Check-in (5 min)
How’s it going? Like, quite literally and about anything if you want. This is a wild time!
Work from Tuesday (5-10 min)
- QSRs were really great to read– see my comments! I also commented on the first QSR if you didn’t catch it. Going forward, I won’t comment on every single one but I’ll try to comment on a few and/or bring them into lessons or Learning Modules. I grade on that “intermediate” level as described in syllabus. If you meet all the criteria, you get full credit. If you missed something the assignment asked for, you get partial credit.
- How’d the Learning Module go? One issue I noticed was a few people missed some of the tasks–be sure you do them all!
- An issue related to this Learning Module task issue is navigation. Be sure you only click the “Click here to continue” button, never the “previous” or “next” buttons. See email about this.
Questions?
Style: You and Your Audience (10 min)
Style, a definition:
Using certain kinds of sentences and words that serve the your and your audience’s values.
Style can be thought of how you manage patterns, repetition, and disruptions of those patterns and repetitions. Deciding on those patterns, repetitions, and disruptions matters when you consider your audience.
In the Blankenship reading, the consideration of audience is what that audience might expect from you and what your audience’s values and expectations are:
- what sorts of words are they used to hearing? (e.g., technical vocabulary, colloquial language) What do they value? (e.g., investors respond well to language that centers a return on investment)
- what kinds of sentences would your audience expect and value? (e.g., long ones, complex ones, simple ones)
- what kinds of organization or paragraphing? (e.g., long paragraphs, short ones)
Style can also be associated with voice. Voice is something that is hard to pin down, but one way to think about it is your idiosyncratic patterns that are unique to how you speak and write. Audiences will always expect things in specific rhetorical situations (see previous Learning Module 1!), but if they know you, they might also expect ways of speaking and writing from you.
Your voice might be kind of natural and it might change depending on the rhetorical situation (e.g., think of how you speak and write in various different contexts to older family members vs. co-workers vs. friends vs. strangers). Your voice might have shared attributes across rhetorical situations, but it really is very difficult to suggest there is something easily identifiable as Your Voice.
So, style absolutely has to do with audience. But don’t get too wrapped up in writing 100% for your audience. Another part of the rhetorical situation is called the exigence, sometimes called the purpose (exigence usually relates more to a shared problem or issue that calls someone to write whereas purpose is a bit more singular). It is about what you want to do, about what you feel is right in terms of what you say in response to what calls you to speak or write.
What are the patterns, repetitions, and disruptions of words, sentences, paragraphing, etc. that make the most sense for your exigence/purpose? What feels right to YOU.
Three reasons why this is important:
- It’s your writing, and sometimes audiences need to receive information in ways that they might not be comfortable receiving. Sometimes something comforting is easy to forget or ignore.
- It is sometimes not possible to know how an audience will receive something. We can’t know until you try something. You know a lot, but you might not know for sure how an audience will receive what you say. Sometimes it might be better to write something in the best way you think rather than worry a lot about how an audience might best receive it.
- Sometimes you just wanna write what you wanna write, even if you have an audience besides yourself. So, just do what you wanna do.
Translingualism and Style
This brings us to translingualism. Briefly, this reading sums up the recent linguistic research about how we learn and use language. The main gist is this: there really aren’t separate languages, only mix of the ones we use based on the different stores of words and grammar we learn. So, it might be more accurate to say that we all have our own “language” that we speak, which is a mix of different languages to make up the total communicative resources we have.
We have different competencies.
Linguistic competence: knowledge of grammar and vocabulary for a language you speak
Strategic competence: using non-linguistic features to help communicate (e.g., body language)
Discourse competence: is it coherent, is it complete (enough)
Sociolinguistic competence: culturally appropriate to situation
You have this whole wide amount of resources, why not use them all where you see fit and where you want to use them? Feel free to play around with them where you are comfortable. That’s why I wanted to focus on “joy” in your QSR responses. You all have many languages and some of them really feel like home. Lean into that when you want and where you are comfortable.
We will talk more about style in Learning Module 2, so get pumped for that!
Writing Groups and Peer Response (20-25 min)
So, Writing Groups.
Writing can be very lonely. Writing is also hard to do if you don’t ever have an audience before your publish. Thus, I like to form writing groups in my classes to help with both of these issues.
All communication in Writing Groups should primarily happen on Slack. But, if it makes sense, you might choose to use a different platform to exchange feedback on your writing projects.
Here again are the roles (this is from the Learning Module):
a. Activity Accountant: Your Activity Accountant makes sure that the group is clear on any assignments or deadlines approaching in the coming week. Ideally the Activity Accountant will provide an update to their group each Sunday or Monday declaring what needs to be done in the coming days. While I will send reminder emails, too, the Activity Accountant emphasizes these deadlines as a double reminder at times. The Activity Accountant can also serve as a liaison between me and your group, receiving answers to questions that your group might have about group-related functions over the course of the semester.
b. Community Builder: Your Community Builder facilitates group discussions and conversations that need not necessarily have something to do with assignments. What are some funny memes or videos you’ve come across recently? What sorts of chat-window activities could provide some momentary relief from your group’s workload? A game? A chat? The Community Builder will typically provide comic or conversational relief at the end of each week.
c. Group Historian: Your Group Historian keeps track of decisions made by your group. This is best done in a single Google Doc or Microsoft Word document, where you date each entry. Keeping track of the conversations and decisions made within your group will help in future situations when your group needs recourse to that information. For instance: when/if you will have Zoom writing sessions, deadlines to get feedback to each other, criteria for feedback. Additionally, the Group Historian alerts me of any changes in group roles, subtopic choices, and other group-related decision-making processes.
d. Group DJ: Your Group DJ will provide songs and playlists that they think could be good for reading, writing, revising, and other aspects of work for this class (and for other classes). The Group DJ should first ask both the kinds of music other group members like and also get a feel for what types of songs they all think might be good for different kinds of work (reading vs. writing vs. brainstorming vs. revising). You might also do “sounds” rather than music (e.g., sounds of a coffee shop, outdoors sounds). The Group DJ should have a selection of songs or playlists roughly each week. Experiment! Don’t just stick to what you all know and like–see if other genres of music, types of songs, collections of sounds, etc. might provide a boost.
And here are the groups with assigned roles:
Group 1
Santi – Activity Accountant
Lina – Community Builder
Maria – Group Historian
Moosa – Group DJ
Group 2*
Ming – Activity Accountant
Fede – Community Builder
Aurie – Group DJ
*Who will be Group Historian? Fede and Aurie: one of you can either drop your role and be Historian or just also be Historian while maintaining your role
Group 3
Mike – Activity Accountant
Renny – Community Builder
Anthony – Group Historian
Ben – Group DJ
Group 4*
Victor – Activity Accountant or Group Historian
Nissim – Activity Accountant or Group Historian
Adam – Community Builder
*Victor and Nissim: maybe you can rotate your roles? Who wants to be Historian first? Or does someone want to just be Historian the whole time?
Meetings with Dan
Every other week, you will meet with me on Tuesdays at either 3pm or 3:30pm.
Group 1 will meet with me at 3pm this coming Tuesday (9/15) at 3pm.
Group 2 will meet with me at 3:30pm this coming Tuesday (9/15) at 3pm.
Group 3 will meet with me at 3pm the following Tuesday (9/22) at 3pm.
Group 4 will meet with me at 3:30pm the following Tuesday (9/22) at 3pm.
These meetings are meant to check in with how your writing is going and to come up with plans for the work coming up in the course. Stay up with the schedule for when your group is meeting. I will have Zoom meeting information soon. Look for an email on this (that will also be subsequently posted to Blackboard).
Peer Response
You all had some great take-aways in the Learning Module. Things like praising but identifying why something is working well. Being critical but constructive. Taking in who you are responding to and how they might best hear feedback. Speaking like a peer or friend to one another rather than some authority. Don’t make the piece your own, it is not yours. Don’t rewrite, just offer what you see in it and let them make of that what they will–ask questions, notice things, etc.
Someone said in their reading annotation: “respect the text.” Yes! It is part of us and is meaningful to share anything you ever write to others. So, the person giving feedback should see their role as a privilege–writing and language are sacred things that can be hard to share.
That said, of course, the receiver of feedback should be grateful, too. Feedback is helpful even the worst kinds (you get a test audience!), be grateful for their time.
As another one of your reading annotations put it: feedback is also an art. It is an imprecise method that takes great care. Takes a while to get right, but it sounds like you all are on the right track already in your responses to Straub!
I want to note one thing about receiving feedback rather than just giving feedback
What problems do you run into when HEARING feedback? My first reaction, almost always, is visceral and emotional “FUCK YOU.” Even with the most gentle feedback, I still do that. Idk why. Then I let that sit, put it away, and am ready to hear and incorporate. And I just take it, man. But it helps me to work out that internal reaction first so I am then super open to hearing feedback from others. Works for me.
Any thoughts about Straub? I like it as a general thought on this subject. Anything that didn’t sit right?
In your Writing Groups, you will be giving feedback to each other on all major writing project drafts (and, if you want, anything else! Feel free to do that if that happens organically).
You’ll do this for your literacy narrative draft, with whatever progress you have on it at the time your share (does not need to be a full draft).
REMEMBER: your draft does not have to be complete. It can be in-progress. So get as much as you can done in preparation for your group members to read your work. YES. Part of me doing this is to kick you in the butt to get your writing started a bit earlier than you might otherwise ; )
To help with this, I have Peer Response Questions on Blackboard under Course Documents. Take a moment to look that over with me.
You will also submit a Peer Response Report to go along with this. I’m just asking for a very informal recap of the feedback you gave and the feedback you received. Instructions are on Blackboard>Course Documents>Assignment Prompts>Process Documents.
First Group Meeting (right now) questions
- Work out roles. Everyone happy with them? Do you want to rotate or just stick with them for now?
- Work out function of roles. How will Group Historian record and share record of decisions? How will Activity Accountant communicate primarily and when? How will DJ and Community Builder share their materials?
- You will get feedback from 2 other group members and you will give feedback to 2 other group members. Who (will be easy in a group of 3) will be matched up and how?
- When will you share your Literacy Narrative draft with each other–by what date and time? Make sure you have enough time to do this so you can write your Peer Response Report by 5pm on Tuesday (9/15).
- How will you share your responses to each other’s work (e.g., on Slack, on Zoom, just in documents over email or in Google Docs)?
- The Group Historian should make sure all these answers are settled, and send me answers by the end of the day tomorrow (9/11).
Literacy Narrative, Learning Module 2, and Peer Response Report (5-10 min)
The QSR on “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” was a way to get started on your Literacy Narrative. It asked you to think about language in a critical way and to do so with an example (specifically, something from your languages that brings you joy and why).
In the first draft of your Literacy Narrative, I’m curious to see how you can write about your own connection to language and literacy and how you incorporate examples from your (or others’) life to support your thinking.
How’s this going? Any questions?
Remember: you have this Literacy Narrative draft due by 11:59pm. I did this so you have time to work through the Learning Module 2 and Peer Response Report first, so you can use what you learn there before submitting this last draft.
I’ll aim to get you feedback on this draft by early next week and you can get to work on revision.
Next Time (2-5 min)
-Learning Module 2 is due by Tuesday, September 15 by 5pm
-Peer Response report is due by Tuesday, September 15 by 5pm
-Literacy Narrative, Draft 1 is due by Tuesday, September 15 by 11:59pm