Month: October 2018

https://medium.com/@cmcdevitt_94561/literacy-narrative-446bc3208ee9

 

Kayla

The biggest thing that I found in her Narrative was the victim narrative.  She has a bit of the victim narrative because the teacher that she had made her and all of her classmates feel very bad about all of the writings that they had been doing.  She says, “Then I got to high school and every bit of confidence that I had about writing was stripped.”  The narrative shows the victim narrative because it is about someone’s confidence being ruined by a teacher.

Sam

Sam’s literacy narrative seems to have a direction towards success narrative.  He says that he didn’t know how to write a story, but then his teacher showed him how he could.  He says, “Write… What the heck is that?  She handed each of us a piece of paper, telling us to write a story.  I had known stories from my grandmother reading them to me before bed, but I didn’t have any clue where to start on this assignment.”  He was clearly just starting school and he had no clue what he was doing.  He then was able to write a story about playing pond hockey with some of the greats.  The narrative shows us the concept of a success narrative because it shows the author going from mostly illiterate to being able to write a story and share it with his peers.

Hannah

Hannah’s story was a really hard one to read.  I have never had to deal with a loss like hers before, but I can only imagine how hard it must be for a family.  I would consider the narrative that she wrote to be a hero narrative above anything else.  She took her brothers passing and used it as motivation to write the best thing that she could, and there is a lot of pride that can be gained from that.  She said in the last paragraph of her narrative that, “I believe that this assignment made me both a stronger person and writer.”  This narrative shows that hardships create stronger people.

Blake

Blake wrote a story that was incredibly complimentary of a mentor from his past.  He wrote a narrative about how his second grade teacher, Mrs. Johnson, helped him to become a better writer and see his full potential.  I would say that this most relates to the point of a good mentor.  He says, “I see now it was because she was holding me to a higher standard because she knew I had the ability to succeed in my work, but I would rush through it and not worry about it.”  This shows that the mentor he had was very good and helpful in giving him a good start.

Part 1

Reflecting on revision – Paper 2

My intro paragraph went through a lot of changes, from the first sentence all the way down to my thesis.  My intro sentence in my first paragraph went into too much detail before actually letting the reader know what it was I was going to be talking about.  In addition, my thesis was changed from focusing only on one paper, and turned into a focus upon many different papers.  In addition to this, I changed my conclusion a ton as well.  I had to add a lot more to my conclusion than anything else.  It went from a very brief conclusion to more of a good ending to a paper.

 

Part 2

 

Original

When studying James Gee’s Building Tasks, you see how much his study on Discourse impacts his writing as a whole.  In the readings that we have had in class, the Discourse of science is considered to be the most important. We especially saw this in Haas’s article, because she was studying a biology student.  The article by Nair and Nair also had a lot to do with science discourse, but it was more focused on a different area of natural science as Haas. When looking in a paper for building tasks, the best way to find them is to follow the IMRaD cheat sheet, which showed in a lot of ways exactly how to find and define one of the seven building tasks.  I believe that the IMRaD paper format is quite important when studying a literary work that uses the discourse of social and natural sciences.

Revised

In class the last few weeks, we have been studying the works of James Gee.  James Gee is a scholar who studies Discourse, and we have been working on understanding the different nuances in language.  When we studied his “Building Tasks,” we saw that there were different areas of Discourse that we could look at to strengthen our writing.  The works that we have been working with the most have been about the Discourse of science.  In “Nair and Nair, Haas, and the IMRaD cheat sheet.  When analyzing the three readings, it is clear that there is some amount of importance ingrained in science Discourse.  The seven building tasks can help to study and understand Discourse.  Overall, I believe that the IMRaD paper format is quite important when studying a literary work that uses the discourse of social and natural sciences.

 

1. We have been study the works of James Gee for a while.  I am very familiar and able to explain his idea on Discourse because we have gone over it so much.  In my intro paragraph, I need to better explain the paper before jumping right into Gee, but I can use Gee to strengthen my argument.
2. I think that the quotation sandwiches that I’ve been making have been pretty strong.  I’ve been trying to support my points with a lot of textual evidence in order to make my paper stronger.
3. My conclusion paragraph is definitely my weakest paragraph, so the most important thing for me to do is strengthen that paragraph.
4. I believe that my analysis of science Discourse tells us that there is a lot of unique language regarding science.  There is gargon that makes science Discourse somewhat harder to learn than other discourses.

Chris McDevitt

10/11/18

English 110 J

When studying James Gee’s Building Tasks, you see how much his study on Discourse impacts his writing as a whole.  In the readings that we have had in class, the Discourse of science is considered to be the most important. We especially saw this in Haas’s article, because she was studying a biology student.  The article by Nair and Nair also had a lot to do with science discourse, but it was more focused on a different area of natural science as Haas. When looking in a paper for building tasks, the best way to find them is to follow the IMRaD cheat sheet, which showed in a lot of ways exactly how to find and define one of the seven building tasks.  I believe that the IMRaD paper format is quite important when studying a literary work that uses the discourse of social and natural sciences.

The seven building tasks that Gee writes about are, significance, practices, identities, relationships, connections, and sign systems and knowledge.  These building tasks are the backbone of importance when analyzing or writing a scholarly article or literary paper. Significance is what a person would find important with a paper, and a really great quote that we went over in class that shows significance is,

“Experts within scientific domains, then, draw upon rich representations of discourse as a social and rhetorical act, what geisler has called socially configured mental models, as they create and interpret texts and as they judge the validity and usefulness of the information within them” (Haas 45)

This quote shows an example of significance because it shows that there needs to be both validity and usefulness in order for information to be important, or hold significance, in a paper.  Practices are what a member of the science Discourse does that makes them different from people that haven’t joined the Discourse. While reading Nair and Nair, there was one quote about practices that appeared to be very strong.  The article said, “Do not go into an extensive literature review; two to four most relevant and recent citations should be adequate to corroborate a statement. Do not repeat well-known facts nor state the obvious (Nair and Nair 18)”.  This is considered a practice because it showing something that a person would only know to write if they are a member of the Discourse. Gee’s research on Discourse shows that there is different varieties of circumstances when being a Discourse can show.

The Building Tasks that I found most important in relation to the Discourse of Science is the Building Tasks of relationships and connections.  These two are very important to the Discourse of Science because social and natural science are based off the relationships between different people and different animals, or just between different atoms or molecules.  A great example of relationships is, “Acknowledging or attempting to understand these elements of discourse-constructing a rhetorical frame which includes authors, readers, motives, relationships, and contexts-is what I call the process of rhetorical reading” (Haas 48).  This is a good example of relationships because it is a direct relationship between reader and writer, and an indirect relationship between writer and reader. In addition to that, a great example of a connection in one of the papers we read was, “She had come to a greater awareness of the rhetorical, contingent nature of both the activities and discourses are participated in within her chosen field, biology” (Haas 46).  This quote is a good example of connections because it connects practices with significance in a wonderful way.

The IMRaD Cheat Sheet is actually an acronym, which stands for “Introduction and Importance, Methods, Results, and Discussion.”  Introduction and importance can be seen as making a case for new research. It is how you are supposed to entice a reader and tell them about the topic if the article.  The methods are sometimes described as what someone does. It is the way that a scientist may have conducted their research or created their hypothesis. The results are the findings of a study, or what the experimentation upon the hypothesis led to.  Finally, the discussion is where the scientists go from the results. There is a lot of discussion about whether or not the experiment was well made, whether or not it needed to be studied over again, or whether the results were even correct. The interesting part about science Discourse is that it is very straight and to the point, which is a lot different from English or History Discourse.  

When structuring a scientific paper of my own, I would use the IMRaD method to help my paper have good flow and make sense.  The way that Carnegie Mellon made a cheat sheet which even had percentages on how much of each type of writing needed makes things so much easier.  IMRaD says that a paper needs to have “25% of space on importance of research, 25% of their space on what you did, 35% of space on what you find: this is the most important part of the abstract, and 15% of their space on the implication of the research.”  When reading a scholarly article, you should be able to see these elements alive in the paper, rather than just trying to force them into place.

The paper that showed off science Discourse the most out of everything we’ve read in class is the Haas paper.  Haas’s study of Eliza showed a lot about how difficult it was for someone not in the Discourse of science trying to join it.  When she first began her college journey, she was almost completely out of the discourse, and did not understand many of the scientific articles that she was tasked to read.  She tried to mushfake it in the discourse, but it didn’t work out very well for the first year or two of her education. However, when she was surrounded by other people who were in the Discourse for a long time, she began to acclimate to the lingo.  Four years into Haas’s study of her, Eliza was a member of the Discourse of science.

Gee’s study of Discourse can be translated into studying the work of Haas.  Haas’s study was about a girl becoming immersed in the Discourse of science over the four years of her achieving her undergraduate degree.  Gee’s building tasks of connections and relationships seem to play the largest part in studying science Discourse.  Science has a lot to do with the relationships between two things or the way an ecosystem or an atom or a compound are connected.  When studying biology, the relationships within an ecosystem are incredibly important to learn about.  The nuances in science Discourse vary greatly based on who you are learning from and the part of science that you are learning about.  There are some terms in science Discourse that are common throughout all of science tho, such as hypothesis or research or study.  These are the type of things that Haas observed Eliza learning about right in front of her eyes.

English 110J

Science Discourse is a very interesting form of language.  There is a whole lot of vernacular that is exclusive to the Discourse.  Gee talks a lot about Discourse in both of the papers that we read from him, and it seems as if there is a lot of small nuances based off the Discourse of particular study.  In Gee’s Building Tasks section of reading, he brings up the seven building tasks that need to be studied.  All of the building tasks that he brought up can be related back to how a group of individuals as a whole study science Discourse.  One crystal clear example of science Discourse that I have experienced in my life was when I had to explain to a professor visiting from China what a hemocytometer was.  She was a science professor back in China, but her english was very spotty, so I found myself having to explain many words to her when I was paired with her in my lab.  But back to the point, a hemocytometer is a tool that grids small amounts of space under a microscope, and is key for cell counting.  That is something only people in the science Discourse would know.

English 110J

1. When Haas says “At the college level, to become literate is in many ways to learn the patterns of knowing about, and behaving towards, texts within a disciplinary field,”  she is saying that literacy is not something easy to achieve.  At the college level, literature becomes much more dense and harder to understand, so students in college must work much harder to become literate in a certain discourse.
2. The myth about autonomous texts is that they really exist, when in reality, texts that are strictly autonomous aren’t really a thing.  People don’t write literature or other works just for someone else, without any background knowledge of anything at all.  All texts are influenced by something outside.
3. Haas’s study of Eliza shows that throughout the four years that it takes to get an undergraduate degree, a student’s understanding of literature would likely increase.  The student would become much more well versed in what they are studying than when they had started as a freshman.  All students come to college to learn and become smarter, especially in the major that they chose, and during their 4 years, they will become much more knowledgeable than they were before.
4. When Haas uses the term “rhetorical frame,” she is referring to an author’s effort to understand why people write how they write.  That’s kind of the way I explained it when we talked about it in writing lab, and the professor agreed with me.  It is a dumbed down version of what the dictionary definition is, but it is actually a fairly accurate depiction of what rhetorical frame is.
5. Gee and Haas share a lot of points of view, like how someone can acquire a discourse by assimilation and apprenticeship.  Haas says that a student becomes more well versed in scientific writing based on the amount of time that they spend studying scientific writing.  Gee says that people can join a secondary Discourse by spending time in a school or work place.  That’s where their views come together.
6. ENG110J