Toward a Composing Model of Reading

I feel like the five functions that Tierney and Pearson talk about in their piece, “Toward a Composing Model of Reading” is not something that we readily think about as we are writing, but after reading the article they are all such obvious things that occur during the writing process. With my Wikipedia article I recall that I utilized and completed all five of the functions.  First of all was planning which I did by researching my article to figure out what information I would put include, as well as looking around for model articles and figuring out my desired layout.  Next I took on the task of drafting which, like was mentioned in the article, I found to be one of the more difficult aspects of composing. With drafting I had to figure out where and how I wanted my article to begin, which is what I understood to be “the lead” in the article. Once I had my lead drafting more or less flowed with one idea flowing into the next. Aligning was probably up there with drafting as far as difficulty goes. The article explained aligning as stances that the writer assumes with their audience. The alignment that I took on in my article was neutral. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia so within it there is no room for persuasion or advertising. The topic that I did my piece on made neutrality challenging but I think I did well with it. Following alignment was revising. The Tierney and Pearson mention in their article that writing is not just taking ideas and slapping them on paper, but it is a process of going back and editing what you wrote. This is something that I find to be essential in any piece, and it is something that I definitely used in composing my Wikipedia article. I constantly was going back in and changing, deleting, and rearranging my text in order to achieve the neutrality and the information level that I wanted.  Lastly the texts talks about monitoring. I took monitoring to be a process that is happen concurrently with all of the other functions discussed in this piece. Monitoring is the process of checking yourself as you plan, draft, align, and revise. While creating my article I was constantly monitoring myself to make sure that what I was presenting and how I presented it was correct. I found this article to be very interesting because, as a I mentioned before, these five functions are things that must occur in creating a piece of writing but it is not something that people really recognize themselves as doing.

My Wikipedia Article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Brew_Week

"Intertextuality and the Discourse Community"

In “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community,” Porter defines intertexuality by saying that writing has bits and pieces of other writings that make it up. This means that when an article writes a piece, that piece is essentially made from putting together parts of numerous other writings. If what Porter says is true, then he is overriding what was mentioned at the beginning which was that writings should be original and autonomous. Porter’s ideas challenge Murray’s idea that all writing is autobiographical because it puts the emphasis on deriving the piece from multiple other sources/pieces where as Murray makes his claim that writing is autobiographical and  our writings are reflections of our own beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. Personally I think that both authors make valid arguments and that writings can come from both personal beliefs/ experiences as well as other writings that the author has read.

"All Writing is Autobiography"

In "All Writing is Autobiography," Donald Murray is asking the audience to think about all of the things that shape and individuals writing. One's experiences, beliefs, knowledge, and attitudes are all constructs that affect the way that people write which is what Murray means by autobiography. For example, two authors can write about the exact same topic using the same number of facts, same layout, etc., but the way they write it will still be different because they each have different personal items that affect them. In every piece of writing a person does, they add a little bit of themselves. This relates to the kinds of writing we find in Wikipedia or an encyclopedia because those are pieces that are all made to be objective. Objective means without personal influence so it should all appear to be written the exact same author, but if you look closely enough at the articles you can see bits and pieces of individuality.

Rhetorical Situations

In "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents," the author loosely defines rhetorical situations as events, acitivities, or situations that a rhetor shapes with particular discourse in order to get people to do something. Examples of rhetorical situations are advertisements where certain language and images are used in order to achieve a goal of motivating the reader to buy into the product. The text goes on to explain the four constituents of rhetorical constraints: exigence, rhetors, audiences, constraints. The exigence is more or less the problem or need of the situation. It is the reason that the discourse is necessary. For example in the case of a shoe add using a celebrity to promote the product, the exigence would include the company’s need to sell people the shoe and also the consumers desire/need to get the benefits of the shoe and to relate to the celebrity figure. The rhetor is the person or figure that generates the specific language and communication being used to persuade in the situation.  The audience is more or less self-explanatory. The audience is the person or group that the rhetor is trying to persuade via discourse.  Constraints are the last of the constituents. The constraints of a rhetorical situation are essentially limitations placed on the rhetor that control what can be said and how it can be said in order to achieve persuasion. A compound rhetorical situation occurs when there are multiple situations that relate to one another and combine to form a larger situation.

As college students and writers, it is important to understand rhetorical situations because they are so prevalent in our learning and daily lives. We need to be able to understand rhetoric and the constraints that can be put on a situation in order to become more well-rounded, established writers/readers.

"The Phenomenology of Error"

In “The Phenomenology of Error,” Joseph Williams makes his point that linguistic errors should be more appropriately looked at as social constructs. By this he means that errors should be viewed more or less as an exchange between the writer and the reader. Also, these exchanges made between writer and reader are going to be different case to case due to how the different readers view the writing and what each of them believe to be considered an error or not. Just because one person believes one thing to be an error does not make it fact, and vice versa for someone who does not think there are errors where errors exist. As far as Wikipedia goes I think that it operates the exact way that Williams discusses in his piece, it operates as a social exchange. One author comes in and creates an article and then the authors after that go through and fix what they believe to be errors or add information as they see fit, but the social exchange itself is not the reason for the negative perception that Wikipedia gets. The reason Wikipedia is characterized as inaccurate and error-prone is due to the fact that the authors that create and edit the articles are “average joes” like you and I. People do not believe that the person making their coffee at the café and the cashier at the department store can be credible authors. This is directly related to the 2005 study of Wikipedia that found that it is essentially equal in errors to that of Encyclopedia Britannica. People put a lot of weight on credentials and status when it comes to what sources they are willing to trust.  Encyclopedia Britannica is easily trusted as a source because people see that it was written by professionals and it is a published source. Then on the other end, Wikipedia is not easily trusted because it is essentially written by anyone who feels like writing and it is constantly changing and being revised. 

My English308J Introduction

This is my blog that I have created for my English 308J course with Matt Vetter.  

              

                My name is Nicole Sieber and I am from Dublin, Ohio which is right outside of Columbus.  I am a senior in the exercise physiology program and I am hoping to attend physical therapy school next fall.  As far as my  experience in English 151 goes, it was not bad but it was nothing special. The class that I was enrolled in was focused almost solely on analytic writing so our assignments consisted of interpreting and analyzing magazine or electronic  articles and ads. I thought that the course was fine but I did not necessarily see the importance of focusing solely on that topic, which I know of course is just simply my personal opinion.  I would have liked to learn things that more realistically applied to daily life or to our futures. For example, it would have been great to have focused a little on writing resumes or general professional writing to use when looking for a job or applying to graduate programs. The most rewarding part of that course was doing well on the assignments and in the class overall.  As far as the least rewarding part I am not sure, but I might say that it was not studying other topics besides analytical writing.

                  I think the course design of this English 308J course looks fine but I am still unclear as to what “writing about writing” means.  I think that once we start up with the course and we begin doing activities I will have a better grasp on how I feel about the material. As far as incorporating technology into the assignments I think that is a good idea and I am interested on getting started on the blogs and the Wikipedia project. What I am apprehensive about is that I will not fully understand the concepts that we are discussing when it comes to studying writing and rhetoric and I am afraid that what we learn will not be anything that I can apply practically to my daily or future activities outside of this course. All in all I am ready to get started and hopefully do well.