May 11

I find myself to be a lot like Shirley, because I too struggle with assignments that require me to write original papers based on textual sources. I find it easier writing opinion base papers because then I can add personal experiences in. Unlike others in this class reading these articles didn't make me feel like I could do this assignment now. I'm still a bit confused on what we are doing and I am finding myself a bit overwhelmed by it.
I do however like the fact that Swales gave you step by step directions in order to come up with a good research introduction. I think the Create a Research Space model (Cars) is pretty helpful. I never really found it hard to write introductions for papers, but that mainly is because they were opinion and personal base papers. But now that I'm in this class I see how the Cars model can help me to write a great introduction.
Even though Kantz didn't help me to come to a realization about what you want for the paper I do feel as if the article was very informing. A quote that stuck out to me was "reading sources rhetorically gives students a powerful tool for creating a persuasive analysis." She goes on to say that there is no proof that this is true, but I believe that it could actually be true.

Annoying Ways People Use Sources

The opening of this article made me want to read it. I love how he compares slow driving to sloppy writing. I for one HATE slow drivers, so I can imagine how irritated he is. I like the quote he used as to why people don't use quotations right. "There are two explanations for why some don't use quotations right. they don't know how, or they don't care" I really believe this to be true, because unlike people that drive slow; when it comes to writing in college majority of people have been writing papers all of there lives. So knowing where to put quotations is something that is learned. So when it comes down to writing the paper if you don't put them in the right spot, I think of it more as you don't care or maybe you just really didn't know. But if it's something you don't know you can always look it up, so you can look at it as them not caring where the "quotations" are. I like how he included examples of the wrong way to place quotations and then provided the right way to do it. All and all I thought this was a great article and it kept me engaged.

Genre

I found these articles difficult for me to understand. None of the quotes really stuck out to me, I did find one to be interesting though. “It is not that a writer merely functions within a context, but that a writer participates in the construction of that context.” To me what this means is that Writing aren't solely based on context, but then I thought well when you read something in order to understand it you have to understand the context of the story. But in order to understand the context you have to read for understanding. Now that I better understand what genre is I believe that context and genre go hand and hand.

April 20

I liked these article best out of the ones we have read on discourse. The reason being is because John and Harris challenge the idea of discourse, and they give you both a negative and positive side of it.
“ …First, many people have chosen to be members of one discourse communities, groups with whom they share social, political, professional, recreational interest” (John) I like this quote because to me it seems as if he saying that people choose to be apart of a community based on their interest, and not because their family belonged to it. When we first started talking about communities I was led to believe that people chose them based on where their family belonged, I now see that the people apart of the communities have common interest.
There seem to me two warnings here. The first is that, since it has no “positive opposing” term, community can soon become empty and sentimental word.” (Harris) This really stood out to me because in pass articles they led me to believe that being apart of a community would be great and it would help me socially and academically. But Harris is leading me to be that it's not all that. It also makes me realize that just because people have similar interest, that's not enough to keep a community going.
I think we spent so much time on these articles, so we can form our own opinion about discourses,communities, ecologies. Just because someone wrote an article about them doesn't mean we have to agree with what they're saying. You need to learn to form your own opinion and in order to do that, you need pros and cons. That's why i enjoyed these two articles best.

April 18

Wardle relates to ecologies because it deals with communication and writing in a specific community. Wardle talks about writing in engineering. People that are in that community will be very familiar with the writing and be able to understand the discourse."At times, however, participation in new communities requires accepting for oneself identities that are at odds with the values of other communities to which one belongs (Lave and Wenger; Russell, "Rethinking") When people choose to be a part of another community they are then choosing to participate in the norms that they have set for that community.

April 13

I think you had us read these articles together because they each talk about a different form of writing. Although they are different from each other they compliment each other also when it come to writing.

The writing that I prefer most is the rhetoric writing, because I feel like whenever you're writing a paper you're using persuasion. Trying to persuade them to like your writing so you can get a good grade.

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems as if discourses focus on your environment, and although that can play a big factor in writing an article or paper it doesn't influence it much.

But after reading Boyd and Gees articles I'm still lost on discourses. So maybe that's why I'm all for rhetoric writing.

resume link

Im not sure how to post a link to my resume.