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.