Response to "Building a Mystery": Alternative Research Writing...

One thing that I really liked about this article, and found different from the other pedagogical articles I've been assigned to read, is that the authors routinely quote creative writers: songwriters, novelists, poets. The authors valued writing as a whole, instead of separating different kinds of writing into neat little fields that shouldn't overlap, which I appreciated. Also, considering where we go to school, it was nice to have a quote from Donald Barthelme: "Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard novelists testify to the fact that, beginning a new book, they are utterly baffled as to how to proceed, what should be written and how it might be written, even though they've done a dozen..." (423). It reminded me of something that his brother, Frederick Barthelme, said recently in workshop--once you reach page 70 in a novel, it's all downhill. Of course, he knows, we all know, that writing is rarely easy, but things are more difficult at the beginning, when everything feels like "not-knowing."

There were a lot of things in the article that I found useful, and that made me think, though there were a few times at which I questioned the authors' tactics. For example, in the first paragraph, Davis and Shadle quote from 1982 survey. Considering that "Building a Mystery" was published nearly twenty years later, I found it a little suspect. I also found it somewhat unnecessary to to state all of the objections and criticisms to each of the alternative research writing methods that they discuss. If you ask students to write one kind of paper, it invariably excludes others. This isn't really a criticism.

There were so many great ideas here, however, that I feel a little badly for pointing out such small criticisms. This was my favorite: I LOVED the idea of the autoethnography, "where students interview three people about themselves, then affirm or rebut the comments" (434). If I asked three people questions about myself--say, my mother, one of my professors, and a friend from high school--I would get all sorts of contradictory thoughts about who "I" am. Which of these people am I really? And then, of course, I have ideas about myself, but if I wrote them down on a piece of paper, would anyone recognize the person I think I am, in my head? And if no one recognized me, what does this say? There are so many interesting questions here that I'm sort of dying to do one of these now. I was also really interested in the multi-genre/media/disciplinary/cultural research project, and the examples from the students at Eastern Oregon University. The authors referred to these examples early in the article, and I thought I was going to get to read one of these papers in their entirities, so I was a little disappointed. The students at Eastern Oregon seemed excited about, and invested in, their projects in a way that students generally don't while writing papers. I was particularly interested in Sherri Edvalson's "A Feminist Education for Barbie" and Michelle Skow's Japanese American Internment project. I'd love to read these.

Response to "Materiality and Genre..."

I thought this article was great for a number of reasons, and made me consider a lot of things I don't ordinarily think about. I was underlining and starring and making notes all over the place. I also disagreed with a few things, which I like because I often don't feel like I have enough knowledge about the things I read in Practicum to disagree. One of the things I had a "problem" with was Bawarshi's piece, about the Patient Medical History Form. Bawarshi states that "the genre is mainly concerned with a patient's physical symptoms [which] suggests that one can isolate physical symptoms and treat them with little to no reference to the patient's state of mind and the effect that state of mind might have on these symptoms" (551). As someone who has filled out these forms before, I disagree that the PMHF is "mainly concerned" with one's current physical symptoms. The forms (and there are a lot of them) ask all sorts of questions and get all sorts of information, and this has never struck me as the focus. There is also no reason that patients can't list mental as well as physical symptoms. Bawarshi states that "the forms tend to discourage patients' reporting of mental or emtional circumstances," though he failed to say how or why. I'm not sure what his point is, ultimately. Is he suggesting that patients shouldn't list their symptoms prior to seeing a doctor, that this should be done away with? What is the alternative? I guess this is ultimately a little off topic, but it just seemed like he had a lot of claims in this paragraph that he provided no evidence for.

The main thing that interested me while reading this article was language, and how different communities define words differently. On page 555, Mary Jo Reiff writes, "Since the main goal of an ethnography, according to Moss, is to gain 'increased insight into the ways in which language communities work' (170), it follows that the oral and written genres of groups will play a central role in the investigation of social context..." Last week, I tutored a student in 102 who was writing her discourse community paper on the tanning salon where she is employed. I was fascinated by the language of this community. The tanning beds were given names like Bahama Baby and Paradise Island, and were categorized according to Levels. For example, all of the employees used the Level One beds, which meant they were hardcore devotees. They ran two-for-one specials called "Bogos." Even the lotions they sold (pushed?) on customers had what I would call fun-in-the-sun names. I was so fascinated. The student had worked at the tanning salon for so long that she didn't realize laypersons wouldn't know what a "bogo" was, or that "light" and "fair" did not mean the same thing. We spent much of our session talking about properly defining terms so that her audience would understand what she was talking about. Words, in general, are tricky little things. They often have so many different meanings and connotations.

Along these same lines, I found it of interest that courts define "might" as "probable." Whenever I say I "might" go somewhere, it almost always means I won't.

I really enjoyed reading Devitt's piece, "Where Communities Collide: Exploring a Legal Genre." She writes, "What I discovered is that no matter how much I elaborated, no matter how many assumptions I made explicit, I could not capture in those instructions all the information that the lawyers considered relevant to the jury's task. Clarifying for the jury's purposes clashed with adhering to legal purposes" (545). While I was reading her piece, I could not help but thinking that the instructions were purposefully misleading, that jury instructions aren't really meant to be followed exactly as the lawyers write them. And then I read that the jury is actually asked to evaluate what terms like "great" and "serious" mean but (of course) "nowhere do the instructions say that" (546). I seriously doubt that lawyers would ever want other lawyers on their juries. They don't really want people to know what's going on; it seems like the system works, in large part, due to the ignorance of laypersons.

Anyway, lots of good stuff to think about...

Teachers Rhetorical Comments on Papers Response

I found this article interesting, and approached in a fair and unbiased manner. While the authors point out the harsh and authoritarian comments that teachers wrote on student papers ("This is just silly." "Throw away!"), they also pointed out the positive and encouraging remarks. Additionally, they noted that the teachers who graded these papers were more than likely overworked, with too many students and too little time/energy for all of them. When I first started reading this article, I was wary--braced for the overly harsh judgment towards composition teachers--but I was, alas, bracing myself for nothing. I feel like teachers, for the most part, do the best they can, and I felt like this was acknowledged throughout the article. There are easier and better paying jobs out there, and most of those who choose to teach for a living have other options.

A comment about the stats:
Even if most of the global comments were brief, I was impressed with the high percentage of papers with global or rhetorical comments: 77%. This was quite a bit higher than I would have suspected. There were other statistics I found curious, or surprising, for example that 25% of the papers had no grade on them.

I liked this quote:
"The primary emotion that they felt as they read through these teacher comments, our readers told us, was a sort of chagrin: these papers and comments revealed to them a world of teaching writing that was harder and sadder than they wanted it to be... (Connors and Lunsford 214). For some reason, this quote gave me a vivid picture of a thin, older woman with mussed hair and an ink mark on her cheek. She's single (probably divorced), and has cats and she eats cake for dinner sometimes. Perhaps she allows herself one cigarette a day. I feel like a sexist or something "ist" for admitting this, but this was the image I got.

I also liked the quote about the "...cryptic systems of numbers, fractions, decimals..." (Connors and Lunsford 209). Maybe it's the word "cryptic," but also the idea that a composition paper would ever need a fraction or a decimal. It would be interesting to see how the teacher arrived at such a precise number. Clearly, a teacher like this would have a system...