Final Portfolio!

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X. Thlog

Finals have arrived. Everything just seems so hectic and I've been feeling really swamped with work and studying (as I'm sure everyone has). But none-the-less, this is the final stretch so I've got to make it count! I have to say that this writing class been really bittersweet. It's been a long time since I've had a class longer than an hour long, so having to go to 2 hour class meetings two times a week was a change of pace. I'm pretty sad that this class is over though. I feel like we've all gotten to know each other on some level and there was a comfort of seen then same faces every week since it's been a while since I've had a small class.
Something I did really enjoy this past week was the google-doc'athon. It wasn't really interactive in that we all just sat at our computers and types away for a good portion of class, but it was nice being able to help my peers and receive some advice/suggestions in return. I got back some pretty helpful feedback so I'm thankful that we had this activity.
Sadly, I wasn't able to make it to our last class meeting (like seriously I don't miss a single day of class and shit has to happen on the last day to prevent me from going...really?) so I feel like I missed out on the last opportunity to see my classmates and say our "see-ya-laters".
I'm so ready to turn in my final portfolio and finally be done with all of these WPs, i feel like they've been haunting me this whole quarter. I'm so ready to turn in my final portfolio and finally be done with all of these WPs, i feel like they've been haunting me this whole quarter. I really just am not a writing person, so this class and this quarter were pretty tough. Writing is not, and never has been, my strong suit, so this class and this quarter were pretty tough, so I'm glad to be done with writing for a bit, and focus back on my major classes and get my grades back up. As writing classes go though, this was one of the best I've been in. Thank you for teaching us, Zack so many wonderful things and for making a kinda dreaded class a class that I can safely say I enjoyed!

WP3

Summary

In the article “Reading and Writing Without Authority” by Ann M. Penrose and Cheryl Geisler, the authors investigated how differences in authority are present in the academic world by comparing the article of Janet, a college freshman, to the article of Roger, a student completing his doctoral work in philosophy. Through their investigations, Penrose and Geisler demonstrate the importance of reading and writing rhetorically and discuss the importance of students seeing themselves as participants instead of observers in the construction of knowledge. They write that student’s lack of authority in their writing corresponds to their lack of previous knowledge about the subject and their inability to relate to the subject or issue being presented. Several times throughout the article, the authors relate their argument back to paternalism - a system under which people would be restricted from freedom of choice - and how Janet’s form of writing is “a handbook for potential paternalists” (Penrose & Geisler 516).

One of the main sections of this article titled “Teaching With Authority” argues for the importance of teaching in a way that “aims to encourage and value students’ individual voices in class discussion, conferences, and written feedback” (Penrose & Geisler 517). Penrose and Geisler write that in encouraging the development of authority students might mean restructuring the dynamics of the classroom in a way that allows for more even distribution of authority among the students and the teacher; possibly by allowing the students to “decide on the topics to be explored [and] concepts to be valued.

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Younger Audience Transformation

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Older Audience Transformation

Click here to see my blog post!

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Deanna Huynh

Zack De Piero

Writing 2

06 March 2016

Self-Analysis

We’ve come full circle. Just a few weeks ago we were learning about what a genre was and what rhetorical features and conventions of a genre were. Now, for this writing project, we were asked to apply the knowledge and understanding we have gained thus far about genres and their rhetorical features and conventions in order to create genres of our own by transforming a scholarly publication into two different genres: one for a younger audience and one for an older audience. In the comic Writing Identities, Elizabeth M. Losh and Jonathan Alexander state “Writing means always changing - changing to meet the needs of different audiences” ( Losh & Alexander 117), so in making these transformations, I made some literary ‘moves’ - different choices the author might have made…and what effect those different choices would have on readers” (Bunn 72) - that aimed toward creating appropriate genres that would be easily understood by a younger and an older audience respectively.

Club flyers are often taken for granted, but are a very prevalent part of high school culture. For the younger audience I wanted to create something simple, yet effective. This transformation was aimed towards an audience of high schoolers, typically age 14-18.

I decided to take the main concepts presented in the article “Reading and Writing Without Authority” and create a flyer for weekly writing workshops held by a high school writing club. The flyer that I created would typically be handed out on club days where different clubs on a particular campus gather together and promote their club and their club events. The purpose of these flyers is to captivate their audience, lead them to want to come out to the events being promoted, so the first move I was sure I wanted to carry out was making the flyer aesthetically pleasing and hopefully appealing. Although I wanted the flyer to be enticing, I did not put any colors on the flyer nor did I add a lot of pictures because I wanted to keep it simplistic. I felt that if I were to add a lot of decorations and color to the flyer, it would have look too cluttered and would have been hard to read. However, I did include small images related to the writing workshop that was being promoted on the flyer and a border around the workshop information to make the flyer look more amusing.

One convention of flyers is that there typically are not a lot of words on the flyer as they are small, thus I had to be cautious of what information I chose to present on the flyer. This corresponds to the idea presented in Scott McCloud’s comic “Writing With Pictures” of “choice of word” which expresses that provided certain constraints within a genre, it is important to “[pick] words that add valuable information” (McCloud 10) in order to provide clarity for readers. The key concepts that the flyer indicated are to be discussed during the workshops are drawn directly from the concepts presented in the article, and are presented with a positive connotation. I phrased each concept in a way that would lead the reader to believe that these are concepts they should want to learn and would enhance their writing skills. Typically when people are handed a flyers, they don’t spend copious amounts of time studying every last detail of the flyer, so it was important that the flyer be simple and that only the most important information - the time and location of the workshops, and basic information regarding the workshops - make it onto the design.

Blogs are generally a well-suited outlet for people to share ideas and opinions. I chose to transform the “Teaching With Authority” section of the article into a blog post for the older audience. The main focus of this transformation is the blog post “Allowing the Student To Become the Teacher” written by an educator, Ms. Kelsey Lee, and is intended for an audience of other educators. Just as I wanted with the flyer for the younger audience, I also wanted this transformation to have a simplistic, yet aesthetically pleasing and appealing look that would be captivating and easily understood by its audience. Before creating this blog, I looked through many other blogs to study the general conventions and rhetorical features of this genre. One of the conventions that I saw in other blogs that I replicated in my blog was the inclusion of bright colors and fun images. The image that I chose to include serves two purposes: the more obvious reason being to add color and liveliness to the post, and the more abstract reason being to elicit an emotional response from the audience because as McCloud writes, “an extreme stylistic choice can invest every moment of a story with an overriding mood” (McCloud 29).

Another big convention of blog posts is the way that the text is formatted. At the top of the blog there is the blog name itself that captures the idea of the blog as a whole, and next to that are different tabs that lead to pages containing different information. I began the blog post with a title meant to be enthralling to teachers, leading them to be interested in the remaining content of the post. Some of the ideas that I wanted to make sure the readers grasped were listed in bullet-point style. The use of the bulleted-list in this case indicates to readers that each new bullet point is a new idea, but ultimately all of the ideas fall under the same umbrella concept. Also because I was using the bullet-list, I decided to give each of the ideas a fun title to gain the reader’s interest and to make the ideas more memorable. At the end of the blog post was included a comment section for the audience to leave their feedback. The comment section is typically a way for the blog’s author to interact and connect with his or her audience and for the readers to interact with and share ideas with one another.

The post is written in a very casual and personal manner as generally, most blog posts are written with the intent of expressing thoughts and opinions. At the beginning of the blog post, I made sure to address the readers and greet them in a common and informal manner - calling them EdHeads - to create a familiar and affable ton, and at the end of the post, I again address them familiarly and send them off with good wishes and encouraging words to ensure the friendly environment. I also encouraged readers to utilize the comment section at the end of the post whether to post new ideas to to ask any questions they had about the post which would reinforce the feeling of familiarity.The entire post is written in “second-person” point of view because as it addresses the reader directly. According to Losh and Alexander, It is important to “engage [the] audience in a way that will invite them to be receptive to [the] message” (Losh & Alexander 150) and writing in the second person point of view and in a amiable and intimate manner is supposed to elicit a response from the readers - the other educators - that would lead them to want to implement this new teaching style in their classrooms that encourages the students to be active participants in class.

There are many conventions and rhetorical features that change from one genre to another in order to accommodate to the audience that the specific genre is intended for. Every writer must have the ability to recognize what conventions and rhetorical features are appropriate for each audience and adjust their writing according to what would be the most easily understood and the most appealing to that audience. If writers can learn to adjust their writing to the needs of their readers, they will have a much easier time expressing their ideas to their audience.

Works Cited

Bunn, Mike. “How to Read Liker a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. By Charles

Lowe and Pavel Zemilansky. Vol. 2. Anderson, South Carolina.: Parlor, 2011. 71-95. Print.

Losh, Elizabeth M., and Johnathan Alexander. “Writing Identities.” Understanding Rhetoric: A

Graphic Guide to Writing. 114-139. Print.

Penrose, Ann M and Cheryl Geisler. Reading and Writing Without Authority. 505-518. Print.

McCloud, Scott. “Writing with Pictures.” Making Comics. New York: Harper, 2006. 8-55. Print.

IX. Thlog

WP3 has been a bit of a struggle. I have tossed around several different ideas for my WP3 and it's been a constant battle wondering if my transformations are going to fully capture the ideas of the article. At first I really wanted to focus on the entire piece because I wanted to capture the idea of the entire article, but I realized that if I were to key in on specific parts of the article, I would better be able to capture the ideas presented and be better able to express the ideas in detail. Going into the peer review session, I had a pretty solid transformation completed for my older audience, and I was able to solidify my thoughts and ideas to complete my blog transformations, but I hadn't quite completed the transformation for the younger audience (and good thing I hadn't) because I realized during the peer revising that my transformation for the younger audience really didn't have a solid message being sent out to the younger audience nor did it make too much sense coming from the article I was using, so I realized that I should set out to find a new transformation idea for the younger audience.
The peer reviews that we did this week in class were helpful. Through the help of my peers I was able to solidify some of my ideas and change others that they helped me realize didn't make all that much sense for my transformations. It was nice being able to see other people's work/transformations as well because it helped me see how they were taking their article topics and transforming them, and I think it was just nice seeing how many different ideas people had. Adding onto that, I also really enjoyed reading other classmate's PB3As because again it was a good way to see this assignment from other people's perspectives and see what ideas they came up with. I also really liked that we had the opportunity to respond to each other's PB3As. Not only did reading the comments on my PB3A help me, but so did being able to read the comments on other PB3As because it helped me see what I should watch out for in my WP3 that may not have been mentioned on my PB3A comments.

PB3A

For my PB3A, I am using the article titled Reading and Writing Without Authority by Ann M. Penrose and Cheryl Geisler. The authors investigated how differences in authority are present in the academic world by comparing the article of a Janet, a college freshman, to the article of Roger, a student completing his doctoral work in philosophy. Through their investigations, Penrose and Geisler demonstrate the importance of reading and writing rhetorically and discuss the importance of students seeing themselves as participants instead of observers in the construction of knowledge. They write that student's lack authority in their writing corresponds to their lack of previous knowledge about the subject and their inability to relate to the subject/issue being presented.

For the genre transformation for a younger audience , I am thinking of writing a college admissions essay meant to be read by an audience of high schoolers (14-18 year olds). The essay would begin with a student speaking of how she used to be really introverted and shy and she was always afraid to share her ideas. People always told her that she had a lot of potential and she herself knew that she had a lot of good ideas but she always felt limited to the ideas that she could express because she felt that she did not have the full knowledge needed to fully engage herself into certain subject, but one day she encountered something life changing and she decided to dive deep into a topic that she was really interested in and through her studies and with her gained knowledge, she was able to better engage herself in the subject and was then able to act as a participant rather than an observer. She was then also more confident in expressing her ideas and opinions on the topic. The subject that she had become really interested in wis the major that she is applying with at that particular institution. I’m not sure what the essay is going to be on exactly but that is my main idea for this transformation.

I also had another idea for the younger audience but I'm not sure if it follows the idea/topic presented in the article. So my idea was to create a comic strip for for an audience of kids ages 8-12. So for the comic the storyline would start with a small girl who is shy and afraid to speak out in class, and is constantly confused in class because she is not participating and therefore is not being fully submerged in the ideas, but then one day a "superhero" shows up and his superpower is bravery (or something like that). The hero encourages the student to speak up and express he ideas and opinions in class and once she starts doing so, she starts understanding the class material better and feels that she is more engaged in the subject and becomes way more interested in it.
OR The comic would have two characters; Janet and Roger who are in the same class. The two characters would have personalities and ideas that correspond to the way they were represented through their papers. The comic would show that Roger is more outspoken and Janet is more afraid to express her ideas but that she has many brilliant ideas. One day Janet will decide to emerge herself more into the subject matter and be more of a participant on the conversations in class. The comic will then show that once Janet is more active in expressing her ideas and opinions, the two characters have a great time sharing ideas with each each other and with their other class mates.
Again I don't have all the kinks worked out, but is this a good idea/do you think it follows the topic of the article?

For the genre transformation for an older audience, I am thinking about writing a blog post addressed to parents with young children. The blog post is going to tell parents that is is important that they encourage their children to express their thoughts and ideas. It will stress that getting their children into the habit of incorporating their ideas into the things that they do at a young age will help them with all of their future endeavors because it is important at all ages to express opinions and ideas. The blog post will also talk about how parents and all adults should get young children to really think about what they think certain things mean, and it will provide pictures and short sentences/phrases that the parents could show to their kids and ask them to “analyze” - just something that will get their kids thinking their own thoughts.

VIII. Thlog

IT FEELS SO NICE BEING DONE WITH WP2. I don't know why but I had an especially hard time with this wp. I sat in the library for 8 straight hours one day just working on it and trying to come up with ideas and trying to make the paragraphs flow nicely but after those 8 hours, I still felt like I had made no progress. BUT it all worked out eventually so all is good!!
I think my favorite part of Monday's class was watching the Bob Ross videos and the Disney painters video. The Bob Ross videos were of course funnier and more entertaining to watch, but all of the videos helped me see the moves and the rhetorical decisions that all of the artists made. It was also nice watching something where the moves being made were also narrated because before these videos, the only 'moves' videos that we had watched were ones where we had to determine the moves on our own, but in these videos, with the narration, it was easier to see what the moves were as they were being made.
I also really liked watching the video of the story Everybody Poops. It was interesting seeing how different the story could be presented on the video versus on a physical book because the animations were more lively and there was movement between some of the objects and and camera often zoomed into specific objects or characters that were important. I did think though that the Morgan Freeman reading of the story was kinda interesting (kinda weird) and that it just completely changed the story.
Anyways, i have to say I'm kind of excited to work on WP3. I feel like this is going to really show me if I have learned or how much I have learned from this class. I already have some ideas for what I want to do for both the younger audience and older audience transformation and I am excited to pitch my ideas in my PB3A and to hear feedback from everyone.

VII. Thlog

Some of my friends in other writing 2 sections have been SUPER busy and swamped recently with their WP2s; having to turn in their final drafts only 2 days after having their rough drafts peer revised, so i've bee extremely grateful for the changes that were made to our class syllabus that have given us more time to really work on our assignments to the best of our abilities.
With that said, this past week was a pretty short one, but it was really helpful; especially the peer revising. It was nice being able to have other peers read and revise my paper and to be able to share ideas amongst one another. I noticed through peer review that a lot of us had different ideas and different approaches to this paper. Also, after having my paper peer revised, I was almost able to see my paper in a different light and realized that I have provided a lot more information on the topic that I had chosen than was necessary, and that I needed to add more information on the different genres and their rhetorical features. In our groups, we were also able to exchange ideas on how to incorporate quotes from the class readings, which was something that I was really struggling with while I was writing my rough draft.
On Wednesday, I also found the socrates activity really helpful as we were able to look and and dissect the beginning of the chosen introduction and we could see what moves each of the authors made and were able to discuss why those introduction sentences were chosen as class favorites.

VI. Thlog

This past week in class taught me a lot about style and stylistic moves in writing. I really enjoyed the lesson on parallelism during Monday's class. It was nice seeing how parallelism is in a lot of places that we would normally not notice, such as in resumes, and how much better a resume with parallelism is than a resume without parallelism. I thought it was really helpful seeing the parallelism in sentences and how parallelism can occur only once in some sentences, but can occur several times in another sentence. I also really appreciated all of the tips that were given on writing. I have used all of the writing tips in the process of writing my rough draft for WP2. I especially liked tip #1. I never really realized how often I use the word 'says' to begin a quote or to cite and author, but after hearing that tip I changed all the 'says' in my WP2 to other verbs and I feel like that alone changed my paper pretty dramatically as there was much more variation in vocabulary in my essay.
"Peer revising" Sandy's paper helped me see what I should and should not do in my own paper. It was nice being able to look at a sample paper and do a reverse outline and revise the thesis.  I really dug deep into that paper looking at ways that it could be improved. I tried to relate some of the "faults" that the paper had to my own writing style so that I could use the revisions I made to that paper on my own writing. Through the sample revision, I realized that some things that I want to improve on my WP2 are my use of direct evidence from the sources, putting my own voice into my writing, and adding to the so what/who cares aspect.

PB2B

            The moves that an author makes are what give their writing individuality and personality. Not all moves that a particular author makes will necessarily be specific and unique to the author, but it is the combination of all of the different moves that the author makes that give their writing uniqueness. In the articles that we’ve read so far this quarter many of the authors have made moves in their writing that correspond to the moves listed in the They Say, I Say Appendix. Although some of the moves that these authors make are more generic and can be put into a list of moves, they also make some moves of their own.

            In “Navigating Genres”, one of the moves that Dirk makes that can also be found in the They Say, I Say Appendix is his use of “Explaining Quotations”. She uses “In other words…” (254) to begin explaining a quote that he had previously inserted into his writing. Dirk also uses the move “Introducing Quotations” when she writes, “Devitt writes…” (252), and “Devitt points out that…” (252), which shows readers that she will be using words or information from someone else. In “Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis”, Carroll uses the move “Capturing Authorial Action” when she writes, “Bitzer argues that…” (48) to emphasize that Bitzer is making a strong argument and is showing authority. She also uses many “Commonly Used Transitions” such as “in fact) (46), “however” (49), “finally” (50), and “although” (48) to show a sequence of events and to provide a sequence to her writing. Lastly, one move that Bunn makes in “How To Read Like a Writer” is “Introducing Standard Views”. He writes “Instead of reading for the content or to better understand the ideas in the writing…” (72 in which he point to reading for the content to be the standard view on reading, whereas reading to better understand the ideas in writing is the way that he believes more people should read.

            One of the moves that I noticed in the articles that was not listed in the They Say, I Say Appendix was the use of “one-liners” where authors write really short, concise sentences which I believe are meant to make a statement. Bunn uses “one-liners” in his writing and creates statements such as “You are reading to learn about writing” (72) and “I came to realize that all writing consists of a series of choices” (72). When there are so few words being said, the statement being made becomes intensified and has more power. Bunn also uses “dots for thoughts, or dotted lines, through his piece to separate different thoughts and ideas that he is expressing. Through his piece, Bunn inserted anecdotes, what I like to call “story time”, that make his life and his experiences more relatable to readers. One of the anecdotes that he used began “In 1997, I was a recent college student living in London for 6 months…” (82). This would make him more relatable to college students who he probably believes comprise the majority of his audience. I also noticed that some authors such as Boyd and Dirk used “Point to Point”, or bullet pointed lists, in their articles. The use of bullet pointed lists emphasizes the important points that the author wants the readers to fully capture. Boyd uses bullets to list ask questions to get her readers in a certain mindset, and Dirk uses bullets to provide examples and emphasize important information. Dirk also uses is “the Enlightened” where he often uses the phrase “I realize” or “I have come to realize” in which he states time when he made a new discovery or came across new information that he was not previously aware of.

V. Thlog

I found learning about “moves” this week really interesting. I didn’t originally know what a “move” was exactly, especially in the writing world, but I learned that it is basically something in particular that a writer (or anyone really) makes that can be recreated by other people and that makes their work or their actions unique to them. The examples of MJ’s shooting techniques and The Rock’s “The People’s Elbow”, and pinpointing the moves made by Bunn in “How to Read Like a Writer” helped me better understand what moves are and how they can be super small details that can be looked over.

I also found the lesson on concepts and disciplines to be very helpful, and I think the lesson has better prepared me for WP2. Before that lesson, I was pretty confused about how I should go about WP2 and I didn’t really understand what the prompt meant by choosing an article from two different disciplines or how I could possibly find and article on the topic from a scholarly and non scholarly publication, but the lesson cleared everything up for me. When we were looking at disciplines and determine which disciplines are categorized as hard sciences, soft sciences, and humanities, I realized that was something I would not have been able to differentiate on my own (especially between the soft sciences and humanities) and I found that really enlightening!!

One particular part about class that I really appreciated was when we, as a class, were asked to say some of the notes that were given on our WP1s and as each classmate said their note, the rest class was asked to raise their hand if they received the same note. I really appreciated this because when I heard that other people received the same comment or criticism that I had gotten on my paper, it made my feel like I wasn’t so alone knowing that a lot of I wasn’t the only one going through the struggle.  

PB2A

A scholarly academic publication is typically a formal and professional publication written by researchers or subject experts. The article that I chose for PB2A is titled "Alzheimer's vaccine: a cure as dangerous as the disease?" and was written by G. Münch, a researcher at University of Leipzig, and S. R. Robinson, a researcher at Monash University. The title poses the question that drives the purpose of the article: is the Alzheimer's vaccine, a supposed cure, as dangerous as the disease itself? 

The article is headed by the title of the piece followed by the names of the authors and their credibility. The article began with a brief summary of what was to be discussed in the full article and provided the main points of the t­ext. The summary informed that there were studies done on transgenic mouse models that supposedly verified the potential for this vaccine's development, but that once the vaccine was used on Alzheimer's patients, the vaccine showed to negatively affect a small number of its recipients with symptoms of brain inflammation. The summary was followed by a short list of key words – “Alzheimer’s disease, vaccine, inflammation, auto-immune disease” (1) –, which, assuming this is an online article would make it easy for people to find this article is they are looking for an article about any of the key words. Following the list of key words is the main body of text in which the authors go in depth about how the studies conducted on the transgenic mice suggested that the vaccine would be safe to use on humans and would not cause any harmful side effects, but when some patients developed unwanted side effects such as ventral nervous system inflammation, brain inflammation, and meninoencephalitis, the use of the vaccine was temporarily suspended. The article was then concluded with acknowledgements and references that listed the authors’ sources of information.

Because this is a scholarly academic publication, the authors use formal, professional language, and as this is a research paper aimed toward the scientific, and more specifically the medical community, the article is written with scientific jargon. The article is also relatively brief – 4 paragraphs long – as it is meant to provide information and educate its readers on the progression of this vaccine. The authors do not include any unnecessary information or any information unrelated to the study done on the vaccine or on how the vaccine was problematic.

The part of the article that seemed the most important to me was the discussion of symptoms of brain inflammation that affected certain patients, and the explanation of what could have caused the brain inflammation to occur, as they address the main question that is posed in the article and is the driving force for the article. Another reason I found that part of the article important is because thee symptoms and side effects related to the vaccine is that the vaccine are what affect the real life patients of these trials. The article explained that the side effects that have thus far affected the patients of the trial have been irreversible, and are potentially life threatening. Even for people who are not apart of the scientific community and do not participate in research for Alzheimer’s, it should be important that more people be aware of life-threatening symptoms from certain vaccines as to be wary of taking and vaccines or forms of medication that could be dangerous.

As this is an article about a trial vaccine that ultimately failed to serve its purpose, the last paragraph of the text include ways in which scientists are trying to improve the vaccine as to reduce and minimize the unwanted side effects produced by this vaccine. Most research articles conclude with a statement about how researchers either have found new advancements, or of how they are trying to improve their methods and studies as to find new advancements.

Works Cited

Münch, G. and S. R. Robinson. “Alzheimer's vaccine: a cure as dangerous as

the disease?”. Journal of Neural Transmission, 2002. Print.