Interesting stuff today! Your assignment is to read your magazine all the way through (if you have a super technical one, such the medical journals, you don't have to read every article. In fact, you won't be able to). Read it, annotate it, and then type out your responses to James Porter's forum analysis appendix. Bring that response to class on Tuesday, of course.
Now, I said that it was NOT OK to have people talk over your head. Of course people do it by accident sometimes just because they are specialists. But we talked today about developing a method for analyzing a piece as if it were a story or a sporting event (handout below).
There are four things to keep in mind when wrestling with a reading that comes from a discourse community that is not your own: you don't have to do it alone (hence, class); you can look for the storyline by attending to the heroes and villains of the piece; you can look to the context, format, and forum for information about the audience and motive of a piece; you can write as a way to make sense of the reading.
See you Tuesday.
DF
February 24, 2011
SUNY Cortland, Professional Writing, Rhetoric (PWR 399)
David Franke, Instructor
Reading “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford. In College Composition and Communication, Vol. 35, No. 2, May 1984.
Today’s thesis: It’s hard to read anything from outside your discourse communities. Unless you are part of the community, you don’t really know what they are saying – you don’t even always know the terms they are using or what the big deal is.
I have found that any article can be figured out if we approach it as is a story, one that’s being told from a particular point of view. I said somewhere that all writing tries to tell a story – even a recipe is a kind of story. Armed with this knowledge, we can get “inside” any text, even before we are full-fledged members of that community. Here are some strategies:
Context: "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked" is a very public story. It’s been published and distributed and read – and it involves other writers in a very public way. What is the discourse community this story is being told to? That is, if this article were a sports event, who would be sitting in the stands? What sort of affinities and attitudes would you have to possess to even attend this event?
Form: What are the sections in this article and what do they imply to you? What is the bibliography there for? How does it help prove Porter's point about intertextuality?
Intertextuality: James Porter said, basically, that new knowledge is a kind of sampling. Kanye West would be proud of Ede and Lunsford, I think, for they sample (and argue with) many writers. Who are they drawing from? What “sampling” are they doing? Usually that means quotes, but not always.
Players: Who are the major characters in this story? Who are the good guys and bad guys? How gentle or tough are they as they bump into the other side?
There are two kinds of villains here. Explain what they are called and what the are up to. Are we being asked to choose one villain over another?
Topic: What exactly are they fighting over? Why does this seem to matter to them? How do they have to re-define the topic to fit their needs?
Evidence: What sort of ammo is used against the villains to win this battle?
Specialization: How smart (that is, how much background knowledge) do the authors assume the people in the stands have? Give some examples of where they spoon feed us and some other examples of where they just assume we understand ideas, terms, or histories.
Unusual features: What’s unusual – perhaps even unique – about this particular article as opposed to others of they type or genre?
Ethics: Is this text good for you? Does it want you to know the truth? What does it assume you already believe to be interesting? What does it want you to do as their reader?
No comments:
Post a Comment