Month: October 2021

Question I am answering: Should high school writing courses  put more focus on grammar and structure?

1. high school writing
2. high school writing courses
3. high school writing classes
4. writing structure
5. writing grammar
6. “grammar” and “structure”
7. structure in writing
8. high school grammar
9. grammar in writing
10. “grammar” and “language”
11. “grammar” and “punctuation”

The source I chose for now is an article titled “Teaching Writing to High School Students: A National Survey” and it has several authors to it. Each author works in different universities working the same department “Department of Special Education”. The article aims to tell how schools aren’t doing that good of a job in teaching proper writing skills and they need to improve on it. More or less, this article relates to my research question in that it puts emphasis on saying that schools should be focusing on grammar and structure even in high school.

 

I feel like I excel at research assignments (as opposed to analytical ones) and I feel there’s several ways to go about researching ideas. I always check several websites to gather basic information and go into specific information by using public forums such as twitter or reddit or anything that has an easy search function. Looking at the list of invention strategies, I find that using the stasis theory would be one of the more easier, beneficial strategy to use.

Why do high school writing courses focus on grammar and structure? This question is to be thoroughly answered in my research assignment using Bad Ideas About Writing.

The last section of “Bad Ideas About Writing” pertains to digital technology and its effect on writing habits. I do discuss this section a lot but I feel it holds the most importance to us in understanding modern writing skills. One chapter in is titled “Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants” and it was written by a mixed-blood Cherokee who goes by the name Phill Michael Alexander. Now, Alexander wrote this chapter to discuss these terms and their impact on society. Digital natives are those born into technology, while digital immigrants refer to those not born in it and have to learn it. The rise of digital technology gives both parties a chance to develop different writing skills, with those born into the technology having to learn old methods to apply while the immigrants have to just learn with the growing tech. I notice that some issues lie in the fact that digital immigrants have to teach the natives the basics before they can learn for themselves which in that case means the terms have no value. I do still wonder what the future of technology holds with writing because writing constantly changes with technology, what with new ways of communicating.

Rhetoric is in several examples of writing. It’s present  in Bad Ideas About Writing as well. I want to target a specific section regarding writing and digital technology. Author Scott Warnock discusses the importance of how people have a misconception of how texting ruins writing when in fact it doesn’t. He talks about how people don’t know what true grammar is and I believe that is the purpose of his entire chapter. He wants to emphasize how people are simply ignorant in what writing is and simply chalk up all digital technology to be bad.

In the context of everyday life, rhetoric can be seen just about everywhere. Ads you see on billboards or the internet, or crazy people in the city are both examples of rhetoric. I, myself, have used the rhetoric of advertising. I sell skateboards with intricate, non-skateboard like designs (such as a gameboy advance or Bold and Brash from Spongebob). You don’t find things like that on the internet and if you do, you’d have to pay a hefty price for it. You’re better off buying something like that from me considering I sell at a cheaper prices even though there’s a wood shortage going on currently. I try to target mostly anime fans who skate but as i grow, i will be branching out my target audience with my boards.

A rhetorical situation is essentially the context that makes up a certain text. It serves to narrow down the specifics of a text, such as what they’re aiming to achieve, the significance/purpose, and even helps in determining the reason for this text’s existence. Using “Bad ideas About Writing” as an example, one could see that in the section titled “Texting Ruins Students’ Grammar Skills,” written by Scott Warnock, the rhetorical situation is responding to a long-time misbelief that digital technology is negatively affecting todays’ students. Within the specific section, Warnock addresses how texting and digital technology in general can’t carry bad habits over to real writing and that it’s more helpful to students by making them more literate. You can tell from his writing that he’s portraying these ideas to an older audience who believe digital technology is bad and wants to disprove this common misbelief amongst the old generation.

1. Roberts-Miller describes the extreme consequences of negative rhetoric or rhetoric that intentionally misleads an audience (11). Think of a time you have seen rhetoric in action. Was it positive or negative? Was it used to get at the truth or to mislead? What were the consequences?

 

rhetoric is described as a way of speaking to persuade another person. Think of it like a rhetorical question; you ask someone something (that doesn’t typically have an answer) in hopes of changing their view on something. An example would be a sub page on reddit called r/ELI5 which stands for ‘Explain Like I’m 5″.  It’s devoted to clearly explaining difficult concepts in a simpler fashion to others. I guess this can be considered a type of rhetoric. This would be a positive rhetoric as it teaches people ideas perceived as hard and makes it no longer as hard. Sometimes people can mislead others by giving false/incorrect information but through personal experience, I found that not to happen often at all.