Today’s Plan:
- Let’s Take a Second to Nerd Out
- Discourse Communities and Writing Groups
- Norming: Looking at Proposals
- Homework
Nerd Out
Feedback to the Community Discourse Assignment
Comment One:
Ok, let me be frank. Climate change is not a controversy. No one who is actually a scientist would argue that climate change isn’t real. Second, you are laying out more of an academic research project. This is the kind of project that would work well in English 123.
I see that you are concerned about the environment. So let’s think about where people write about current environmental issues. Here’s something you might want to try: Google starbucks plastic straw ban. See where that leads you. Or Google Trump to lift coal regulations. See where that leads you. Find something people argue about.
Comment Two:
My spider sense is tingling a bit here. I like the articles you summarize in the paragraph–especially the Banks-Santilli piece. That is recent. But for this class to work, you would have to find something to put in conversation with that piece–an article that either explicitly dismisses her idea, or one that argues for another, bigger, struggle that students face.
Does that make sense? Are these articles clearly speaking to other articles? Can you map a conversation?
Comment Three:
Hmm. This might not work.
You are outlining a topic more than identifying a community. What I mean is that these are stand alone articles. They aren’t responding to a specific event that people care about.
This will make it harder for you to write timely pieces in which people are debating each other. Compare what you have here to this article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/?utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-fb-test-321-2-&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social
That article just came out. I can almost guarantee that someone will write a response to it in the next few days.
Stay away from the generic “How to succeed in college pieces” and look for more argumentative stuff. If you aren’t sure how to tell the difference, come to office hours and we can carve out a reading list.
I’m all for people writing about education, but I want to make sure you are reading stuff that’s going to spur good writing.
Discourse Communities and Writing Groups
Your discourse community is where you will be writing out there on the wild, wild, net. Your writing group is who you will be working with in here.
Let’s talk.
Homework
Read They Say, I Say pages pages 19-41 (Chapter One, “They Say: Starting with What Others Are Saying.” I want you to use a template from pages 24-25 to write a paragraph introducing your relationship to your chosen activity/discourse community. This paragraph will contribute to your Proposal (which I will formally introduce in Monday’s class).
Then I want you to read pages 30-41. I want you to write a paragraph that concisely summarizes an article that somehow relates to your first paragraph. Perhaps it expresses a similar idea. Perhaps it changes your thoughts or introduces you to something you haven’t thought about before. Whatever. What is important is that you open the paragraph introducing a summary (see pages 39) (i.e., “Susan Miller asserts that Forsaken will provide us the Destiny 2 we have been waiting for. She argues X. She also points out Y. Finally, she concludes that Z. I agree with Miller/I disagree with Miller/I have mixed feelings about Miller. One the one hand, I’m looking forward to X but think Z will stink because it reminds me of this other game that stinks.” Please note that filling out X, Y, and Z might take a lot of words and sentences.
Think up a suitable pseudonym for your writing. If you need help.
