Post 8 The Future of Literacy

Visual and technical literacies are the main focus of my post high school education. Classes and hours of slaving away on a computer just "winging it" with photoshop have taught me how to create images that can effectively communicate my point of view or image. I did not have much formal schooling in photography or photoshop in high school, so mostly anything I did was on my own, or found on the internet. I thought I had a good enough grip on photography to give it a go and try it as my career. Once I was accepted to Ohio for photography (after an extensive interview and portfolio review), I realized that I knew nothing about the real language of visual literacy. Art History classes mainly educated me formally on the "language" of visual literacy, and how to recognize and create pieces with meaning or messages. For me this is most important in visual literacy or literacies of the future. People must be able to recognize the artists or creators intended meaning in a visual piece, or there is no point in creating art in the first place. My higher level photography courses including fashion, studio techniques, and still life gave me an even greater "visual vocabulary" for crating pieces of visual literature. At this point in my life, I believe I am finally "literate" in photography and am ready to enter the real world and start composing and sharing my work.

Post 7 Sponsors of Literacy

Brandt's idea that sponsors always have something to gain from teaching literacy is an interesting and new way to look at how and why we became literate. I believe her claim that the sponsors always have something to benefit has a lot of logical points that one may not always consider. Her point that a nation can benefit from its citizens being literate would prove that the "sponsors" of literacy would want to have as many literate citizens as possible, but this is not the case in all situations. Sponsors can control the lexicons of information available to the masses and inherently control public knowledge and influence public involvement. The point she mentions on how the professional world now requires new forms of literacy also backs this idea that sponsors have a lot to benefit from teaching literacy. It is now possible for employers to hire and choose applicants solely based on written resumes and cover letters that rely heavily on literacy. Employers can benefit and hire more literate people by using a selection process that measures one's level of literacy. She uses the case of Lowery to show how Unions (the sponsors of literacy at hand) could use funded programs that taught literacy in that field to shape union driven policies of that time and force popular opinion toward anti-communist ideals.

Wikipedia Reflection

Porter's piece on intertextuality can be applied to the wikipedia process and website, and the idea of intertextuality is critical for online encyclopedias to exist. The construct Porter describes, intertextuality, or the idea that all text is borrowed from previous writer's work, is crucial in creating an online encyclopedia that uses hyperlinks, and needs credible, well cited information. When one is researching a wikipedia article to develop they most often turn to other books on the topic that have already been published. By doing so, one could say that any edits made to a wikipedia page using information from another source could be called plagiarism. If one simply copies and pastes information to a wikipedia page, that can be labeled plagiarism, but this can be avoided by understanding the text you are citing and re-wording the information in a useful way so that it applies to the wikipedia page you are trying to expand on.  Wikipedia could not exist if this construct had not been broken down in the last few years of our writing career. Porter comments on how the opening portion of The Declaration of Independence was taken fromt he ideas of another author, and we do not consider this great piece of American literature to be plagiarism. These ideas on intertextuality are archaic, and in the extremely interconnected world we live in today we thrive off of intertextuality and the "borrowing" of ideas to create our own new social trends and ideas. Porter's idea of a discourse community is also very prevalent in the wikipedia community as well. The idea of a wiki being a collective effort of many sources creates a community of people who are similarly interested in a topic. This is exactly what Porter calls a discourse community. You can bet that anything you put on that community's favorite wikipedia is going to be highly scrutinized and edited for error, due to the involvement of a highly interested discourse community. The definition Porter gives us in Writing about Writing is a perfect definition of wikipedia. He states "A "discourse community" is a group of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated." Wikipedia provides that regulation for the discourse community by setting out a list of guidelines for editing. These guidelines state that when editing a wiki you must be objective and non-biased and also that you write in an encyclopedic style. Although there is no main moderator for the entire online encyclopedia the discourse community of that page will quickly notice any bias and remove your edit. Wikipedia is interesting, because the discourse community is the one doing the regulation of their own articles. For my wikipedia edit, I created a new page on a very niche style of music. Although the entire world can now access this article, I am willing to bet not many people will, and therefore a very small discourse community is present. Although there is no discourse community on wikipedia (yet), there is a very large community of people posting about Seapunk on the popular blogging website Tumblr. Although tumblr is not an encyclopedic website, it could be a good place to go to get some conversation going on the wikipedia page, since there are other people interested in this very niche style of music. The main focus of this piece is that wikipedia is a great place to get scholarly conversation started on any article you have an interest in, no matter how obscure. Purdy presents the notion that wikipedia is based on revision and idea development. This makes writing on Wikipedia much less intimidating or daunting of a task, since you are writing for the entire online community to see. Purdy also mentions how wikipedia's development is based on conversation. This creates a very positive and forward thinking attitude towards the development of a scholarly article on a collective website like wikipedia. By taking the focus off of credibility and putting the emphasis on the access to reliable sources and factual information wikipedia has enabled anyone with access to a library to contribute to a scholarly article. There are many features of Wikipedia that make it very easy to see what other people wrote about the topic, or what people are saying about the topic. The History page shows previous edits to that specific wikipedia article, and the discussion page lets people comment on the topic in a forum like setting. These tools make wikipedia feel more like a community than just a website for information. These aspects of wikipedia and the revision of wikipedia articles all represent intertextuality in the modern technological era.

Post 6: Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents

Keith Grant Davie does a very good job of explaining a very abstract and nebulous idea such as rhetoric. I have understood the idea of rhetoric since my freshman english class, but this article really cleared up many of the details I was unsure about like exigence and discourse. Grant-Davie defines rhetorical language as language that is trying to get someone to do something. Whether consciously or sub-consciously we use rhetoric to get our points across to others daily. Grant-Davie also uses a term unfamiliar to most, exigence. He explains that exigence is a need the can be addressed by communication. If I had a problem with an assignment I would simply express to you that I was struggling on the assignment, and as my audience, you would interpret my exigence and try to help. In this situation you are the audience, because you are the sole constituent who can fulfill the need presented by my exigence.

Post 5: Shitty First Drafts

Lamott's Shitty First Drafts is a great reminder that all great works of any kind of art start of as a draft, markup, or idea. Her central argument in the short piece is that no one is going to be able to write an award winning piece of work on their first try. EVER. She almost over emphasizes the necessity of a drafting process, but also brings up many good points for writers struggling with beginning a composition. Throughout the piece Lamott focuses on the idea of writing playfully and just for the sake of getting some ink on the paper. When you look at the origins of a wikipedia page many of them are created just for the sake of getting discussion and research on the topic going. Often times these starter pages are short, horribly written articles. Over time these short article evolve into full pages of credible information with sources, links, and images. This whole process can be viewed on wikipedia through the history tab of the page, and even the original article can still be viewed. This new technology of revision is crushing the old, concrete, published book with a new, constantly updatable form of multimedia information.

Post 4

In Murray's piece All Writing is Autobiographical, he challenges us to break one of the constructs that has been formed over years and years of schooling and English classes. This is the fact the we view non-fiction writing as being non-autobiographical, and the fact of the matter is that all of you writing is a compilation of our past experiences and the tiny things that make us who we are. Murray states "Well, that is academic writing, writing to instruct, textbook writing. It is clearly nonfiction, and to me it is clearly autobiography". Later on in the same paragraph Murray concludes this thought by mentioning "We make up our own history, our own legends, and our own knowledge by writing our autobiography". The point he makes clearly reinforces how what we write is a product of who we are, and that we must remember in order to make successful literary works we must remember to write autobiographically.

The Phenomenology of Error

William's text is highly effective at conveying a strong message on the topic of error. He states that error may not be as serious of a social infraction as many make it out to be. Often times a writer will state a grammatical rule, and then break it later in a text. He mentions this example to provide evidence that grammatical errors are often times unavoidable and very prevalent in every day speech, regardless of your level of grammatical expertise. Williams also brings up the point that when we are revising an essay if we are looking for grammatical errors we will almost always miss the message a writer is trying to convey. This essay was intended to be read my teachers and I think if more teachers focused on content rather than grammar students could benefit more from writing classes. This seems to be Williams indictment towards teachers of English and those who review or grade literary works. His point about reading unreflexively states that if this was practiced we would find fewer errors in a work and this would lead to a greater understanding and appreciation of the author's true reason for composing the text. He does not fully renounce the use of grammatical rules though, he states that one must still honor them, even though they often times lack what he calls "practical force". I agree with Williams point about revisions and thoroughly support a change in the way we look at texts with a focus on content instead of highlighting and condemning grammatical errors.

Writing is like...

For me, writing is like riding a bike in many different ways. When you haven't rode a bike in a long time, it can be a little scary to get back on for the first time. I find this to be the same for writing. After a long period of not writing it can be very overwhelming to have to write a ten or twelve page paper for a college class. Just like riding a bike though, once you start to get your balance and peddle you become more comfortable, and your riding skills (or writing skills) naturally come back. You remember some of the old tricks you could do after being on the bike for a few hours. While writing you begin to remember ways to make your writing more interesting for the reader. I have not been in a writing class since Freshman year, and that class seemed to focus more on reading literature and regurgitating analyses, which was not enjoyable. I am excited to focus more on the writing process and composition of my literary work.