Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice

in the introduction both Swales and Gee give their viewpoints on what a discourse community is. Swales is a lot more lenient on what it means to be a part of a discourse community. he says that someone can be involved with a discourse community but not necessarily be a member of that community. Gee is pretty much the opposite. he says that someone cannot float between groups. and if they do they are mushfakes.

Johns talks about how people are born into some discourse communities and they have the ability to chose others that they would like to be a part of. she also says that discourse communities shouldnt really be called that but instead be called communities of practice.

Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics

He is talking about how we must be able to do certain tasks or have certain skills before we are allowed to move up to the next "level" in learning a discourse.

In my high school language classes (French) we had 4 areas of learning. Reading, writing, speaking and listening. we had to keep a B or better in each of these areas in order to not only pass the class but also be able to go on to the next level. if you did not keep your grade up to that level you were required to retake the class.

The Future of LIteracy

I think that i most relate to Brittney Moraski. Just like her family, i grew up knowing that education had an unspoken importance. I knew from a very young age that i was expected to go to college. her parents reading choices are very similar to my parents. my mom would always be reading novels and my dad read magazines and the newspaper every day. just like Brittney i relied on friends for my access to a computer. although we had computers at school, i spent the most time on computers at my friend Jessie's house or at the library. We did not get a computer at home until i was in high school. by the time we got a computer at home i was very literate. i used our home computer but knew enough at that point in my life that i didnt really learn much more from our personal computer.

Literacy Sponsors

My biggest literacy sponsors are my family and school.

My family has always been very into reading and everything that goes along with it. my mother began reading to me when i was a baby and read to me until i was able to read to her. She believed that it was very important to be able to read. School has obviously been a big sponsor. I remember in kindergarten, my teacher would read to the class but also read one on one with us. it was always very exciting to be able to have that one on one reading time with my teacher and i always felt very proud of myself that i could read to her. she did an amazing job of encouraging me to read and gave praise out often when i read well. both my family and school gave me academic literacy.

i think that the access that these two groups provided was more than adequate. because of these two groups i now enjoy reading everything i can get my hands on.

i cant really think of any literacy that i was denied. i think my parents did an amazing job of exposing me to different literacy and experiences. my school was very liberal and they were amazing at teaching me about different people and cultures and to that point literacy.

Project 2

When finding information for a research project or even information on something that I find interesting I generally look at Wikipedia first. This usually happens because it is the first link that shows up when I Google something. I also use Wikipedia first because I know that the information that is listed in the various articles will be well organized and easy to understand.

To begin with I thought that project 1 would be a piece of cake. How hard could it be to find some sources and write some words on a new topic? I ended up finding that this project was harder than I anticipated but the whole process ended up being kind of fun.

I started off local and discovered that Fox Lake near my house was not on Wikipedia. This seemed like an amazing topic at the time and I dove into finding resources for information on the lake. To begin with I found lots of information and quickly put together a draft of an article. Using the code from Stroud’s Run state park my article looked pretty good.

After using all the information that I could get from a State of Ohio website I realized that that was all the information that was out there on the lake. All the other websites had taken information of the State of Ohio website, sometimes word for word, and used it in their webpages about the lake.

This became a roadblock. I only had 350 words and no more information that I could find on the lake. I tried my hardest to search for more information but came up with nothing. There just wasn’t enough going on at this location for anyone to write anything new or unique. I knew that something had to be done and with just a few days before the due date I changed topics.

Although I had some of the same problems with finding unique information on different websites, I was able to find much more information on my new topic, Camp Akita. Because it was a better-known place there was even a Columbus Dispatch article about it.

Once I began to write I found this article a lot easier to write. Because I knew a lot about Camp Akita I was able to add a bit to the information provided and was able to make sure that anyone that read my article would understand the information and get a feel for the camp.

At the end it seemed like a mad dash to get the article done. I was able to write the article quickly but getting all the code put together and making sure that when it was posted that it looked good took time. I didn’t originally anticipate that putting in all the code and links would take so much time so I felt hurried in the end.

It was nice that we had lab time towards the due date so that we could talk to our classmates and ask them questions about code and layout that they had already figured out. That was a huge help and made my page look a lot better and flow really well.

My article is still up and it does not seem like it will be taken down in the near future. I thought that this was a very worthwhile project. I have never worked on a paper like this and I think it helped open my eyes to a different world of information. I was always told that Wikipedia is unreliable and I believed it but now I feel different about the website. I am now able to trust the information that I find on it and although I do not think I will be listing it as a reference for an academic paper I will definitely use it in my daily research as a reliable source.

I definitely learned how to better summarize information by doing this project. This project helped me to take the information that I was reading on various websites and put it together into one coherent document. I really had to focus on the information that I was reading and change it so that it was in my own words without merely copying word for word from my sources.

I didn’t do much quoting in this piece of writing but I did think hard about where direct quotes would go. I also made sure that I wasn’t using too much quoted information because I wanted the article to be in my voice and not the voice of the writers that wrote the references that I used.

The book Writing About Writing says that tone is “a reader’s judgment of what a text sounds like, sometimes also termed the dominant mood of a text” (733). I wanted to make sure that when I was writing this article that I had a grip on my tone. I wanted to make sure that my tone was kept very informative without sounding boring or like a lecture.

I learned even more that writing is intertextual or that “texts are made up of other texts” (WAW 726). In order to write this article I had to take information from other places. I did rewrite the information and make it mine as much as I could but really there is no way to truly do that when writing a research piece.

Wikipedia is changing information and the way that we receive it. You can type just about anything into Google and the 1^st website that comes up is almost always Wikipedia. I don’t think there are any other websites that can claim that. This makes Wikipedia accessible to anyone that has the internet.

Because Wikipedia is free, anyone can use it. If you were to buy a printed encyclopedia such as Britannica, you could end up spending hundreds of dollars on something is practically the same as the free Wikipedia. I think that having Wikipedia is a huge advantage for everyone, not only students. Wikipedia makes information available to the masses that in the past would have only been available to academics or those with access to libraries that carried encyclopedias.

I know that professors tend to look down upon Wikipedia but I believe they do this because they do not know that Wikipedia is just as reliable as Britannica. Both encyclopedias have mistakes including actual errors, omissions and misleading statements. When it comes to numbers they are almost the same. “All told, Wikipedia had 162 such problems, while Britannica had 123. That averages out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia” (cnet).

Wikipedia makes it possible for everyone to add to their knowledge of the world. It provides a very accessible place for people to not only receive new information but also share the information that they have.

I truly enjoyed writing this article and plan on checking on it periodically to make sure that it is still posted on Wikipedia and to see if anyone has edited it. As new information comes in I plan on adding to my article to make sure that it is always up to date and correct. Although this projects was more complicated than I originally anticipated I am glad that I got the opportunity to write for such an amazing database. I hope that other people will be able to learn how valuable Wikipedia is.

References:

Wardle, Elizabeth, and Doug Downs. Writing About Writing: A College Reader. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. Print. 

Terdiman, Daniel. “Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica.”  Cnet News. CBS Interactive, 2011.  http://news.cnet.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html                                                                                       

Shitty First Drafts

Lamont's assumption is that established writers are able to sit down every morning and write amazing pieces that only take one draft and are perfect the first time. that they dont need to re write anything because the first draft is a perfect piece of writing. i think that it is prevalent because as the reader we dont get to see the behind the scenes parts of the writing process. all we see is the finished process so we assume that that was the first draft and that it came out of the writers brain exactly how it is on the page. the actual process of writing is writing a quick first draft to get everything on paper. then going back and tweaking the paper to add and cut items to make it better. then go back at least one more time to finish up the paper and make sure that everything is where it should be.

Wikipedia allows us to access the shitty first drafts through the view history tab. i think this is helpful because it allows the reader to see exactly where the piece of writing has been and where it started. it lets us see the shitty first draft that in other mediums we would not be able to see.

Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision

I think that the revision that is closest to what i do is "fixing things". i tend to write an entire piece before going back and "tinkering" with it until it is complete. or as complete as i can make it and feel somewhat satisfied. when i write i try to get straight to the point without adding too much extra. so it is not often that i need to use "cutting" in my writing. but some times i do find that there are pieces of my writing that need taken out so that the point that i am trying to make can become clearer.

when looking at the tabs in an article we can learn where that article has been and what has happened to it in its past. we get so see how it all started and the steps that people took to get it where it is today. we also get to see how people feel and interpret the article. they enrich our understanding because we get to see the background of the article that we usually dont get to see in writing. we get to see the whole process from start to finish.