. Design asks the questions: How should something look? Is the way this looks appropriate? Does it represent me? Is it visually pleasing? Developing your own personal aesthetic is crucial to how you will represent yourself, in a world where you can't judge someone instinctively by magically picking up on who they are. So we must present ourselves. Our appearance, our homes, our speech, and our writing will represent us.

So, in writing in the professions, it seems only natural that we should learn the elements of design. If we must represent ourselves in the same common ways- through documents, cover letters, resumes, etc., it is probably good to know how to show others that we have good taste. Our good taste is a reflection upon our level of professionalism, our artistic sensibility, and our knowledge of the status quo.

I am not sure of my future profession. I want to be a creative writer, but I am unsure of how that will work in the confines of this class. So, for the purpose of this class, I will choose a different future profession that I am interested in: craftsman/ small business owner. My friend and I plan to start a business selling clothes that we have made and altered from previously used clothes, as well as screenprinted t-shirts. Design will be crucial for this. We will need to design hang tags for our clothes, as well as clothing tags, that represent the name of our "brand." (which is thus far not known). We plan to sell these items at craft markets and fairs, so we will need to design a logo for our business, as well as signs for the tables we set up. We need to create a sort of image, I guess, that represents our particular vision. Depending on how things go, we may need to get a small business loan. This will require design. We also may need to market our clothing to boutiques that already do this similar type of thing. Therefore, we will need business cards, resumes, and cover letters.

Reading Like A Writer

The concept of Reading like a Writer, as introduced by Mike Bunn, makes a lot of sense to me. I am a writer, mostly of non-fiction, poetry, and literary analysis, and I find that I often am looking at texts from that perspective. If I am reading something I really like, I try to look at what about the author's writing- structurally or content-wise or stylistically on a sentence level - is working, or drawing me to it. My most recent creative writing teacher introduced us to the concept of energy- just our natural response to any piece of writing. Where do we start to feel something? Where does it pick up? When you start to look for these kinds of things, you start to catalog what seems to work. Then your mind wonders why, and you are on the path to discovering something about writing.

Even looking at it just from a reader's perspective, as Bunn does, the concept does a lot to illuminate analytical and critical reading. If you look at a text from a rhetorician's standpoint, understanding how the argument of a particular piece works, what strategies he or she is using, you can read more critically. Are you being duped? You are probably being duped anyway, but, are they going about it artfully? Does the tone of the writing convince you? I liked that Bunn said you should think about the intended purpose and audience for a text, for, if you are reading critically, it is important to know from what sort of angle you critique should come. For example, you wouldn't want to read someone's personal essay with the same critical eye as you would a presidential speech.

In reading like a writer, some of the important questions I think about are:
Where is the writing unclear?
Where is it confident?
What is the purpose of this (metaphor, anecdote, aside)?
Why is the piece structured in this way?