10.16 Composing essays and Discourse analysis

We started class today with a discussion of Mary Elizabeth Pope's "Composing Teacher Training."  This essay is both a "model" essay for the kind of writing you will create to accompany your Senior Seminar project for the Writing Option Major, and it is an illustration of how reflective, analytic writing both complements a research process, and IS a research process in its own right.

After I read you excerpts from the essay, Teacher Training (which I forgot to send you the link for!) - we talked through "Composing 'Teacher Training'" with particular attention to her composing process.

We noticed the following (below is what we wrote on the board followed by an overview of class discussion):

Activities associated with finding a focus
thinking back on a childhood experience (bad)
a journaling activity where she made a list of topics she would never writ about = conflicted material

freewriting

With respect to these activities, we noted that onflicted  material - things we feel bad or confused about - can often provide good material for research and creative work.  They are "unresolved" = so there is a drive to explore them, and the researcher/writer will have a REASON (other than whatever the assignment demands) for digging into the project. We also noted that freewriting, random associating, talking to friends, browsing the internet, taking a walk = anything that lets material pour into your mind (and turns off your editor) can work as a way to get you to open up new ideas. Putting ideas together in ways you haven't put them together before is central to seeing things "new." 

Research activities

connecting to experience (thinking back on what happend)

visiting physical  places and things associated with your idea

talking to others who were there - or have similar experiences 

peer workshop (discussions with other writers about what connects to your ideas)

As with the "brainstorming" ideas - we noted that the research process seemed to take place through out the writing process . Pope went back and forth between writing - finding more ideas - deciding how to put her ideas into words - writing - and then going through the loop again.  Research activities are not only about reading other texts - for Pope they were about going back to her early experiences.  Psychologists have observed that physical objects - and other people - can serve as "triggers" to detailed memories that might otherwise remain inaccessible.  Photos, places, objects, and other physical artifacts actually seem to "hold" memories for human beings. 

Writing process

trying to write the introduction = part of discovery process

discovery/invention takes place throughout the whole writing process

journaling - to find truth + to craft essay to meet audience demands

clustering = organization association exhaustive categorization/coding

reflective rhetorical analysis = balance between audience + individual truth

We noted that Pope seemed to use her writing process AS PART OF her research process. We also noted that she used her movement among brainstorming, researching, and writing activities as a way to negotiate HER truth into a truth appropriate for her audience.  In some ways, she found what she wanted to say by thinking (and writing) about how BEST to put her feelings into writing.  

Gee and Discourse Analysis

We spent the last half hour of class reviewing the first two chapters of Gee.  In many ways this book is very readable - with lots of examples.  You are READING this text as practice for reading other research methods texts - for when you do research on your own => so you can learn new methods through reading what others have written.  

I noted that Gee's book is set up so that it defines terms, uses them, and then used the terms it has already defined to define and illustrate new terms.  You need to be comfortable with the language in the early chapters in order to be able to understand and use the methods described later in the book.  I identified important terms and page numbers - and that was about all we had time to do.

For next class:

Read: Chapters 3 & 4 in Gee.

Blog 13:  List any terms from Gee you are having trouble understanding.  List/discuss some of the building tasks language does that might apply to your research project.

In our next class, we will begin by workshopping your short analysis projects.  That will take up a little more than half the class.  The rest of the class will be spent clarifying any issues for Gee that you don't understand => and applying his methods in an sample analysis.

Good class = see you Thursday.