Today’s Plan:
- Group Share
- Review Try This! Assignment
- Worknet: Bibliographic Pass
- For Next Session
Group Share
Ten minutes on the clock. Share with your group mates one of the key terms you pulled from your article. Yes, I know you have all read different articles. Now we are testing to see if key terms appear across articles, if we can start to identify disciplinary vocabulary.
For those who completed 122, academic disciplines are highly specialized discourse communities, and most have developed very complex and nuanced vocabularies. I’m a video gamer, and as such have a pretty developed gaming vocabulary including terms like “meta,” “PvE,” “GG,” “DPS,” “carry,” “power creep,” “nerf,” and “lfg,”(which means something very different than how professional athletes use LFG!!!”). Academic disciplines are similar in that each one has its own vocabulary used by insiders, and given the sophistication of these vocabularies, it can be disorienting to new comers.
Review Try This! Assignment
Let’s take a look at the assignment.
As I’ve said in the email, the goal of this assignment is to help you develop strategies for dealing with those specialized (and at times obtuse and arcane) vocabularies you will discover in your chosen field. Whatever the field, you are going to come across specialized language and terms. Even in the field I’ve been studying for 25+ years, I come across new terms with which I am unfamiliar.
The worknet is Derek Mueller’s approach to helping initiates familiarize themselves with research in their field, and with reading professional disciplinary research. I like the way that Mueller starts with vocabulary because it is something specific we can target; the goal here is to provide strategies that help you feel more confident when reading texts that will likely make you feel overwhelmed or anxious.
Monday’s assignment simply asked you to identify some key terms and attempt, based on context and prior knowledge, to define them. Now we want to dig a bit deeper. Let’s look at the follow-up assignment from the book (page 48):
For Next Session
For homework, I’d like you to select two terms. I want you to research each term. For each of them:- Look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary. To easily do this, you should use a computer on campus (I recommend the 1240 lab downstairs or the library), because you’ll want to be logged into the OED (see top-right corner). Don’t just look at the result page, make sure you are looking at the whole entry. Check the etymology, scroll through some of the historic definitions, get a sense of how the word has traveled.
- Search for your word in Google Scholar. Make your search something like: [term] and [discipline or context]. For instance, procedural rhetoric and video games. Or: pedagogy and college writing. Scroll through the responses and get a sense for how that word shows up in the titles of research articles. After you have done both searches for a term, take about 10 minutes and write about 100-200 words defining the term and describing its use. Do this for two terms (so 200-400 words of writing). In the computer lab on Friday, I’m going to walk you through setting up a work log Google Doc. All the work you do for the next 6 weeks will take place in that document. The first two assignments will be these two Try This assignments (the first semantic sweep to identify terms and this follow-up to dig into them some more).
