2.6 Porter

Autoethnograhic project:  We talked about what writing assignment you would use for this project (see your textbook, page 322) and I answered some of your questions about "documenting" your writing process. This is the first time I have assigned this project - so we will work out the requirements together.  Make sure you have a recording device that you can bring to class to experiment with.  

Intertext.  James Porter's essay introduces the idea of intertextuality, and claims that "intertext constrains writing" in terms of the traces and presuppositions associated with the discourse communities it connects to.  If you can translate that into regular English - you've got the most of the main ideas in this essay.  He points out that current approaches to teaching writing draw from the idea of the writer as the autonomous, creator of his/her texts - and based on his analysis of the framing of the Declaration of Independence - this is clearly not the way writing works.

In class, you looked at course syllabi - documents routinely "written" to describe courses.  As you analyzed these documents, you found three "classes" of traces: traces associated with form/organization (the layout including the sequence of headings/ideas, use of typeface, organization on the page,  etc); content (what the headings were concerned with, the focus of individual sections), and language (standard word-for-word descriptions in the course description, objectives, and required materials etc).  

We then discussed the idea of plagiarism - and what is expected and prohibited - in terms of intertextuality.  For a syllabus - standard content, form and even standard language is expected - since students across the university expect to have the same standards & experiences for the same course.  We then turned back to the essays written for the placement exam - and were getting started on thinking about what is "expected" in terms of intertext, and what is prohibited.  We noticed that "complete" directions for form and focus were NOT available in the prompt itself  - rather, the student writer had to be "already" familiar with the expectations of the discourse community (college writing teachers) in terms of how to focus, organize, and develop the essay. And we also noticed that in general - in college writing - students are expected to use their "own language."

So far so good!

For class Thursday:

We will continue our discussion of Porter, and you practice using track changes to document successive drafts. You will also make sure you can use your voice recorder to create & save mp3 files.

BRING YOUR VOICE RECORDING DEVICE TO CLASS (and something = thumbdrive - to save your files to).