bell hooks Reading Response

Summary

In her essay “Writing Autobiography,” bell hooks describes to fellow writers and those interested in writing the process of writing her autobiography and the process of remembering that such a project requires. She talks about the fiction of memory as well as the delight and closure remembering can bring.

 

Synthesis

This essay reminds me of Donald Murray’s “All Writing Is Autobiography,” particularly the sections in which he questions the “truth” of autobiography. When hooks describes the scene with her father’s car on the train tracks, and questions whether is was real or a vivid nightmare, she reminds me of Murray when he says that a fiction can become truth in the telling. Murray would say that though the scene with her father on the train tracks might not have actually happened, the emotions fueling the fiction were real, and in writing the scene down she has given the emotions tangible permanence and validity.

 

Pre-reading Question

3) George Elliot was a woman. This is one particular pen name that sticks out to me. In the time she was writing, if she wanted her work to be taken seriously, it would have behooved her to write as a man, and therefore rid herself of any gender bias. Some authors use pen names when they want to cross over into a different genre, so readers won’t come to their work with pre-conceived notions of what the new novel will be like.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1) hooks wanted release from her past. She hoped that by writing about her childhood her past self would no longer haunt her. As if, by putting her experiences on the page, she would wipe the experience from her soul.

 

4) hooks goes from wanting to “kill” the Gloria of her childhood to being happy with the rediscovery of her. She accepts Gloria for what she was and can now look to the future.

 

Applying and Exploring Ideas

4) I can’t think of a time when I personally needed to change my identity to write something. However, I had a friend who was asked to make her writing more masculine. She was writing a technical guide, and her professor said that she needed to write like a man to succeed on the project. My friend definitely had to put on a mask so that others would perceive and accept her work in the way that she wanted.

 

Personal Thoughts

I thought this was a very interesting reading. How does it relate to the Malcom X and Sherman Alexie pieces though? We don’t really learn much about hooks’ literacy sponsors in this piece.

Sherman Alexie-Like Literacy Narrative: I've Been Duped!

Balanced on my father’s hip, I was subject to constant chatter from the time I could open my eyes. The man talked to me, early and often (dare I say incessantly). Part of our daily interactions included the reading of books. Though I cannot remember much of such an early part of my life, I have been assured by my mother that my demands to be read to were often and emphatic.

 

I am not sure how or when I first started comprehending the written words. I do remember one afternoon at some craft shop with my mother where I read her the various witty sayings hand-painted onto wooden signs. She was astounded that I could read them, but it felt to me as natural as those early conversations with my father.

 

I think it had something to do with the fact that I was an only child, but it seems like I filled every waking hour with reading. I preferred novels, but I also remember checking out every volume of Charlie Brown’s Encyclopedia from my elementary school library. In the world of books I could escape my loneliness. There whole worlds existed merely for the purpose of entertaining me and keeping me occupied. Books kept me thoroughly engrossed in a way that cartoons never did.

 

My poor parents would often come home from a long day at work only to be asked for a ride to the local library or book store. Yet they were very good sports about the whole thing, so supportive of my obsession. Enablers to my addiction.

 

Because it was, in reality, an obsession, an addiction. In my adolescent years and early teens I was basically a shut in. Sure, I went to school and was involved in various clubs, but where other girls were talking on the phone about the latest NSYNC album, I was on the couch reading the latest novel I managed to acquire.

 

Reading did something to me. It wasn’t just about interaction with other people (or characters,) though I did enjoy that. It was the fact that the people in these books were so passionate about various issues that it led them to take action. They knew what they had to do in those books, because their hearts and their passions led them to do it. The only thing I had ever felt passionate about was reading. I envied their certainty and their subsequent ability to take action.

 

I am still searching for that passion. I am an adult now, why am I not experiencing the level of conviction and agency that the characters in the novels of my youth experienced? Now that I am supposed to be the heroine of my own life, all I want to do is escape back into the stories of others. I don’t have the free time that I did as an adolescent, and though I am still an avid reader, my ability to completely lose myself in a novel is becoming more and more difficult as my duties in the “real world” increase. So I am stuck in limbo, unable to act as the heroines of my childhood, yet unable to completely return to the warm, identity-stealing cocoon of adolescent fantasy.

 

What is a pseudo-adult to do? I feel robbed of both my potential for agency as well as my ability to totally delight in the stories of others. My literacy has trapped me into an uncomfortable compromise that I never thought I would have to make. I cannot go back, yet I cannot see how to go forward. My love has betrayed me. The fanciful narratives I read as a child have done nothing to prepare me for a life of mediocrity: no one writes novels about the truly average.

Malcom X Reading Response

Summary

Malcom X’s “Learning to Read,” as dictated to Alex Haley, is a narrative of X’s literacy history. X tells interested followers and readers how he came to be the well spoken, well written, well read individual many knew him as through his informal self education at the Norfolk Prison Colony.

 

Synthesis

Malcom X’s literacy narrative shows us examples of the literary sponsors that Deborah Brandt introduces us to in her article “Sponsors of Literacy”.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1) Malcom X’s audience seems to be those who follow his political ideaologies, with no assumptions of a particular knowledge of composition theory on the part of the reader; that is, this article is meant for a non-academic reading audience. I know this because he does not use jargon words as Brandt does when talking of a similar subject. Furthermore, his smooth narrative style makes the piece accessible to most literate persons.

 

3) Bimbi, Norfolk Prison Colony, Mr. Elijah Muhammad, and Parkhurst. The most influential literacy sponsors were the Norfolk Prison Colony and Parkhurst, the former because it gave him the time to study so intensely and the latter because it was much of his personal collection that populated the Norfolk Prison Colony’s library.

 

4) Malcom X definitely misappropriated the intentions of the Norfolk Prison Colony. He took the time and opportunity that prison afforded him to become an intensely literate individual. This is definitely outside the normal hoped of prison literacy programs. Furthermore, he used the literacy he gained from prison as a means to validate his notions of violence against the white man.

 

Personal Thoughts

I love the pairing of this piece with the Brandt piece. I wish WAW did this more; using a more engaging piece of writing like a narrative as an example of what a theory heavy article is talking about seems to me a great way to get student to understand both pieces.

Teaching Journal #5

This was a week full of grammar, punctuation, peer reviews, and workshopping. I think I’ve gotten the hang of managing class discussion time when it comes to going over the readings, but, as I will illustrate, I could use some polishing of my workshopping skills.

 

Monday we covered Dawkins and Bernhardt. We went over Dawkins’s hierarchy of punctuation as well as his system of raising and lowering. I then adapted the group activity Javen showed us in ENG 5890. Basically I wrote my own paragraph with no punctuation in it, and had the class (split in to four groups) punctuate it and explain their choices according to the raising/lowering system. I think this helped them understand Dawkins’s method of punctuation more than if I had just lectured on the subject. However, the activity took more class time than I would have liked. In the future, I think I will split the paragraph into smaller chunks and have each group punctuate a different section. We talked about Bryson as a class. I passed out the “Responding to Peer Writing” handout and we talked about how to do a peer review.

 

Wednesday we went over questions about the impending draft of project 1, basic MLA format, how to upload their assignments to SafeAssign, and finally spent time workshopping the sample peer review. Answering questions and showing them how to do things they know they will need to do went smoothly, and they were very interested and vocal in that part of the lesson. However, when I switched to the lion’s share of that day’s lesson, the worskshop of the sample peer review, I quickly lost them. It was so hard to get them to participate that unfortunately I spent most of my time trying to wheedle out some conversation rather than showing them my comments and the overall elements of a peer review.

 

Friday we workshopped a student paper. I tried to force them to pay attention by randomly calling on students to read the paper aloud, as John suggested, but I ended up just getting a lot of confused looks as I jarred them out of their daydreaming to read a paragraph on the overhead projector. I think next time I will have them read a paper ahead of class time so we can spend more time in discussion and less time with them dozing off. Maybe I could also try incorporating group work in the future, with each group being responsible to comment on one section of the paper, and then come together as a class to discuss the paper’s effectiveness as a whole. I think this would work especially well in conjunction with having them read the paper the night before. Alternatively, I could schedule my workshop days in a computer classroom and have them each read the paper to themselves on their individual computer screens. This would save them from the boredom of having the paper read aloud to them; it would force them to pay more attention to the paper.

 

Overall I think I most need to work on running an efficient workshop, because I know this is a problem that is not going to just go away. Luckily I will have more time this semester to hone my skills in that department. I feel like a big part of learning how to teach is trial and error. I wonder if my students know they are my guinea pigs? Overall they are pretty good sports about the workload, so if I can just foster more participation in discussion things would be delightful. I use group work often as a springboard in to whole class discussion, and I think my lack of group work as a “warm-up” is part of the reason my workshops are not the most successful class periods. I am trying to get them to participate as a class without the group work as a bridge, but so far I have been unsuccessful. Maybe I should just stick with the group work if it leads to decent whole class discussion, but I feel like we could delve deeper into the text if we didn’t spend as much time doing group work.

Brandt Dialectical Notebook

“Usually richer, more knowledgeable, and more entrenched than the sponsored, sponsors nevertheless enter a reciprocal relationship with those they underwrite” (335).

            Brant brings up an interesting point that can easily be forgotten when one thinks about sponsors: the fact that they too gain something from their sponsored.

 

“Like Little Leaguers who wear the logo of a local insurance agency on their uniforms, not out of a concern for enhancing the agency’s image but as a means for getting to play ball, people throughout history have acquired literacy pragmatically under the banner of others’ causes” (335).

            I love this metaphor. It clearly illustrates and foreshadows Brandt’s point of misappropriation.

 

“…obligations toward one’s sponsors run deep, affecting what, why, and how people write and read” (335).

            Brant tells us to what extent sponsors exert power over the literacy of their subjects.

 

“The competition to harness literacy, to manage, measure, teach, and exploit it, has intensified throughout the century. It is vital to pay attention to this development because it largely sets the terms for individuals’ encounters with literacy” (336).

            The competition between sponsors in an ever-changing world is an important idea to comprehend if one is going to fully understand Brandt’s narrative of Lowery.

 

“Recession, relocation, immigration, technological change, government retreat all can—and do—condition the course by which literate potential develops” (339).

            Brant enumerates the reasons why literacy or the value of a particular literacy can change for an individual.

 

“A consummate debater and deal maker, Lowery saw his value to the union bureaucracy subside, as power shifted to younger, university-trained staffers whose literacy credentials better matched the specialized forms of escalating pressure coming from the other side” (342).

            This illustrates the competition between sponsors that Brandt discussed earlier. Also, it touches on the “escalating pressure” being put on literacy, as each sponsor essentially tries to one-up the previous (oral deals to basic legal document drafting to wholly text driven interactions in union deals).

 

“…strong loyalties outside the workplace prompted these two secretaries to lift these literate resources for use in other spheres” (345).

            Brandt shows how two secretaries used the literacies they acquired from their male bosses/literary sponsors to help them in their personal endeavors of faith and family.

 

“Mary Christine Anderson estimated that secretaries might encounter up to 97 different genres in the course of doing dictation or transcription” (345).

            Talk about a thorough education! It seems like secretaries should rule the world with all of the literacies they were potentially exposed to.

 

“Interestingly, these roles, deeply sanctioned within the history of women’s literacy—and operating beneath the newer permissible feminine activity of clerical work—become grounds for covert, innovative appropriation even as they reinforce traditional female identities” (347).

            I love the secretary narratives. I agree with Brandt on the irony of women being agents of their own literacies all within the accepted feminine framework of the workplace and home life.

 

“Sarah Steele’s act of appropriation  in some sense explains how dominant forms of literacy migrate and penetrate into private spheres, including private consciousness” (348).

            This sounds a little like big brother is watching us, but I think this is one of Brandt’s more important asides. She also mentions earlier how the plethora of college graduates within our society has pervaded and changes our literacies.

 

“What I have tried to suggest is that as we assist and study individuals in pursuit of literacy, we also recognize how literacy is in pursuit of them” (348).

            Brandt’s cleverly worded sentence makes us very aware of the various sponsorships of literacies.

Teaching Journal #4

This week we covered Porter, Bernhardt, and the workshop on their intros and syntheses. Overall, the week got better over its course. The students were more vocal and concerned about project one than the readings, probably because they know that they will, at the end, potentially be evaluated on the writing they do for this project.

 

Monday we went through the vocabulary I had them define at the beginning of class, and cleared up any questions about the terms Porter uses (intertextuality, iterability, presupposition, and discourse community). I need to streamline this process, as it is currently taking too long. I don’t want to get rid of it though, because I think understanding the terminology is a necessary step in understanding the piece as a whole. I showed them a Family Guy clip and had them point out instances of iteration and presupposition. From the responses I received, it seemed like they understood both concepts. We talked about plagiarism, the autonomous writer, originality, freedom, and the discourse community as a class. In an effort to get them to make better connections in their syntheses, I did the group activity Albert suggested, which asked them to find “fruitful connections” between this article and the others we’ve read. The connections I received were much better than what I had been reading in their reading responses, so I think I would do this activity again. When asked, they expressed concern over the intro and synthesis that was due Friday, so I said I would spend time talking about it on Wednesday.

 

Wednesday I spent the first half of the class answering questions about project 1. This seemed to quell their fears somewhat, so I am glad I spent the time to do it. However, as a result, the Bernhardt discussion felt a little rushed. We went over the four laws of gestalt a little more quickly that I usually do with terminology, but I think this is for the best. The students still get a reminder about the main ideas of the article, and I don’t waste as much time just talking about the building blocks of the essay.  We discussed the rest of the article as a class, and they were more vocal than they had been on Monday (maybe because at that point they had asked so many questions about the project their vocal chords were primed for discussion).

 

Friday we watched the video “Beyond the Red Ink” and discussed. They agreed overall with what the students in the video said about teacher comments. I used the discussion as a springboard to talk about my own feedback. I asked them to be brutally honest (but of course they probably still don’t want to bash the teacher in front of her) about my comments, and they said that I exhibit many of the traits promoted in the video. I also used the opportunity to tell them how I will respond to their project one papers. I told them that I would focus on the most important concerns I could find in their papers, leaving lesser concerns like grammar for another revision. Afterwards,we workshopped two student papers. This was a very interesting exercise. In many instances, the students were tougher on each other than I would have been. I found myself mediating the conversation a great deal in order to make sure that feelings were not hurt. (I took the names off of the papers, but still, students in the class had written them). The workshop definitely fostered student involvement in the discussion.

 

Overall, I think I am getting more comfortable in my teaching style. I am quicker on my feet when something isn’t working, quicker to rephrase a question or dial it back if it is clear the students don’t understand. Mostly, I would say I am getting better at gauging student need (i.e. their need to go over project one, their need to discuss key terms before we discuss key ideas).

Bryson Reading Response

Summary

Bill Bryson, in his article “Good English and Bad,” attempts to expose to other academics many of the grammatical rules we have come to accept over the years as foundationless. He cites the initial impracticality of basing English grammar on that of Latin, a dead romance language, and goes on to show that many academics who came up with certain grammatical rules had no good reason to make them in the first place. He proposes caution, because although English is by its nature always changing, it is good to question those changes somewhat, in order that they may be tested for their validity. Bryson sees how grammar is being taught as right or wrong, and wants to introduce us to the ample middle ground between the two.

 

Synthesis

 

Bryson’s solution at the end of his article, to embrace change and yet question it at the same time, reminds me of Peter Elbow’s “both/and” way of thinking. Though the two write on different subjects, the “both/and” spirit remains the same in the two pieces.

 

Like Dawkins, Bryson questions the model of prescriptive grammar that nearly all of us our taught from infancy. Whereas Bryson is more intent on exposing some of these grammar rules as foundationless, Dawkins proposes a real model for sensible grammar usage. Both address the problem, but only Dawkins proposes a method with which to change it. However, Dawkins just covers punctuation, which is admittedly easier to address a solution to than the many and varied rules that Bryson covers.

 

Pre-reading Exercise

 

3) I think technology (specifically texting and tweeting) has made brevity desirable in our communications with each other. I also think it has lowered the level of formality we sometimes eschew in other forms of communication. Correct grammar, full sentences, even the complete spellings of words have gone out the window. “Totes” has become shorthand for “totally,” “cray” for “crazy”.

 

Questions For Discussion and Journaling

 

1) Bryson challenges the notion of many of the grammatical rules we think we have to follow in order to speak and write “good English”. He does this by citing the fact that there is no logical reason we follow these rules (some of them are even counter-intuitive) and that the learned men who put them into place admitted that they had no real grammatical reasons for doing so. He often cited Robert Lowth as the originator of some of these arbitrary rules. For example: “Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer—surprise, surprise—is that Robert Lowth didn’t like it” (65-6).

 

2) Bryson says that English has such a complex grammar structure because we base it on Latin. This wouldn’t be so bad, except English is not very closely related to Latin. Early scholars’ insistence on modeling English grammar after Latin is how we got many quirky little rules (like not splitting infinitives). Furthermore, we have never had a supreme council that governs over our language, so essentially any scholar with access to a printing press could make his claim for a specific grammatical rule.

 

3) Prescriptive grammar tells you the correct way to write. Descriptive grammar explains different ways to approach grammar without making any value judgments (or at least not very forcefully). Before this class, I have mostly encountered prescriptive grammar. After reading these articles, however, I have come to know a thing or two about descriptive grammar.

 

Meta Moment

Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, proper noun, direct object, indirect object, preposition, and conjunction. I learned all of these through school, whether through English classes or foreign language classes, I can’t remember (probably a combination of both). I think knowing the terminology of grammar has been helpful to me in my writing because it gives me a specific vocabulary with which to discuss my writing with teachers, tutors, peers, etc.

 

Personal Thoughts

 

I think this article gave an interesting historical look at where we got many of our more confusing grammatical rules. Though it does not propose an immediate solution (other than to have a questioning attitude, which can be an effective solution) it does allow us to see the power an individual can have over an entire language. If Robert Lowth can create language change, what is stopping us today?

Dawkins Reading Response

Summary

In his article “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool,” John Dawkins asks teachers to abandon teaching the grammar rules given in handbooks and to adopt a simpler method of teaching grammar. He says that grammar should not be taught so that students might avoid error, but so that students might better their writing. To do this, he says that teachers must teach their students that grammar is a rhetorical tool used to indicate relationships between clauses. Students can raise the punctuation (on the hierarchical scale given by Dawkins) in order to emphasize separation, or lower the punctuation in order to indicate a connection. Dawkins hopes that viewing grammar in such a way will allow students to think more closely about what they want to say with their writing.

 

Synthesis

The attention Dawkins gives to the importance of the rhetorical situation in the punctuation of a sentence reminds me of Kantz. In her article “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively,” she brings up the importance of always knowing the rhetorical situation of an article, as a reader. Dawkins takes this a step further and tries to make one aware of the rhetorical situation as a writer. 

 

Pre-reading Exercise

For me, grammar is the mechanics of writing; the sort of mortar with which we cement the bricks of our words into a stable structure. It includes capitalization, punctuation, syntax, inflected verb forms, participles, subject verb agreement, case agreement, number agreement, pronoun agreement… the list goes on.

 

Questions For Discussion and Journaling

 

1) Dawkins challenges the notion of grammar as taught by handbooks. He argues that grammar can be used rhetorically to communicate effectively to an audience, and that it should not be used as a rigid set of rules for the sake of being grammatically correct.

 

3) Raising refers to bumping up the expected punctuation to something above it on the grammatical hierarchy. Raising is a tool used to indicate separation. Lowering refers to, well, lowering the expected punctuation down to something below it on the grammatical hierarchy; lowering is a tool used to indicate connection.

 

6) I mostly ignore grammar as I write, unless I come across a particularly long sentence in which I am concerned my meaning might not be clear; then I take some time to consider how best to convey my meaning to the reader. I think Dawkins’ model of grammar is useful to someone like me who does not think about grammar overmuch. His hierarchy is a simple way of looking at grammar that will help me to determine the relationships I want to convey between my clauses.

 

Meta Moment

I think my teacher wanted me to read this article because abandoning the notion that grammar is a rigid, fixed set of rules is hard to do. The construct of grammar is one that has been very well ingrained in most students by the time they reach college, so reading an essay that gives good reasons why that notion should be dispelled is more effective than just having one college instructor say it. By reading this article, I realize that grammar is just another rhetorical tool, one I can employ to make effective choices in my writing. It gives me another weapon in my arsenal with which to get my message across to the reader.

 

Personal Thoughts

The Dawkins reading was really enlightening for me. I knew grammar could be used as a rhetorical tool (passive voice, fragments as sentences, etc.) but I never knew to what extent it could be used, what relationships you could convey through mere punctuation. Not to mention, his system of raising and lowering on the hierarchical scale of punctuation is easy to use and helpful to think about when writing.

Lanham Dialectical Notebook

“So books are not going to die, and neither is the literature contained in them. That is not the question the future market place will debate” (16).

           

Considering this article was published in 2001, I wonder what Lanham would make of e-readers? Today, I am not so positive that print books won’t become a thing of the past, I wonder if Lanham would be.

“No bad decision to make—it still includes the vast majority of writers (including me, right here—but unmistakably antiquarian and, as the modes of textual display improve and proliferate, increasingly so” (17).

I like that Lanham acknowledges the fact that he isn’t using digital means to convey his message. And, if he is trying to reach out to other scholars who wish to continue working within the comfortable confines of print text, then the best way to reach them is through their chosen medium.

“Sure, she will probably repeat the arguments of her book, but just seeing and hearing her gives us a sense of how to read the book, tells us what kind of person wrote it” (20).

Lanham explains the effect of having the author interact with her text. She gives new meaning, new depth to the text. We hear her voice

            “But, in an electronic text ‘printout,’ the oral world stands there in the margin talking to the literate world. Two different worlds slide uneasily against each other like two tectonic plates” (20).

            I like the way Lanham describes the interaction between the literate and the oral versions of text. Their coexistence is uneasy, but the result can be quite extraordinary.

            “The whole weight of these alternative display modes receptures this history instead of, as the media prophets of doom argue, repudiating it. We have always craved mixed, rich, competitive, antiphonal signs” (21).

            Lanham argues that the literate tradition stems from the oral tradition, and that we have always been striving for multi-modal forms of communication. Seen in this light, digital displays are not seeking to supplant text, but to coexist with them.

“We want to be able to read in layers, for main argument, secondary ones, detailed evidence, in ways not linear but, as now we must call them, hypertextual” (25).

This reminds me of Bernhardt’s article, in which he says that the localization of text allows for different readers to get exactly what they need from the text.

“We want the shape of words to look like the structure of thought express, if only because we evolved to live in a world of shapes” (28).

Lanham says that we yearn for three dimensionality so much that we want words to physically resemble the meaning they represent. 

“Concepts came embodied. You did not discuss courage. You observed Achilles. Animated letters rush into the breach between the two. They seek to heal the breach between orality and literacy” (30).

Lanham explains the propensity of modern advertisers to use animated letters in their commercials. He discusses Homeric epic, saying that concepts were not talked about, they were performed. Animated letters are essentially  a compromise. They are both the physical embodiment of the word as well as the concept.

“This stuff isn’t repudiating the past. It is redeeming it. Galvanizing it. Showing us, for the first time, what this whole suppressed agenda was all about” (33).

Lanham helps to further reject the claim that digital technologies aren’t cannibalizing the print texts. They are achieving a multi-modal for of expression that mankind has strived for since the time of oral storytelling.

“Happily, all these folks are part of the current disciplinary scene. Less happily, they dwell in separate capsules, which, if not hermetically sealed, seldom breathe the same air” (33).

To make this multi-modal world of informational display, Lanham says that we will need to enlist the expertise of all the disciplines. This may prove to be a challenge, as they are somewhat secluded from one another as a rule.

“We cannot exist, after all, only by breathing out abstraction, alphabets which do not think; nor only by breathing in animation, alphabets which do; but only by respiration, the life-giving oscillation of the two. That oscillation is what’s next for text” (34).

Lanham proposes a “both/and” solution (to borrow a phrase from Elbow) to the evolution of text. He says we should embrace words as abstract ideas, but also words as animate concepts, and go back and forth between the two often.

Teaching Journal #3

Monday I taught Berger and McCloud. For McCloud, I wanted them to understand the ideas of icons, universality, and the mask. The students really responded to the McCloud article, and when I questioned them as a class about the main ideas listed above, they even seemed to understand the article pretty well.

            Encouraged by my success in engaging them as a whole class with the McCloud article, I continued this method of whole class discussion with the Berger piece. This did elicit as much conversation as the McCloud piece did. In retrospect, I should have assigned them a group activity to get them trying out ideas on their neighbors before they presented them to the class. As it was, I ended up explaining most of the Berger piece to them, asking short questions along the way to keep them involved. And, although they perked up when I showed them images of the “nude” versus the “naked” today, overall they were not ready for whole-class discussion on a piece they were so uncertain about, and I should have eased them into it by using group work or individual in-class writing about the tougher ideas.

            Wednesday I gauged their willingness to talk at the beginning of class with an open-ended question about Allen’s article. When that failed, I decided to refresh their memory with the subject of the article by splitting them into pairs and having each pair write a characteristic of the “inspired writer” or the “real writer” on the board. This got them talking about the article to each other, at least. We went over the characteristics as a class, and I used this as well as their personal identifications as “real writers” as my way in to a conversation on the Allen piece.

            As I questioned them about the readings, I discovered that the students were not forthcoming about their lack of knowledge on what the articles were about, even on the basic level of vocabulary. I don’t know why this surprised me so much, as I know I have been guilty of pretending I know what someone is talking about when I really have no idea; who wants to look like a fool? I explained Allen’s phrase “alien discourse” to them when I realized they had no idea what the term meant, and made a mental note to myself to be on the lookout for tricky terminology.

            My plan for increasing their understanding through vocabulary found an immediate opportunity for experiment on Friday. While I passed back papers and took role, I had them individually write down definitions for vocabulary words I found in that day’s readings. Going over the definitions gave us a common pool of vocabulary and ideas for us to use as we collectively engaged the texts. It worked really well, I think, and I plan to use the exercise again as a way to get them thinking about the texts from the very beginning of class.

            I used Maggie’s group activity to get them to pick out the voices of Lamott, King, and Diaz in their respective essays. What I really liked about the exercise is that it forces them not only to pinpoint what they think voice is, but that it forces them to do so by finding examples within the text. I have had a hard time getting the students to look through their books for textual examples as we talk in class, so this activity was especially helpful in that regard.

           
 I am having a hard time balancing group work, individual writing, and whole class discussion. I feel like I either have too much of the first two and none of the last, or all class discussion (which usually turns out to be mediocre). I am thinking about doing a short individual writing assignment like the vocab definitions at the beginning of class, and then one group activity later on to keep them from zoning out during the whole class discussion.

Bernhardt Reading Response

Summary

            Stephen Bernhardt, in his article “Seeing the Text,” makes the case that visually informative texts should be considered within the classroom as legitimate forms of written communication. He extols to his fellow teachers and scholars the capabilities of visually informative texts to achieve the same rhetorical goals that traditional essays do. Furthermore, Bernhardt contends that a visual text is more versatile than the traditional essay because of its localization of text; different readers can easily eke out from the text as simple or as complex a reading as they would like. Bernhardt says that visually informative texts must be studied and taught in the classroom to correlate with the advances in technological media.

 

Synthesis

            Bernhardt’s essay questions the construct of the traditional progressively organized essay, in which the argument pushes the reader down the page. His questioning of the traditional essay form and support of visual texts cannot help but remind me of Scott McCloud, who so memorably draws our attention to the power of the visual with his comic.

 

Pre-reading Exercise

2) In a text heavy advertisement for an audiobook, I notice the use of different texts and font sizes. The larger fonts emphasize the author’s name. To advertise the title of the book, they have contrasted white lettering against a dark, rectangle shaped background. As such, my eyes are most drawn to those two elements. There is an image of a character from the book, but it only serves to fill the blank space beside some smaller print of other available audiobooks.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1) I sometimes have trouble reading this low-visual type of writing, especially when the subject material is unfamiliar. One think I like about visually informative texts is the fact that you can take a very simple reading from it if you like; it can serve to just give you the basics. Just finding the basics can be harder in a text which is not as visual, because you might have to sift through some unfamiliar terminology and ideas in order to find them.

 

Applying and Exploring Ideas

3) Bernhardt uses the term ‘gestalt’ to refer to the visual impression of the text as a whole. Knowing the definition of the term helps the reader understand the aesthetics of the whole page are important in the readability of the piece. Knowing what the term ‘gestalt’ means also helps explain why Bernhardt then spends the next several paragraphs talking about the physical looks and layout of the page.

 

After You Read

            Scott McCloud would have represented Bernhardt’s argument in the mode he is arguing for. That is, he would make the text visually informative rather than progressively so. Bernhardt seems a little counter-intuitive in his organization of the piece. If he is going to argue for the legitimate study and teaching of visually informative texts, then he should probably lead by example.

 

Personal Thoughts

            Although I think this article is helpful and informative in explaining the capabilities, strategies, and forms of visually informative texts, I could not help but find it exceedingly dull. I think if Bernhardt had made this essay into a visually informative text, I would have been able to better believe him in his testimony that visually informative texts are the wave of the future. With his tacit endorsement of the traditional progressive text, I question the validity of his claims. Did he choose a traditional essay style because he was afraid his work would not be published otherwise? If so, that just suggests to me that visually informative texts are not as important as Bernhardt makes them out to be. On the other hand, this piece was published in the eighties. I wonder if journals today would be more open to the publication of a visually informative text.

Howard Dialectical Notebook

“We labor in error when we believe pedagogy can impart foundational textual morals—or basic skills in source citation—and thereby put an end to what we are pleased to call the “plagiarism epidemic” (219).

            Howard introduces the fallacy that composition instructors believe—that they can end plagiarism in student writing through teachings in the classroom.

 

“Pedagogy can’t fix plagiarism, because students and faculty are too much working from different economic systems” (220).

            Howard explains why she believes that teachers can’t prevent students from plagiarizing through mere lesson plans: students and teachers speak two different languages, the former being concerned with how a writing course can benefit them economically, and the latter being concerned with imparting the cultural capital of good writing.

 

“By urging on our students the importance of the “knowledge and skills” we offer to impart, we are inescapably urging that our students value us, too—that they desire to be like us, at least insofar as they are to desire the capital we hold” (223).

            Are we that desperate for acclaim? Howard makes us seem so. Though in other places she seems to sing the praises of the dedicated instructor who wants her students to succeed and become decent writer. I think she is right, though, in her assertion that we want students to want the embodied cultural capital that we want/possess. 

 

“The educational institution is a primary site for transmitting cultural capital, and that cultural capital, once acquired, becomes a tool for acquiring economic capital” (223).

            I can totally see the desire for economic capital in my students. They are told from childhood that getting a college degree directly translates into more money. No wonder they are not interested in the same capital we are. When you think about it, we are a little crazy to desire the embodied cultural capital at the expense (sometimes—at least in graduate school) of economic capital.

 

“Few of us, in fact, have not occasionally engaged in whole-category derision of our students, a discourse of long standing” (224).

            This is depressing but true. I think some of us become so jaded by our students’ apathy at the embodied cultural capital that we become offended and lash out at our students as inept when really they are focused on another type of capital.

 

“Students may regard writing in the academy not as a means of personal or intellectual growth (embodied cultural capital) but as a requirement for a grade, a credit, a degree (institutionalized cultural capital, which then translates into the accumulation of economic capital)” (226).

            Howard explains the differences between the outlooks of an instructor and a student. Instructors want intellectual growth, students want economic growth.

 

“I find this site revolting because it captures “the” writing process I and many other composition instructors inevitably convey to our students, and it turns that process into a trick—a hack—for sidestepping the very thing I am most trying to convey to my students: the joys and benefits of authentic engagement in writing and intellectual work” (227)

In her defamation of StudentHacks.org, Howard laments the loss of interaction with and interest in writing assignments that students encounter when they seek to write a research paper in ten hours. This further illustrates the students’ obsession with the goal of obtaining cultural capital, to the exclusion of any other type of capital; they view anything else as a waste of time.

 

“Quantified writing assessment aligns with the quantification of educational credentials (institutionalized cultural capital) much more closely than it does with the qualities of the individual that inhere in embodied cultural capital” (229).

            Howard seems to degrade the use of software to detect plagiarism, because it does not correlate with the values we are trying to impose upon our students. This makes me question the use of SafeAssign, and I wonder if this is why we are only using it as a teaching tool to help point out to students where they are plagiarizing? I think, used as a tool rather than as a quantifiable grader, plagiarism detection software can be useful for the classroom.

 

“…composition instructors will benefit from recognizing that students and their writing can never be brought, by pedagogy or any other means, into full compliance with instructors’ preexisting textual ideals” (230).

            Depressing. However, there is always merit in trying to understand the point of view of our students. If we intend to keep on fighting to sneak some cultural capital into their ideals, we need to know the differentiation in goals between our students and us.

Porter Reading Response

Summary

In his article, “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community,” James Porter attempts to debunk the idea of the “autonomous writer” for his fellow educators and academics. He contends that the notion of the autonomous writer is detrimental when taught in freshman composition courses, and strives to bring to our attention the notion of intertextuality and discourse communities in order to prove that good writers shape the scholarship that has preceded them to contribute to and even change their discourse community.

 

Synthesis

The most obvious connection is between Porter’s notion of intertextuality and Greene’s model of academic scholarship as an ongoing conversation. Greene, in his practical advice on how to become engaged with and write a research paper, says that “if you see inquiry as a means of entering conversations, then you will understand research as a social process” (19). Greene acknowledges the fact that the academic conversation is a social beast, one that is ongoing. Porter’s claim that being a good writer means knowing the scholarship that has come before you and using it to your advantage in making a reasoned argument definitely correlates with what Greene is saying.

 

Another correlation exists between Porter’s idea of the “autonomous writer” and Allen’s idea of the “inspired writer”. Although Allen’s idea is a little more fantastical than Porter’s autonomous writer, which he says is actually frequently taught in composition classrooms, both strive to question their respective constructs of the writer.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

 

4) While I think Porter’s key criterion makes sense, given his argument, I do agree that it is not the first criterion many people would think of when considering the evaluation of writing. I think the norm is to judge writing by how well it holds up to the vision of the “autonomous writer,” that is, how ground-breaking and original the text seems. I think in the past my writing has been judged by the latter as well as the former criteria, depending on the teacher.

 

5) Porter reflects his own arguments splendidly because he uses the scholarship that has come before him to successfully navigate the waters of his discourse community. He reiterates useful scholarship within his discourse community and presupposes our familiarity with examples like the Declaration of Independence, popular commercials, and popular novels.

 

Applying and Exploring Ideas

 

2) I would revise our plagiarism policy to include what Porter says about discourse communities and the necessity to use what others have said before you in order to continue the conversation. However, I would need to make clear that we must introduce these ideas under their rightful authors, and not appropriate them as our own. This would really just expand our current plagiarism policy, which says that “plagiarism involves the presentation of some other person’s work as if it were the work of the presenter” (Ohio University Student Handbook, Coda A, offense 10).

 

Meta Moment

Porter changes for us the idea that the writer works totally alone and replaces it with the notion that writing is a very social process; we achieve nothing alone. I now imagine writing to be more collaborative. Adopting this notion will change the way I write in that I will be more aware of the discourse community that surrounds me and be more willing to use its scholarship without fear of plagiarism.

 

Pre-reading Exercise

I get help from peers in my classes, fellow students, teachers, writing center tutors, and even people who aren’t involved in academia. Everyone helps in different ways, though I primarily get help from these people with ideas for my paper.

 

Personal Thoughts

I really liked this article. Porter livens his article with rich examples to demonstrate intertextuality and discourse communities. I also really liked his organizational style; I could clearly plot out the standard academic moves he was making in his article.

 

Bartholomae Reading Response

Summary

Bartholomae, in his article “Must We Mean What We Say?,” strives to explain to fellow educators that students must play with authorial identity and tone in their writing if they are going to write anything worth writing. Having taught freshman composition for many years, he identifies a lack in student writing that he proposes can be solved; he wants teachers to ask their students to reevaluate how they identify (in terms of themselves as well as other writers) in their writing.

 

Synthesis

Bartholomae’s insistence on considering other writers’ works as a tool in furthering one’s own writing is reminiscent of Greene’s framing technique. Bartholomae’s explanation of why he gave his students a review of a poem, “I was teaching my students how to work with sources, how to have an idea in response to someone else’s ideas, how to get a word in edgewise” (22) reminds me of Kantz’s essay in which she talks of how we can help students read rhetorically to find their original argument within an academic conversation, their niche.

 

Pre-reading Exercise

2) I change my writing all the time, depending on my genre and audience. If I am composing an email to a student, I have to be helpful and professional, and above all, succinct. If I am writing an academic paper for a particular professor I will alter my writing style and voice to coincide with that reader’s wishes and expectations. If I am posting something on Facebook I try to be pithy and appeal to a large demographic of friends and peers.

 

Questions For Discussion and Journaling

1)      The student can get more than one persona on the page because she is, as Bartholomae points out “double voiced” (19). She recognizes the different identifies she needs to convey in her paper and changes her authorial tone to suit the situation. I think by revising my work and looking at my writing through the work of other writers (as Bartholomae suggests) I can change my tone to fit my needs.

3) I think Bartholomae is trying to question the construct of always “being ourselves” when we write, or, alternatively, of writing ourselves out of the paper with pure objectivity. He says that we indeed do not always need to “mean what we say” and encourages playing with authorial voice in our writing.

 

Meta Moment

I think the advice given by Appiah is something I have always striven to achieve in my writing. In some of my early attempts at academic writing I could not help but insert some of my own wit alongside my studied academic tone. Though sometimes the duality of tone is, I believe, unsupported in some classrooms, it something I would nevertheless wish to cultivate in my future endeavors. I like Bartholomae’s notion of using the voices of other writers to revise one’s own writing. It is a tool I would like to utilize in future projects.

 

Personal Thoughts

Bartholomae’s article was one of the most engaging ones I’ve read for the course to date. His writing style is very different; he has some adventurous forays with grammar that I enjoy. He chooses not to explain some of the off-hand comments he makes, but he praises a student who does the same, so that makes me think this is a deliberate choice made on his part. His ideas are deep without being unapproachable.

Elbow Reading Response

Summary

Peter Elbow, in his article “Voice In Writing: Embracing Contraries,” attempts to renew the scholarly discussion of voice in writing. Elbow thinks that we need adopt a “both/ and” attitude in addition to our "either/or" view, toward voice as well as other issues within writing. Elbow says that by viewing writing through the lens of voice as well as the lens of text, we will fulfill the need expressed in academia and strengthen our analytical skills with these complementary readings.

 

Synthesis

Elbow’s support of Baird seems to be in contention with the way Bartholomae wants us to “play” with voice. Elbow says of Baird and his colleagues, “in their fascination with voice, they sometimes seemed to want a voice that was true or right in itself, fitting the writer or speaker—not just a voice that is appropriate to the audience or genre” (47). This seems to be in opposition to Bartholomae, who asks us to use different voices in our writing, not always our own.

 

Elbow’s disdain for an “either-or” argument, a “zero-sum” game, reminds me of the way Greene talks about arguments. He uses “zero-sum” to describe what an argument in academia is not, it continues on, with new and revised arguments coming forth all the time.

 

Pre-reading Exercise

2) I think using “I” in my academic papers would make my writing more engaging and appealing to the reader. If I had a personal connection to the subject I was writing about, I could use that connection to either appeal to the audience through an emotional appeal, or I could make myself seem more expert on the situation because of my personal connection to it.

 

Questions For Discussion and Journaling

4) I believe Elbow does play his “doubting and believing” game. By giving the full side of each debate, he brings to our attention the very real merits of each side of the debate. Having heard these, we as an audience are more willing to accept his wish for there to be no true winner of the argument; we want both voice and no voice. Elbow doesn’t want to resolve the tension because he wants both sides to continue to on; he wants a “both/ and” solution.

 

Applying and Exploring Ideas

2) Hearing a piece read aloud does simplify my reading because the vocalization of the piece gives it a predetermined voice. This could be helpful if say the author of the piece were to read his text, as it would give me an idea of how the author meant his work to be taken. It could be detrimental to other readings of the text, however. Once I heard the voice it would be hard to forget it; hard to impose a purely textual reading on the piece of work.

 

Meta Moment

I think we need to work on making layers of meaning within our own writings if we are to achieve both sides of voice, as Elbow wants us to. If we can read in different lenses to come up with a more complex meaning, can’t we write in the same way?

 

Personal Thoughts

The reading by Elbow is interesting in its organization. I have never seen a debate so thoroughly argued on both sides in an academic paper, though it did serve to achieve the result he was hoping for, convincing the audience that both voice and non voice need to coexist.

Lamott, King, and Diaz Dialectical Journal

LAMOTT

 

“People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But his is just the fantasy of the uninitiated” (301).

            This passage, I believe one of the most charming in the essay, reminds me of the Allen essay in which she wishes to debunk the myth of the inspired writer. It seems Lamott shares the same desire (and, as evidenced later, bears a grudge against those whom she believes actually are inspired writers). Both scholars agree that this fantasy is not the norm.

 

“The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later” (302).

            Here Lamott gives us permission, and even encourages us, to write badly, to write anything, so long as we can get something on the page. You can’t revise until you have a “shitty first draft”.

 

“So I’d start writing without reigning myself in” (302).

            This is another important element of the “shitty first draft”. We must be child-like in our abandon while writing that first draft. We must take risks, explore every avenue of our subconscious, if we are going to come up with that hare-brained idea that we can shape into something wonderful later.

 

“What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head” (303).

            The last hurdle in getting the first draft on paper, Lamott says, is to quiet your inner demons. Don’t worry about what your inner critic is going to say about your writing, just write whatever pops into your head, critics be damned.

 

KING

 

“If that’s how things play out, then you are somewhere downstream on the timeline from me… but you’re quite likely in your own far-seeing place, the one where you go to receive telepathic messages” (305).

            King illustrates writing as telepathy by bringing to our attention that there exists a great deal of time and space between him and us.

 

“Decorative souls may add a little lace, and welcome—my tablecloth is your tablecloth, knock yourself out” (306).

            He reminds us that how he sees his writing is not necessarily the way we will see it. This reminds me of the McCloud article, what we see might not necessarily be what others see.

 

“It’s easy to become careless when making rough comparisons, but the alternative is a prissy attention to detail that takes all the fun out of writing” (306).

            King embraces the fact that his audience might see something slightly different than he does in his writing. He says that to impose your exact vision on the audience is to take away the magic of the telepathy.

 

“But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business” (307).  

            King demands the audience take the telepathic art of writing seriously, and I think the juxtaposition of the comic and the serious is brilliant. You have to believe in the magic for it to happen. When you come to the blank page, you have to commit to the fact that you have something to say, that you’re going to say it, and that others are going to read it.

 

DIAZ

 

“It was like I had somehow slipped into a No-Writing Twilight Zone and I couldn’t find an exit” (319).

            I like the colorful way Diaz describes his writer’s block. I am sure many students and professionals have felt this way at one time or another.

 

“Want to talk about stubborn? I kept at it for five straight years. Five damn years. Every day failing for five years? I’m a pretty stubborn, pretty hard-hearted character, but those five years of failing did a number on my psyche” (319).

            This sounds disturbingly similar to grad school.

 

“Five years of my life and the dream that I had of myself, all down the tubes because I couldn’t pull off something that other people seemed to pull off with relative ease: a novel” (320).

            Perhaps the source of some of Diaz’s despair is the notion of the inspired writer put forth by Allen. If he truly believes that others are succeeding where he is failing, that no true writer has experienced the difficulties he has with writing, then he might think that he is not cut out to write.

 

“I separated the 75 pages that were worthy from the mountain of loss, sat at my desk, and despite every part of me shrieking no no no no, I jumped back down the rabbit hole again. There were no sudden miracles” (320).

            What I think we can take from Diaz’s piece is that, when in doubt, work, work, work, work, and then work some more. Don’t expect an easy fix. Write because you have to, because you have something to say, because you are a writer, not because you think it should be easy.

Murray Reading Response

Summary

In his article “All Writing Is Autobiographical”, Donald Murray attempts to convince his audience of fellow scholars and teachers that all writing, regardless of genre, contains within it some personal aspects of the writer. He wants his audience to acknowledge this fact so that they can allow their students to overcome the construct of keeping themselves out of their writing. He wants teachers to teach their students that inserting oneself into one’s writing is necessary and indeed impossible to do otherwise.

 

Synthesis

            Murray helps to overcome the construct of not using the first person in academic writing by utilizing it in his own academic writing, much like Kleine and Kantz. His use of personal narrative in this article is also reminiscent of Kleine and his story of the night library. Kantz even helps to support Murray’s claim that “all writing is autobiographical” when she freely admits that Shirley is an amalgamation of several students, herself included.

 

Prewriting Exercise

            I was initially taught that my writing in the school and business spheres should be objective and impersonal. Like many high schoolers, I was instructed never to use the first person in my writing if I wanted my claims to be taken seriously.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

 

1) Murray is asking for his readers to question the long standing construct of objectivity as the standard of writing, that the author has no business inserting herself into her writing.

 

3) Murray breaks the academic mold in many ways; he uses the first person, he quotes lengthy passages of his own creative writing, and his tone is informal. He uses these writing methods as rhetorical tools to prove his point that all writing is autobiographical. By using the first person, he shows that an author can both write autobiographically and maintain his validity in a scholarly article. By quoting his own creative writing, he can prove his point that throughout different genres, writing always contains a piece of the author, either what he was before he wrote it or what that writing made him become.

 

4) What makes Murray’s article scholarly is that he is addressing a community of scholars, he cites what other scholars have contributed to the conversation, and he demonstrated his point by citing passages of his own writing that he could dissect as intensely autobiographical

 

Applying and Exploring Ideas

 

2) All writing is personal; our interests and ideas are shaped by who we are and what experiences we have had. Furthermore, what we write can change who we think we are and how we view past experiences. It is impossible to keep yourself out of your writing because writing is a creative endeavor, and therefore highly personal.

 

Meta Moment

 

            Understanding what Murray has to say about all writing being autobiographical can help me in my own writing, both by opening my eyes to connections between my writing and who I am (even if I was unaware of it before), and by making me realize that it is alright and even desirable for me to explore autobiographical themes.

 

Personal Thoughts

 

            I think Murray’s essay is highly readable, which helps to further drive home the point he is trying to make. Here we see a man allowed to explore autobiographical themes throughout his career, and we see how he has flourished not only as a creative writer, but as an academic one as well.

Berkenkotter and Murray Reading Response

In “Decisions and Revisions” and “Response of a Laboratory Rat—or, Being Protocoled”, Carol Berkenkotter and Donald M. Murray, in their respective articles, illustrate for other academics the benefits of studying a writer outside the laboratory in a naturalistic setting. They note the interesting discoveries they make in the writing process through this naturalistic study, namely the dominance of planning over revising, and the cyclical relationship between the two.

            Berkenkotter chooses an unorthodox approach to conducting research about writing by choosing to study an accomplished writer in a naturalistic setting. Conventional writing studies, usually conducted in a constrained time period in an artificial, laboratory setting, can not hope to observe the depth of planning involved in the revision of am experienced writer left to his own compository process. This is because writing is a highly social process, as Greene mentions in his article. Berkenkotter’s findings correlate with Greene as well as with what Michael Kleine’s assertion, in his article“What is it We Do When We Write Articles Like This—And How Can We Get Students to Join Us?”, that all writing is associated with discourse. Berkenkotter, in her representation of Murray’s verbal cues during his revision/planning processes, shows Murray using language as a tool to evaluate and reconsider how best to tell his message to his audience. He is highly aware of those who will read his writings and wants to carry on the conversation as best he can.

 

Pre-reading Exercise

            Like many people, I have my own little rituals when it comes time to write a paper. After I do many other household chores in an attempt to procrastinate, I settle down on my bed or at a table and begin the long process of writing and revising. I will drink water like a dying man in the desert, and consequently take several trips to the little writers’ room. I will often break up the writing and take a shower or brush my teeth. These give me much needed breaks within the writing process without really taking my mind off the writing.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1)      Though I found Murray’s writing processes to be somewhat old-fashioned, even eccentric, I did note that those proclivities allowed him to spend an especially large amount of time planning for an article. Yet his planning does not stop there. The recursive nature of his writing process allows him to return again and again to the planning stage. Though I do think I spend a considerable amount of time planning at the beginning of my work, I do not believe my writing process doubles back on planning quite as often as Murray’s does.

2)      Berkenkotter was astounded to find that Murray spent so much time planning and so little time revising. This is, of course, due to the interplay between revision and revising, and how so often revision turns into more planning for Murray.

 

Meta Moment

The “talk aloud” method, though apparently a popular research tool for some time, is new to me. I think if I verbalize my decision making process whilst I am writing I might be able to better solidify in my mind my plans for writing and revision.

 

            These two articles gave two very interesting views on the same research experiment, and I found the package as a whole to be entertaining as well as informative. The insight these articles give on the writing process of an experienced writer in a naturalistic setting allows scholars to both rethink the way they write as well as research