McCarthy Journaling Question #5

Throughout McCarthy's observation of Dave's writing habits over his college career, I actually wasn't able to draw many parallels to my own experiences writing in college thus far. Though I definitely need the directions of the assignment explained to me, like Dave does, I often find myself confident when long writing assignments are given in my courses. Over my academic career, my teachers, peers, and parents have always complimented my writing ability and, consequently, I've become confident in my ability to write in any course. In fact, I get excited when I am assigned a paper in a course like Math or Science, where I typically don't do exceptionally well on tests and quizzes. Although I am perfectly aware that I am not a phenomenal writer and I could use improvement in areas, I believe that my lack of hesitance towards an assignment allows me to handle a paper in a way that Dave's lack of confidence wouldn't allow him. Luckily, "Because of a number of successful classroom experiences with writing, and an ability to forget the less successful ones, Dave said, 'Writing is no problem for me. At work, in school, I just do it.'" As Dave received more positive feedback like I did, he became more confident in his writing.
Undoubtedly, the hardest aspect of writing in college for me is expanding my vocabulary. Throughout all of my papers, I tend to use all the same descriptive words and sentence structures. Hopefully over the next four years I will be able to expand my vocabulary through reading other texts and being exposed to writers with different styles than mine.

The Relationship of Discourse and Authority- #4 Journaling Question

After an individual has completed the requirements of the degree or been advanced in his or her academic career by other means, there are still issues of authority to contend with. For example, standardized examinations seem to rate a student's intelligence solely off his or her performance on the examination. Unfortunately, a large population of intelligent students do not perform well on standardized tests, so this exam prohibits a plethora of qualified students from reaching their desired positions within the discourse community--i.e. graduate school. Luckily, Johns sees this issue as urgent and believes that the problems of authority, status, and control over community utterances should be discussed in literacy classes. She believes that by assisting students in analyzing authoritative texts and critiquing authority relationships, students will become more aware of these factors affecting their academic lives. Consequently, these students will hopefully be able to produce and comprehend texts that command authority within academic contexts.

Anne Johns on Discourse Communities

In "Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity," linguist Anne Johns focuses more broadly on John Swales' definition of discourse communities. Intrigued by Swales' outlook on discourse communities, I believe Anne Johns continues his views in a more in-depth manner in order to combat various conflicts concerning discourse communities. Without discouraging Swales' credibility, Anne highlights that the standards of discourse communities are set in part by the environments in which they are created. People are born, or taken involuntarily by families or cultures, into some communities of practice, such as social, political, and recreational communities. On the other hand, academic communities are selected and voluntary. Following academia, discourse communities continue into the professional life because every major profession has organizations, practices, lexis, and genres. Without a doubt, every individual speaks and acts a certain way depending on their location and their company. For instance, I have a different voice at home, at work, and at school. I believe that Anne's continuation of Swales' scholarly article most definitely made Swales' analysis more believable and relateable.

John Swales' Discourse Communities

Within this excerpt from his accredited book Genre Analysis, John Swales explains the concept of what he calls a “discourse community.” While conceptualizing his definition of a discourse community, Swales proposes six characteristics that he considers to be necessary and sufficient for indentifying a group of people as a discourse community. His definitions and my understandings of them follow:

1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals.---
Whether formal or informal, goals are set by the discourse community that highlights its values, morals, expectations, beliefs, and aspirations.
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.---
Discourse communities have mediums or environments of communication that they frequently use in order to relay messages between its members.
3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.---
Technology and print sources, such as newspapers, magazines, and books that interest the discourse community’s goals, provide the discourse community ways of obtaining information and sharing back their input.
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims.---
Due to values and opinions of groupings within discourse communities and continuously changing values of the original discourse community, these individuals constantly adapt and expand their expectations.
5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis. ---
Discourse communities have their own vocabulary, as distinct as its grammar, that isolates the community from outsiders and provides information between members.
6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. ---
Depending on a reasonable ratio between novices and experts, discourse communities are constantly experiencing shifts of members as people die, leave, or grow older and grow wiser.

Response of a Laboratory Rat--or, Being Protocoled

It is without a doubt that there is not one perfect writer on this planet. From the dawn to the dusk of humanity, no one will ever be able to harness the beast known as the English Language and utilize it to make a "perfect" piece. "Perfect" is in the eye of the beholder, and, there are approximately 8 billion sets of eyes on this planet. Though no writer is perfect, more effective and experienced writers consistently try to expand the literary minds of their students. In his response to Dr. Carol Berkenkotter's study, Donald Murray said, "I find it very difficult to make my students aware of the layers of concern through which the writing writer must oscillate at such a speed that it appears the concerns are dealt with instantaneously." After reading this quote, I believe that Murray's relationship with his audience is an attempt to get unexperienced writers on his level of writing. In order to do so, Murray must both show examples of his experienced writing and try to essentially "dumb himself down" to get his students to understand the message he is trying to convey. Since I am quite an unexperienced writer myself, I believe I relate to my audience without trying to do so. Though my vocabularly may be large and my writing style may be different, I believe that I am an easy writer to follow. Since I've never really had anyone complain about not understanding the message I was trying to convey, I never have really thought about my audience directly. I write for me.

Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool

Honestly, as pompous and ignorant as this may sound, I feel as though my punctuation skills and intuition are on-target. Whenever I write, I feel as though I automatically know what punctuation to use within my literary work. As if it has been engrained in me, I use commas, quotations, hyphens, and semi-colons with no hesitation or worry. Dawkins’ scholarly article has, without a doubt, been the most useless article to me. All of the other articles in class have stimulated my mind into approaching writing and reading in different ways. Personally, I believe Dawkins failed to make me feel differently about punctuation.

Donald Murray's "All Writing is Autobiography"

Compared to many other scholarly writings, it is undeniable that Donald Murray’s “All writing is Autobiography” is more informal and understandable. Personally, I believe Murray wrote his article partially in laymen’s terms in order to make his argument more conversational and persuasive. When an author uses a conversational tone, it is much easier to understand and relate to the text because it feels as though the rhetor and audience are engaging in an active conversation. In addition, by using pieces of his own writings, Murray proves that even award-winning scholars like him put their own worldviews and perceptions directly in their writing. Murray highlights this fact when he says, “In writing this paper I have begun to understand, better than I ever have before, that all writing, in many different ways, is autobiographical, and that our autobiography grows from a few deep taproots that are set down into our past in childhood, (Murray 49).” He knows that as a human being, his writing is being affected by his past experiences. It’s hard to write an unbiased text when our lives are full of situations that make us more partial to one side of a conflict. Through writing this way, Murray highlights that no rhetor is above outside influence and we are always going to make our own writings appeal to ourselves first.

Analysis of "Why Women Aren't Funny" by Christopher Hitchens

In my opinion, Christopher Hitchens wrote his overtly controversial article “Why Women Aren’t Funny” in order to bring to light the fact that, in general, the female sex is not immediately linked with the characteristic of humor. As Hitchens said in the beginning of his article, a male does not typically think of finding a female counterpart based off her natural ability to make him laugh. Because it is majorly aggressive, pre-emptive, and controversial, humor does not seem to set well with the publics’ consensus that the female sex is naturally thoughtful and nurturing. Undoubtedly, Vanity Fair is mainly known as a female magazine that stays faithful to traditional values of women. A feminine activist who rides a motorcycle to work and wears oversized t-shirts would most likely not be caught dead reading the latest issue of Vanity Fair. As a rhetor, Hitchens chose a great audience because they typically believe that there are intellectual, emotional, social, and cultural differences between men and women. The exigence of his article was to highlight that humor is more idealistic in men because of women’s values.
Hitchens effectively used a combination of logos, ethos, and pathos to support his claim that humor is not as socioculturally important to women as it is to men. He first appeals to logic and underlines his credibility by highlighting a Stanford University School of Medicine study that revealed that a woman’s brain is more stimulated by humor than a man’s. Secondly, Hitchens suggests that because humor is a sign of intelligence and aggressiveness, the delicate female race are arguably frowned upon for using it. Overall I believe Hitchens was trying to stress that, although equality is often the goal between sexes, it is a cold, hard fact that men and women have different socioculutral expectations. It is their roles as members of society of those expectations are acceptable or not.

Grant-Davie: Discussion and Journaling Questions

2. Other writers (Bitzer, Vatz, Cosigny) have tried to explain the concept of the rhetorical situation before. Why does Grant-Davie think more work is needed?
Although both teachers and scholars of rhetoric consistently refer to the term rhetorical situation, the concept has proven to be underexamined since 1968 when Lloyd Bitzer defined it and the 1970s when Richard Vatz and Scott Cosigny responded to Bitzer’s claims. Due to Bitzer’s, Vatz’s, and Cosigny’s varying opinions behind the true meaning of rhetorical situation, English professor Keith Grant-Davie believes that the original definitions of the term and its constituents need to be analyzed in order to develop a more in-depth scheme for analyzing rhetorical situations. Grant-Davie truly believes that the true meaning behind rhetorical situation is a mixture of the theories all put forth by his scholarly predecessors and wishes to provide a compounded definition to a new, ever-changing age.

3. How would you define exigence? Why does exigence matter in rhetorical situations? (What difference does it make?)
Personally, I would define exigence as a problematic case or situation that is expected to be solved in an urgent and orderly manner. In rhetorical situations, exigence is extremely significant because it provides purpose and motivation to the discourse. Undoubtedly, individuals listen to discourse in order to benefit information or viewpoints from its contents. Without an exigence within the discourse, the discourse would lack a topic, purpose, or goal. Consequently, the discourse would have no significance because it has no problem to address or resolve.

How does your second, more-informed reading of Haas and Flower compare to your first reading?

Without an unquestionable doubt, my second, more-informed reading of Haas and Flower was extremely beneficial to my understanding of the text. Ironically, as Haas and Flower highlighted in their study, I began reading their analysis with the intent of extracting pure, unsaturated knowledge and facts so that I could contribute to an in-class discussion of the material. Using the reading strategies I’ve been taught throughout my schooling, I searched for the main points of the study so that I could paraphrase and summarize its content. Unfortunately, traditional schooling usually centers around the importance of factual information and not making parallels and understanding intent.
However, while discussing Haas and Flower during class, an imaginary light bulb arose above my head when I realized that I was selling myself short by conforming to traditional reading skills and not using the critical reading skills that I am surely capable of. Although I did not realize it during my initial reading, I was fulfilling Haas and Flower’s stereotype as an “average good reader.” Through this realization, however, I quickly transformed into the critical reader that they continually push young adults to be. Rather than scavenging for facts, I related the reading to my own academic abilities and realized that the implementation of critical reading skills is truly useful in understanding the author’s purpose and recognizing the issue at hand. Recognizing the author’s purpose allows a reader to better follow their message as their eyes soak in the text. Haas and Flower were correct—critical reading skills put texts into a different, more mature perspective. Although the text was not intended for a young audience, I was still able to recognize the issue and try to apply the solution to my life. I am hoping that by the end of this course, my rhetorical strategies will prove dominant over the black-and-white methods that have previously been instilled in me. Toto, we’re not in high school anymore.

After my initial reading of Haas and Flower, I have some questions.

1. Throughout their experiment, did Haas and Flower take into account that their interpretations of their subjects’ interpretations may have an effect on their results?
2. Have Haas and Flower considered that the geographical location of a student may have a lot to do with their study? For example, a student from Maine is likely to have a different interpretation of a text than a student from California would because their worldviews, opinions, beliefs, and prior knowledge are most definitely products of their separate environments. Isn’t it also likely that schooling plays a vital role in this study because schools in different geographic locations are likely to hold different standards of reading comprehension?
3. Do “early transactions” occur when readers analyze all forms of text—i.e. fictional novels, magazines, etc.—or merely with multi-dimensional writings?
4. When do “rhetorical reading skills” seem to develop in a “typical” student? Do motivation and a thirst for knowledge often serve as the unofficial prerequisite of rhetorical reading?