Toward a Composing Model of Reading

After reading “Toward a Composing Model of Reading” by Tierney and Pearson, I definitely think I used all five of the functions of writing.  They listed the five functions to be: planning, drafting, aligning, revising, and monitoring.  These are functions that I used every time I am writing without really thinking anything of it.  This is something that is so ingrained in our minds since we first started writing in elementary school.  We’ve been taught the process of writing when we learned to write and since the very beginning it’s something we’ve all had to do.  Because of this its second nature and is something I do every time without thinking about it at all.

Applying this to our first project writing a Wikipedia article, I absolutely went through all five of the steps.  First, I started with planning.  As described by Tierney and Pearson this phase includes behaviors such as setting the purpose for writing, evaluating current state of knowledge on the subject, narrowing the topic and/or goals, and self-questioning.   I planned by finding a suitable topic that I could find a decent amount of information about it.  I looked thought the requested articles page and searched for things that could be easily researched questioning how easily it would be to find reliable sources on the topic.  Once I narrowed in on one specific topic to write on and started doing my research.  This is about the time when I switched from the planning stage to the drafting stage.  As I found and read different reliable sources I started to take notes of important points to include in my article.  I then drafted these points into a very rough draft of my writing.

I quickly switched into the aligning phase.  In this phase the writer aligns there writing in a way that flows and makes sense.  This phase has everything to do with the writer’s ability to make the writing readable and coherent.  In this phase, I came up with the subtitles I was going to uses in my article and started deciding which different bits of information and paragraphs were going under which subtitles.  I aligned my article in a way that I thought would be easy to read and understand.  The aligning phase kind of works hand in hand for me because as I aligned my article in a more reader friendly way;  I also revised the way my article was written so that the sentences made sense when I moved them and so that it all flowed together.  I read over the sentences as I was moving and aligning them and as I did this I was checking for grammatical and logical errors.  After I was finished aligning I continued to revise till I felt the article was as good as I was going to get it. 

Now that I have finished my article and submitted it for review, I am in the monitoring stage.  I am checking to see if it’s acceptable and gets created as an article.  Also I check to see if I get any feedback on my writing and what could improve it.   Also part of the monitoring process in this class is waiting to see my grade for the project and how it was perceived by Matt.

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

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

Intertextuality and the Discourse Community

After reading Donald Murray’s “All Writing is Autobiographical” and James Porter’s “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” it’s quite easy to see the similarities and differences in the twos point of views.  Murray argues that all writing is autobiographical and that each writer brings a part of themselves to the piece.  In other words meaning that we all base at least a little of our writing off our past experiences.  Porter on the other hand argues that everything is borrowed from writings that came before it.  That everything that we write has little bits and pieces from multiple other texts.  To me it seems like Murray and Porter have similar but different ideas.  What I mean by this is that Murray and Porter both believe that the writer draws on and brings up things from the past.  In Murray’s argument he says that each writer draws from past experiences.  Well isn’t reading an article part of a past experience?  So then couldn’t one argue that Porters argument could fit into the context of Murrays?   Porter’s argument on the other hand is a little harder to just go with thought because in the way he describes it were always plagiarizing everything we write.   Porter’s argument is much more rash and less up to interpretation as Murrays.   There were many things that Porter said in his article that I just don’t agree with.  For instance, he said that the writer has no free will.

All Writing is Autobiographical

In "All writing is Autobiographical,” Murray suggests that all writing is autobiographical because even when the author has no intention of putting details of their own life in it they still end up include stuff from their own life experiences.  Murray asks us to reconsider how we look at writing and to realize that in everything we write we include something about ourselves that distinguishes our work from others.   This applies to what we have been discussing about Wikipedia because even though Wikipedia and all encyclopedias’ are supposed to be objective sources.  But according to Murray whenever someone is writing they reveal something about themselves through their writing. Personal bias can easily be included without the author realizing it.  If the author has a pre-determined notion of what their writing about the article can still come out one sided even though the author is trying to be objective.

Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents

In the article Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents, Davie defines a rhetorical situation as, "a set of related factors whose interaction creates and controls discourse."  I take this to mean that basically one or more people get together to communicate/discuss to modify another persons written work or speech. There are three constituents of a rhetorical situation and they are exigence, audience, and constraints of the situation.  Exigence is the problem that needs to be solved. Audience is the person or persons trying to resolve that problem and the constraints are the things that affect the ability for the audience to solve the problem.  Davie defined a compound rhetorical situation to be " the discussion of a single subject by multiple rhetors and audiences."  In other words a compound rhetorical situation is where more than one person is trying to modify the work.
As a college student it is important for us to be aware of rhetorical situations and the constraints it creates because being able to identify rhetorical situations will make us better writers.  By being able to recognize rhetorical situations it makes me better able to present my argument clearly and concisely to the audience that it is intended for.

The Phenomenology of Error

In "The Phenomenology of Error," Joseph M. Williams argues that writing errors should be seen as "social constructs."  A social construct is a perception of an individual, group, or idea that is constructed through cultural or social practices.  Williams feels that people should see what most perceive as errors in writing to be more of an adaptation of English.   English should grow and adapt to fit the needs and everyday uses of the people who speak and use it. What used to be considered improper English is no longer seen as improper English in everyday conversations.  Only in an academic setting such as a paper, journal, or article does it become scrutinized.  He also pointed out that everyone makes errors, but when someone such as EB White makes a mistake that he scrutinizes other peoples work for no one says a thing because he must know what he’s doing and if he writes it that way it must be correct.  So some works get picked over with a fine tooth comb while other skate by without really being closely reviewed.  This is why many people have such a bad view of Wikipedia.  Even though it has relatively the same number of errors that Britannica has it is seen in a bad light.  This is because Wikipedia can be changed and written by anyone and Britannica is only written by very educated scholars.  So Wikipedia is more highly criticized and examined than Britannica; Even though a study found them both to be equally reliable.

Introduction

Welcome to my blog I am writing this blog for my English 308J course with Matt Vetter.

My name is Ashley Angelo.  I am the oldest of three. My hometown is Canton, Ohio.   I love playing sports, especially soccer.   I am currently a senior majoring in Computer Science here at Ohio University.  My experience in English 151 was pretty good, it wasn’t a hard class.   As long as you wrote all the papers you were supposed to it wasn’t hard to do well in the class.  By far the worst part of that course was being forced to read the book Cion, which I found to be quite dull.  What would make that class better is if we would be able to write more about subjects that interest us.  I hope to be able to do well and get an A in this course, but every time I have to take an English course I always worry that I’ll struggle because I don’t consider myself to be a good writer.  I find it to be especially hard for me to come up with coherent and well flowing thoughts.  And a big part of my problem is I always procrastinate because I find it quite difficult to start my papers, it’s not too bad usually after the first or second paragraph, but it’s difficult for me to start writing.  For some reason because of this I find the only thing that helps me to get the first few paragraphs and then the whole paper is having the time crunch of having to get it done before class the next day.