Assignment 15: Missed it by...that much

To be so close together, and yet so far apart at the same time, Gee and Swales seems do be able to do it all the time. I bet if these two writers had teamed up they would have been one of the great duos. They could’ve have been like Batman and Robin, the Wonder Twins, or Rocky and Bullwinkle. Alas they didn’t really see eye to eye so let’s just scratch that idea out of our minds right now. Swales was really pushing for a huge of community of discourses that one could float between and help out which ever community one would see fit at the time. There wasn’t really any conflict in Swales’ theory of discourse communities. This is where Gee says no. He finds that the only reality is that only the perfect people for the communities can join in. Those who aren’t good enough either has to “mushfake” their ways in, or keep on looking for a lower standard group. But to Gee, there is no way a happy community could exist.

            Johns goes on to talk about what some of the expected things are in the academic discourse communities. She brings in this idea that perhaps those who are new to the groups and not fully aware of the rules could actually take leadership over the community for that fact alone. People look to other people who are willing to risk things for the better results, even if that means breaking some of the discourse community rules. The newer recruits may not know all of the old rules, but they’re going off of the rules they know. Rules change, so it could very well be that 2 members separated by some years were brought up with different interpretations of that certain discourse community. And while people are used to the old ideas, the new ones may just look shiny enough that people will want to try them out and see what happens. I think this bit of thinking is an example of what it would look like. This idea that things don’t have to stay the same looks pretty good compared to Gee and Swales. They’re too busy being convinced they’re right to look at other ideas for the discourse communities. That’s a good way to kill your community. The world is ever changing, adapt or get out. This even applies to the literary world too.

Assignment 14: The He-man woman hater club...women welcome.

If you want to get into the cool club, you have to be tested to make sure you’re going to fit in well with the already existing members. Sometimes that means the members start looking at you from a distance at first without you knowing it. It’s the best way to see how you truly interact with people, surroundings and in this case, literacy discourse. This is a good way to test you without know you’re being tested. It’s a “no pressure” situation. But there is pressure. Tons of pressure. Don’t look now but you’re being watched to see how you react to this post. They’re going to decide if you’re “club material”. I’ll put in a good word for you. Only time will tell whether you doing all the right things at this moment…if not, I’m not sure this will work out for you. I’m sure you’re fine though.

That’s not a situation you’d want to be caught up in. That’s what I took away from this “right time, right place, right people” situation. While it is beneficial to have people of similar backgrounds in the same discourse community, it couldn’t hurt to mix things up in my opinion. Why not take someone who is at a lower level and throw him or her in with a higher-level literary discourser. Or in some cases I’ve seen, mix two types of artists together. One who is stronger in 3-D art and one that is stronger in 2-D art. Give them an assignment. They may surprise you. I did a project with two of my buddies sophomore year where we were to take “paper materials” and make some sort of 3-D project with it. I’m mostly structured in the drawing and my two friends were stronger in the 3-D aspect, ceramics and what have you. Well we made a pirate ship and a sea serpent and it turned out amazing. The work load was pretty evenly divided up between the three of us, so it wasn’t like someone was doing more or less than the others. I drew up some ideas as to how it would look and the other two guys led the creating process. I did what I was told and they did their thing, and it turned out pretty impressive. My point is, mixing up backgrounds can turn out to be a good thing. Don’t make the community so exclusive.

Assignment 13: *insert clever title name. Sorry guys...I've got nothing right now.

1.) A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. Aka stay in the guidelines of what everyone else is talking about and you’re good. It could be anything. Politics, social events, paper airplanes, whatever catches your fancy. As long as you’re not saying, “Well I think “x” is the best presidential candidate because he is showing he knows what the people want. I was a dinosaur in a past life”, you should be okay. Stay on the topic, and if you have secret goals of your own like, “I want to sound smart so that girl over there thinks I’m smart”, then by all means, try to impress.

2.) A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. It’s a small world after all. Now that that song is stuck in your head, let me try and make a point. It’s saying that while there make a group of people who have never met before but all come from the same background in teachings or what have you are still connected by the fact that they are all going out with the same mission in mind. For me, this would be like when I was in high school and part of my youth group. We would go on mission trips to other cities and we even made it to Mexico one year. We helped build a second story on a church. There would be a group coming in after us to help finish the church. So while we never met, we still had the same goal, thus creating a community.

3.) A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. This is saying that even though you may be part of a medical team, if you don’t stop the patient from bleeding out, you’re not really helping anyone. You have to put forth some effort to actually be apart of the community. This isn’t a “show up and you win!” type of deal. It’s time to nut up or shut up. This is like art critiques we have for class. If you’re not putting up work or speaking, why are you there?

4.) A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one of more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. Be original. No one likes a tattletale…or people who can’t think of anything original. Okay that last part isn’t true. But don’t walk up to someone and takes their idea. Be cool. True originality is hard to come by in the art world, it’s okay to have been influenced by other artists, just don’t take the Mona Lisa and say you made it.

5.) In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis. It’s like having your own decoder ring. You become comfortable with shortcuts or anagrams for words and while outsiders may not know what you’re getting at, the rest of your club does. A good group can do this. A great group can be understood by everyone…members and nonmembers alike. This is like when I try to explain to people some ways of setting up files on adobe illustrator or some other graphic software. I need to change my terminology to help make it simple for everyone.

6.) A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise. Make way for the new guys and have a fond farewell for the old. Everyone is important in a group. The new are the future while the old are the past. You can’t have one without the other. And a good balance of the two insures you of having a long history. I can only think of family generations for an example. my grandfathers teaching my parents who then taught me, and I will teach the younger generation of my family to come. Circle of life.

Assignment 12: "txt me when u get here." "k." ...Yay progress.

To say that new technology won’t change the way things are written is kind of arrogant. It definitely changes things up. I mean, have you seen text messages? “k. Where you at? C u there.” And my all time favorite…”lol”. Gosh. If I could erase one thing from the written English language, it might be that. I don’t know why but it gets under my skin. I mean, even blogs change the way we “write” things out. More typing now than writing, but you know what I’m saying. I can appreciate where he’s coming from though. To say that we will go back to doing things manually, and treating it like it’s a new thing to us. I can relate with that but it had to deal with drawing. I had spent so much time over this past year on my computer designing things and illustrating thing with a mouse pad. And when I picked up a pencil, I was a little rusty and I was kind of frustrated with my level of drawing. But the more I drew the better I felt and my level of drawing increased to just about what it was before. This shows that old habits die-hard and are sometimes the best way to get things done. There’s no school like old school.

Assignment 11: A Frankenstein of a tale. Except it's a happy ending.

Decisions, decisions…who do I connect with most in this article? Could I send them into surgery and make a super human using a part of all of them? You’re right…the last doctor who tried that had his monster of a creation destroy his life until he was given a bride. And that didn’t go over so well. I digress. Anyways. If I were forced to pick one person, I’d have to go with Mr. Joseph Johansen. At first I wasn’t feeling it with the whole 11 other siblings and whatnot, but as soon as it mentioned that he was interested in graphic design, my ears perked up. Seeing as that is my major, I almost feel it’s a duty laid upon me to feel an interest in other graphic designers. But I really appreciate the fact that he taught himself most of those programs because I took classes learning that stuff, and I’m still learning new stuff every time I use an Adobe program. And how he tied digital media into literacy was really cool. That kind of stuff needs to be out there. Especially now that everyone is “going green”. Digital media is the future of literacy and people need to be eased into that. Who better than a designer to make it look all warm and friendly?

Assignment 10: Get busy living, or get busy dying.

The times that show us who we can truly be are the times when we usually only have control over one thing in the situation. Malcolm X found himself in prison and locked away for months. He could have just moped around and been a cold thug when he was released, but instead he took the time he had to do something he had never been able to do…read. On the street he was a highly educated man, but if put into an academic scenario, he wouldn’t have been able to keep up. He decided he needed to keep up. He approached the literary world head on and dove right into the dictionary to discover new words and meanings. With his background, he didn’t have much to go off of so head on was the best way for him. It certainly showed after he got out of prison.

            I hated Grapes of Wrath. It was boring, it was long, and the ending was creepy. That was my junior year of high school. I would love to know how a kindergartener made it through that book without dying of boredom. I love comic books though. I grew up with Spider-Man. So, we’re back on the more relatable subject. I remember, “reading” through those comics, aka looking at the pictures and then drawing them myself. What Alexie did with his reading skills is amazing. He started at such a young age, something not all kids get to do, and he shot off like a rocket in his passion for education. Because he had little, and had little to do, he was able to focus and enjoy the books more. Nowadays we have seventeen things going on around us that we rarely get to be consumed by the literacy we’re reading. Sherman Alexie got busy reading, and he stayed busy reading. It helped him achieve all that he’s done to this day.

assignment 9: Literacy is a meal best served cold. ...or warm. It's your call.

This response is brought to you by…Literacy! After one bite, you’ll be begging for more! They say breakfast is the best meal of the day, but I think the best meal is a big dose of literary guidance and “sponsorship”. My starting and longest sponsors have been my parents. My dad, an English major, and my mom, a journalism major, have always encouraged my to further my use and knowledge of the English language. Learning the proper way to speak, read, and write has been a big part of my growing up experience. Other sponsors I’d have to say would be the various schools I have attended over the years. Each year it’s given me new insight into the ever-expanding journey into enlightenment. A third place where I have spent a bit of time at is my church. It’s always been a part of my life and it’s certainly a place to learn. Not just in the spiritual sense but in the sense of literacy as well.

            I would say I’ve been taught a lot of the same type of civic literacy through all of these outlets I’ve mentioned. I was raised with the golden rule and all that, and the people who raised me on that sort of teaching wanted me to have that sort of reinforcement in my reading and writing as well. Treat others as you wish to be treated…if we just used that mindset, everywhere would be awesome to live. But I digress. Academically, I’ve grown most in the home and school. As I mentioned before, my parents are both heavily involved in the English world. So it was almost routine to have my little bits of my English corrected here and there. But it helped me understand the usage of words and where they fit, so I’m grateful.

            Looking back on this history of my “sponsors” I’d say yes, my sponsors have been adequate. I will continue to learn from each of them in different ways, and I will become a better person because of it. Knowledge is power!

Project 2: Britannica v. Wikipedia: Heavy Weight Encyclopedia Championship

Reflecting on the Wikipedia

A Story by Rob Wallover

Wikipedia. This is the future. This is the voice of the people. Making an article was quite an experience. As geeky as it sounds, it was pretty thrilling. To think that your article, that you took the time and effort to create, could be deleted at any moment is kind of exciting. To get the article topic that you can’t get over is a process. Since we were going for local things near the Athens County, I went through the Ohio University page on Wikipedia to see what they had, and what they didn’t. I tried going for something a little more notable than something in Athens that would just be deleted as soon as it was posted.

I saw that our beloved mascot, Rufus the Bobcat, was not among the included articles under the Ohio University page. I figured He was pretty popular, especially with the whole Ohio State incident. I also wanted to show a little OU pride and make an article for the bobcat. I went to Google for the start of the research. The first couple websites I found were Ohio University based, for example there was an Ohio Alumni website which had the history of Rufus the Bobcat. This was an awesome source but it wasn’t going to be enough for the Wikipedia article: one because it was only one source and two because it wasn’t an “unbiased” source.

I ran into that problem for a couple of my sources. They were based from the school itself, which was so very helpful when it came to the history of the mascot and other interesting facts, but when it came to being unbiased, they fell short. So I expanded my research to other subjects other than his history. I turned to the thing that is on everybody’s mind when someone mentions Rufus the Bobcat…the famous tackling of Brutus the Buckeye. I looked up interviews and news reports on ESPN.com about the aggressive encounter. It turned out that Ohio State wasn’t the first act of violence. During an Ohio vs. Buffalo game, Rufus taunted the bull with a red towel. The other mascot mistakenly played along with the mischievous bobcat. As the bull charged at the red towel, Rufus side stepped him and shoved the other mascot to the group. He then proceeded to jump on top of him and pretend to be riding the bull. This interaction went unnoticed because it wasn’t on national TV and it wasn’t against Ohio State. This gave me a chance to add in subtopics for the article. I was able to make a subtitle that was how Rufus came to be, the chances he had gone through, and the small history of violence. Actually writing up the article was kind of cool. The codes were sort of a pain to figure out but no pain, no gain. Once I got the ball rolling and had all the information that I thought was a solid background of sources, the article itself was pretty cool.

The next step was to take it into the drawing board. This was a nice turning point in the writing process. This helped me see what I needed to fix and how I could take the editors critiquing into consideration for the final article. The editor just said that I might need to get more “reliable sources” aka non-OU related websites. After reading that I found some other websites that talked about Rufus and they were not OU based. As previously stated, I found the ESPN articles that helped out with the non-biased sources.

The final step was sending it in for a review to see how it would hold up in the Wikipedia world. They rejected mine for having too many “biased” sources. I then decided to take to low road and ignore their opinions. That’s a beautiful thing about Wikipedia. You can just skip being critiqued if you think your subject matter is important enough to be seen regardless of the sources you used. The other beautiful thing about the system is that other people can decide to add on or take away from the article to help stay online. It’s really cool looking back on the article now to see how things have changed and how people are helping make the article more solid to stay on the website.

The traditional writing skills I have been talk over the years of my education has certainly helped me with the writing of the article. The tone of the article was probably for the most difficult part because; as you can see I like keeping things personable and low key. For the article I have to keep the tone neutral and straight factual. If you swayed too far one way or the other, you ended up sounding in favor of your article or treating the article as a roast. When I was told to keep the tone neutral, I couldn’t help but think of the article in Writing About Writing: “All Writing Is Autobiographical”. Donald Murray states, “…that, in a sense, all writing is autobiographical” (56). He talks about how we may not obviously put our voice in the writings but because of the way we researched or how we present the information, it makes the paper or article unique to us. Thus, we have our voice in the paper. It may not be our opinion, but we’re in the paper.

 Placing this article into the public domain is almost a duty for someone who has put time and effort into finding out about a subject that interests them. If there’s information out there, see if you can add to it. The reason I say this is because it’s really good to see what other people think of your input. We can’t go through life thinking everything we do is perfect. We need reality checks once in a while. The side part about this is that it’s a two-sided coin. You can critique other people’s writings. This would not be critiquing to be mean, but to help the writer become better. This helps you help them revise the information they have presented. I’m reminded of the article “Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision” written by Barbara Tomlinson. She shows the reader the many ways one can revise their papers using interesting and entertaining metaphors. She’s listed so many options to treat revisions as, that’s there is something there for everyone. I found about two examples that really helped me. The first was the “refining ore” process. Tomlinson states, “James Dickery, when drawing an analogy between his writing process and refining ore, is actually describing a process of revision-as-reformulation: rather than focusing on the discovery of the “ore,” his material, he is concerned with attempts to transform that material into a more valuable commodity” (254). The other treated the paper as a painting. “I write first drafts with great speed but the older I get (a familiar observation, I know) I rewrite more and more…. I’m more an oil painter now. More deliberate. A good deal less certain. (1971, p. 337)” (257). Those two examples helped me when I went back through my article seeing if there were things I could revise.

Again, that’s the great thing about Wikipedia. You get to go back and revise it. Just like that. Or this. That quick. That’s amazing. With encyclopedias, you have to wait ‘til the next year’s copy to see what was changed. This new media of sharing information is just the thing this era of technology needs. I think this system works. You make an article with good information or it gets deleted. This way, only the accurate pieces of information stay in the public’s eye. While yes, they’re will be those people who mess with the articles and make them say nonsense, that’s part of the system. This tests the will of the social society to learn. If people want to learn they will change the article back to he most accurate thing it could be. This is the one. Wikipedia. Tell your friends.

Sources:

Writing About Writing:

--Murray, D. (1991). “All Writing Is Autobiographical.”

College Composition and Communication, 66-74.

--Tomlinson, B. (1988).

“Tuning, Typing, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision. “

Written Communication, 58-81.

Assignment 8: What is that? It's gross! ...That my friend, is a paper being written.

This is gold. The article you’re reading right now is gold. Surprised? Well that makes two of us. It’s not gold…it’s not even silver. Heck, I’d be thrilled for bronze. But this article, is a bag of dog crap that’s about to be set on fire. Why is it a flaming bag of crap? Because it’s my first typed response for this reading. It’s not going to a renowned paper that will touch the lives of millions and brought the world together to settle their differences ultimately making world peace. At least, not yet it isn’t. That’s the point that Anne Lamott is trying to make. You need to get the ball rolling somehow. Even if that means starting with a small disgusting ball of mud and slime, the payoff will be well worth the trouble. This reading really helps show that you don’t need to be Bill Shakespeare on your first try at a paper. I really enjoyed this message she put forward where it humanized published authors who seem to be immortalized in the eyes of “everyday people”. They’re people too. They need just as much time to write an article or book as the next person. You have to let loose and just throw ideas on the page. Who cares what it is? You could have a sentence like; “The orange elephant went strolling down the street when he came across a very strange tree. He stared at it puzzling how the leaves had become so blue and transparent.” See? I just made that up. Just now. Would I write a story about that? I could try. But the important thing is I’m getting words on the page. I’m letting my creative juices flow. That’s what we all need to do before buckling down for a paper. Just write. And you can do just that on Wikipedia. Thanks to the “edit” button, you can go live with a crap article and have it get fixed in a matter of hours. Or you can take it to the drawing board and see how people react to it. This is helpful because it gives you such a big jump from step one to step two. You get to stick you head up above the crap and smell the roses that are waiting for you just up over the hill that is your paper. So go nuts. Have fun with the writing process. It’s here to help sift through this junk with you. And don’t forget to wear gloves.

Assignment 7: Did I forget something?

Writing is a process…Writing is a long process. A paper done well is a long process. Hmmm…as you can see it takes some tries to get it right. Refining a paper can be an experience or it can be quite dull, depending on how much your fixing. Looking at the examples given in the book show that refining can be taken in many different ways. I liked the idea of the mining the ore as far as considering the metaphor as a ways to refine the paper. The little chipping away at the paper is what I would usually do when I revised things. I would try and get into the paper a little bit at a time as opposed to trying to tackle the whole thing at once. The other metaphor I really enjoyed was the painting one. It really reflected my writing style. I punch something out really quickly and hope it’s good enough. The more I’ve written I’ve slowly learned to take more time with my papers. I like thinking that the paper is like a painting with the amount of layers that go into it. If I was to pick a new technique to use for the next paper I write I would probably pick the “cutting” technique. I like the idea of writing too much and then cutting back on the things that aren’t necessary for the paper. I will definitely keep this article in mind and use for reference the next time I’m fixing up a paper or Wikipedia page.