1.31 Practice doing discourse analysis

Today you gave your presentations on the shaggy dog stories and you were great! I know this is a lot of new language and that Shaggy Dog stories aren't exactly one of the most popular jokes for your identity group = but you did a great job identifying quesitons to ask and then using the "tools" from Gee to analyze how the jokes worked.

Specically, you used Gee's questions as a starting place to identify and analyze
1) the characteristics of Shaggy Dog stories as a genre
2) relationships created through language (for example=>how connections to Conversations + the role played by Intertextuality made the joke funny or connected to the audience)
3)  how language forms (for example => the punchline as a set of puns, the story form with beginning set up, middle development/presentation of complicating action, end = concluding/wrapping up) and how Social Languages (the way the string  talked "bar" talk, how the waiter in the Panda story talked like a New Yorker) created a setting, developed characters, contributed to the humor, etc.

Thank you for your presentations - and I will be providing some written comments to Blogs 2 & 3 before next class.

Why are we doing this? As I said in class = the purpose of this assignment was to give you practice doing analysis that pays close attention to discourse (language in use) and that uses particular examples from a piece of language as evidence of what that language does or how it is used. What you are doing is discourse analysis = and you will use discourse anlaysis to describe relationships in the data you collect for your research project. The blog posts with practice data analysis are opportunities for you to get low stakes (meaning not hugely important to your grade) feedback on how well you are doing, and what you can do to improve; that way, you will have some experience & confidence by the time you analyze the data for your research project.

For next class:
Read: Branick.  I left extra copies in my mail box at the English Department if you didn't get one.)
Blog 4: Do your own analysis of Shaggy Dog stories. You can dig deeper into the question you started work on with your group, you can apply the questions your group asked to another story, or you can ask another question, or anything else that gives you good practice using Gee's "tools" to analyze language.

Your post should do the following:

1.  State the question about shaggy dog stories your analysis will answer
2.  Use  Gee's language tools/questions as a way to explore the Discourses, Conversations, Intertextuality, Social Languages - and particular language choices in the story you are analyzing.
3. Give specific examples of the language and other features to illustrate the points you make about Dicourses, Conversations, Intertextuality, etc used in the story you are analzying
4. Discuss of any patterns
5. State how your analysis answers the question you asked.

Thanks for the good class today - and have a great weekend.