Link to Final Portfolio

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uDuHs0xEh6e-4g0AdWLn8b-CrR1jVHDBFoRaCdzofwY/edit?hl=en_US

Response for May 9th Article

For class today, we had to read an article titled “Annoying Ways People Use Sources” by Kyle D. Stedman. This article was all about how there are different ways to properly cite a source, and sometimes people either do not know that there is a right way or they are too lazy to care. One passage that I found in this article that really stood out to me was when he said “those decisions include nitty-gritty things like introducing quotations and citing paraphrases clearly: not everyone in the entire world approaches these things the same way, but when I strategically learn the expectations of my U.S. academic audience, what I really want to say comes across smoothly, without little annoying blips in my readers’ experience”. This passage stood out to me because this is definitely something that a professional would say. Someone who was not good at putting together pieces of work would not say something like this because they would not know any better.

Another passage that really stood out to me was when Stedman stated “the easiest way to effectively massage in quotations is by purposefully returning to each one in your draft to see if you set the stage for your readers—often, by signaling that a quote is about to come, stating who the quote came from, and showing how your readers should interpret it”. I think the reason why this stood out to me was that it is a very helpful statement. I sometimes have had an issue with throwing a quote into a paper just because it is similar to what I am talking about in that paragraph at the time. It makes sense though that it is easier to understand a paper that has quotes in it when the quotes are properly introduced and not just thrown into the mix of things.

Link to Genre Analysis Paper

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rtfon9VH1VfrQyOe-9SNY36UGi2aUz2r6wMopmyvnFA/edit?hl=fi#

Response for April 27th Articles

For tonight’s homework, we read three articles. The first article we read was called ‘The Ecology of Genre’ by Anis Bawarshi. The passage from this article that stood out the most to me was when Bawarshi stated “We create our environments – our rhetorical situations – as we write within them; that is, we create our contexts as we create our texts. And genre is at the heart of this ecological/rhetorical process”. This statement stood out to me because it is very true. I believe that our environments are created by using rhetoric, which in turn created new and/or improving genres.

The second article we read was called ‘The Rhetorical Situation of the Scientific Paper and the “Appearance” of Objectivity’ by Matthew C. Allen. The passage that stood out in this article was in the very first paragraph when he stated “Rhetoric is often perceived as the art of persuasion, while science is generally seen as the art of demonstration. This idea implies, to use a figure of speech, that rhetoric and science should not be seen together in public”. I liked this passage because it added a little bit of humor to it which let us as readers know that the article isn’t as formal and serious as we thought it was going to be jumping into it, but at the same time makes a very good point in defining those two words that should not be used together because they contradict each other.

The third and final article we read for tonight was called ‘Young Scholars in First Year Writing – College Admissions Essay: A Genre of Masculinity’ by Sarah-Kate Magee. The passage I found in this article to most stand out to me was when she stated “The writing of female writers in this genre has masculine characteristics. In other words, the genre seems to influence women’s writing style, perhaps in a way that is different from what Flynn accounted for”. This passage basically sums up what she is trying to point out throughout the whole essay. Women and men may have writings that are somewhat different from each other, but they have a lot of similarities also. Women’s writings do what Flynn didn’t believe them to do, which is carrying many masculine traits. Overall, this was my favorite reading out of the three readings we had to do for tonight.

Response for April 25th Articles

The first article we read for today was titled ‘Navigating Genres’ by Kerry Dirk. The passage that stood out to me in this article was when she said “In other words, Bitzer is saying that when something new happens that requires a response, someone must create that first response. Then when that situation happens again, another person uses the first response as a basis for the second, and eventually everyone who encounters this situation is basing his/her response on the previous ones, resulting in the creation of a new genre”. This passage really helped me with the concept of genre. It described it in a different way than just giving a book definition. It gave an example that was easy to follow and helped in grasping the concept.

The second article we read for today was titled ‘Teaching Critical Genre Awareness’ by Amy Devitt. The passage that stood out in this article was when she stated “With genres understood today as actions in social contexts, genres become embedded in the assumptions, values, and beliefs of the groups in power as any genre emerges, develops, and changes. To teach a particular genre is to teach that genre’s context”. This article basically is laying out the fact that in order to teach someone about a particular genre, you have to first know yourself what the context of that genre is and be able to accurately explain it. Also, it is saying that genres develop and change so a person must thoroughly know about it in order to be able to teach someone else about it.

These articles have honestly helped me to better understand the concept of genre. Genre, in my own words, is basically when someone does something that is of importance to others and others begin to do the same thing, it creates the definition of genre. It is pretty much what everyone knows to be that genre. The example that Kerry Dirk gave about country music helped me to better understand the concept greatly. Dirk’s article seemed to help me more so than Devitt’s article did. Dirk’s article was written in a more understandable student tone, while Devitt’s article was harder to pick up on and understand.

Response for April 20th Articles

The first article we read for today was called ‘Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity’ written by Ann Johns. One passage that stuck out to me in this reading was when she said “As this discussion indicates, individuals often affiliate with several communities at the same time, with varying levels of involvement and interest. People may join a group because they agree politically, because they want to socialize, or because they are interested in a specific sport or pastime”. This quote stuck out to me because it is very true. I feel like high school is a good example of this. In high school, I joined two or three different groups and clubs that were in no way related just because I was interested in what each group was all about.

The second article we read for today’s class was ‘The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing’ by Joseph Harris. One quote that stood out to me in this article was when at the beginning when they were introducing the author. It said “Harris argues that the word ‘community’ is empty and sentimental and that it has no positive opposing term. He ends the article by arguing that the term community should only be used to describe what happens in very specific and local groups”. Although this was not part of the actual article itself, I believe that it proves a very specific point that Harris is trying to make.
Harris obviously challenges discourse communities by stating that he doesn’t even like the word communities to be used in that definition. Johns challenges more so the topic of the academic community than discourse communities. I believe that neither one of these articles have changed the way that I thought about discourse communities really. Only gave more specific examples and a better chance to follow up on what the definition means to each individual person. I think the reason we’ve spent so much time on this topic is because it is thought to be a very important topic to learn. In order to fully know what is going on, you have to know the good side and bad side of the topic so you can understand.

Response for April 18th Articles

“Engagement entails defining a “common enterprise” that newcomers and old-timers pursue together to develop “interpersonal relationships” and “a sense of interacting trajectories that shape identities in relation to one another”.” This is from the first article I read called ‘Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces’. I believe that this passage is an important one. It is basically stating that engaging in things together as a whole instead of working on things as separate parts is way better because you get to make relationships with the people you work with and learn how to work as a team. If you do not decide to work as a team in the workplace, things can easily fall apart.

“However, since writing centers rely on building successful relationships with students, consultants must understand how to initiate effective interaction with all students, even those with subjects outside their comfort zone”. This passage comes from the second article that we had to read for today called ‘Finding Harmony in Disharmony: Engineering and English Studies’. This passage really stood out to me. It is basically bringing up the point of this whole article by stating that writing center workers have to learn how to handle students who come in and need help writing papers about things that the writing center workers are not familiar with. And although it would seem easier for them to help a English student than an engineering student, that is not usually the case. The writing center workers learn to familiarize themselves with the different subjects they have to help students write papers about.

“We accept the idea that our knowledge is shaped by our language”. I picked this passage out of the last article we had to read for today titled ‘Engineering Writing/Writing Engineering’. I believe that this quote is important to the whole article in a sense that our language teaches us many new things every day. Everyone has a different type of language that they use on a daily basis, and one who is writing a paper about engineering may use a different language than one who writes about a book they had to read for an English class. Engineers have a completely different way of writing their ‘technical’ papers than any other type of writing.

I believe that Wardle discusses discourse communities throughout her whole article. She talks about them by stating her own personal view on how throughout her life she has experienced language in ways that she has not experienced before. This taught me that when I write in my profession, I’m going to need to open my eyes to the different forms of writing in the different professions. I believe that Windsor approaches the topic more formally than Johnson, Clark, and Burton did. Windsor uses big words and phrases that people may not understand if they weren’t smart about that topic in general.