Today's Work

Oh man. The draft is due Monday. I don't know where I am going to find the time to get everything done. Here's how it's going... Today I have added a lot of structure to my paper. I am seeing a outline form and possibly a direction or flow that I want to go from topic to topic. I have more aspects of visual media to look at than I previously thought. Last night I was doing some last minute research when I stumbled upon a cool journal article about the future of books and how we are digitizing all our literature and making it available online for purchase. I am going to have to make room to include into my paper. Length may be a problem for me. I am already at 4 pages without really doing that much in depth look into each topic. I may have to cut some stuff out or be more concise in my description and analysis of the topic. Wish Me Luck.

What

What I got done today

Today's workshop was good. I started my section on graphic novels and what their role is in the future of visual media. I got a about a page done so that is exciting and I am definitley feeling better about the direction of my inquiry procject. Cool. See you Wednesday.

Commitment

"The most tragic thing in the world is wasted talent." It occurred to me as I was reading other people's blogs tonight that most of the students in ENG 401 are very committed to their work they do in this class. Almost everyone in the class has at least 20 or more posts on their blog. I then looked at my measly six postings (seven including this one) and had an epiphany...I have commitment issues. Newsflash fellow 401ers: The key to success is NOT hard work and determination. The key to success in ANYTHING depends on your commitment to the subject. If you are 100% committed to something ... hard work and determination will be intrinsically connected to the commitment you put forth. Wednesday I was excitedly telling myself that I would have the entire five day break to catch up on schoolwork. Here's how my Thanksgiving break went down: I worked Tuesday night for 6 hours, Wednesday morning for another 6, Thanksgiving with the fam on Thursday, I worked 14 hours on Friday because it was double time and a half, then another 10 on Saturday, and another 7 today. It's very clear where most of my commitment lies. I work for AT&T mobility. It's a great place to work but it is a very stressful demanding job. They look at my job as a career, I look at it as a part time job to pay bills and tuition. The money is amazing, therefore, it is really hard to give up. I want to put school first but realize that I also need some sort of income to support myself. I am not sure what I will do to help rectify the problem, maybe you guys could give me some insight on the matter. Anyway, going back to 401. The point, I guess, of this posting is to convey or make a promise to myself, Dr. O'Rourke, and the class than I am willing to make more of a commitment to the collaborative learning process we are taking part in. I have felt, due to the lack of commitment in the learning process, like the odd man out sometimes and I want to do whatever I can to rectify this dissonant feeling. With all that being said, here is where I am at with a few weeks left to go: I am shifting gears a little bit in my inquiry project. I am writing with less emphasis on affect in visual media and more on the future of visual media. When I was writing my exploratory draft I discovered that the argument I was trying to make didn't feel that strong. I honestly didn't think it was an important enough topic to write about. I know I should have realized this sooner but unfortunately I didn't. However, because I am going into graphic design, exploring research and topics about the future of visual media felt like it would have more significance to me than what I was writing about before. Fortunately, I have already done a good deal of research on the topic and I have first hand interviews with Jacob Hill and Bonnie Foley on the subject. With this change I am going to have to rewrite my annotated bibliography and rework my proposal. I will post them for your review as soon as I am finished with them.
See you guys in six hours.

Part I: Exploration
1. Identify the issue or problem that you plan to focus on in your Inquiry Project. For my inquiry project, I am focusing on how people perceive television compared to reading text from a book. Can we interpret the same or more information from a movie (television) scene rather than the same scene from a book and vice versa.

2. What is your personal connection to and interest in this topic? I am a Interdisciplinary communications major, with a focus in graphic design. I am very interested on how visual media effects the reader compared to text. My ability to communicate to an audience through visual mediums is inherently compared to my understanding of the media. Therefore, I need to explore how people see a visual composition and react to it.

3. What opinions do you already hold about this topic? Currently, I believe that a person can gather more information about what a product is with a visual composition of that product rather than a textual composition of that product. If you take a still shot of a movie and analyze that scene the audience can infer more information about the current situation the character is going through. In order for the same effect to happen in text, the writer has to "set up" the scene by literally describing the scene to the reader.

4. What knowledge do you already have about this topic. What are your main questions about this topic? What are you most curious about? The knowledge I have about this topic is mostly from my own experience and from the research I have already done on this topic. I am most curious about researching the ambiguity that writers have about their work; in other words sometimes writers will not describe their scene to the reader because they want the audience to visualize the scene in their own mind. Does a visual (non-textual) scene ever do this? Is it impossible for this to happen in a visual scene? What is the effect on the audience? In order for the visual composition to work the reader has to "believe" in the layout of the scene. If the medium is too unusual or specific the audience might dismiss the credibility of the information. In literature if the reader is not given the visual concept of the scene it is the reader's obligation to visualize it himself. In doing this, does this idea of "audience participation" make the reader more "involved" in the textual medium.

6. How might composition theorists and researchers approach or study this topic? Does this approach differ from those of other related disciplines (such as communication studies)? Fortunately, I think this topic can be easily researched by analyzing readers ability to understand a scene in a movie or a scene in a book. The researcher might be able to give some sort of quiz about the scene they just watched or read to gauge the ability of the audience. It would also be interesting to see how age affects the results. I think it is a society induced idea that younger people tend to be visual learners because of the effect of television and computers.

7. How could you research this topic outside the library (for example, through interviews and/or observations)? I am probably going to put my family through a lot of tests. Watching scenes from movies then having them read text and see what they remember or liked better about each medium.

8. Write an initial claim, or an open-ended question, to guide your research on this topic. Make it specific but exploratory. Remember that a good claim opens up an area of inquiry about a topic; a claim should invite evidence, support, and debate. Time and time again, people always say after watching a block-buster movie that the book was better. I want to explore this idea. Why do people like to read J.R. Tolkien's books rather than watch the visually amazing movies? I want to explore reader engagement. I think that because people are actively engaged in a book as a third party character, makes it more entertaining than possibly watching the movie.

Ede and Lundsford Response

In Ede and Lundsford's article the authors start by addressing a simple problem writing teachers have: "to be for or against an emphasis on audience in composition courses." The purpose of the article is to expand the writers mind on the role an audience plays in writing development.

Ede and Lundsford address that there are two types of audience writing and they are "audience addressed" and "audience invoked." Audience addressed concerns itself with how writers write to a specific audience. In this case Ede and Lundsford say that the audience is "real." This type of audience is not fictionalized but rather a real person or real group. My understanding of this theory states that the writer could be writing to head of a company or lobbying to a pharmaceutical group. The authors believe the problem with this theory is that it places too much emphasis on how the audience reacts to the writing and less on the creative development of the writer.

"Audience invoked" theory addresses a more emotional feeling from the reader that the writer is trying to generate. Focus is on the writers ability to portray what he is feeling to the reader. The process in writing to the audience is more creative and fictionalized than "audience addressed." I believe the problem with this is that is very hard to do and especially hard to teach. This ability to develop and sustain a specific type of audience and develop emotion and feeling based on that audience is not something every high school or college student can do. It is a very involved creative process that only good writers can achieve.

To be honest, I did not have too much of an issue with either processes that Ede and Lundsford discuss in the article. Each theory, whether it be "audience addressed" or "audience invoked," has its place in composition theory. I can imagine that "audience addressed" technique is used a great deal in the business world where formal writing can be a little narrow and to the point. Nevertheless, this type of writing still has a place and is used quite frequently. I can see the "audience invoked" style being used more in a literary sense, where you really want to focus on the reader/writer relationship. In this technique you are using more creative juices to fictualize the audience and focus on emotional response for the reader and can also be considered a valuable practice in compositional theory. Either processes can work given the right context; the important issue in Ede's article as well as Ong's article is that you consider the audience you are writing too.

The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction

In Ong's "The writer's audience is always a fiction", Ong suggests that a key component in the writing process is imagining who your audience is when writing your paper. He says that writers are blind to the reaction of the audience therefore you need to create a fictionalized audience to write to. He gives an example of a public speaker speaking to an audience and how that speaker can manipulate the direction he wants to go in his speech based on the reaction he is receiving from the crowd. Ong says that this communication process does not exist in writing. You are not immediately receiving feedback from your audience because they are not present when you are writing it. He believes the best way to help alleviate the problem is by creating a fictionalized audience to write to help create a better communication pathway. The article suggests that the more you read and understand other authors fictionalized audience the more suited or successful you will become in understanding your fictitious audience.

Although I agree with Ong's view on how writers need to visualize the audience they are writing to, I feel a writer should never write something just to please his audience. A writer should go in the direction he wants to go but still maintain a level of relevance to the audience of the paper. In this article, Ong says that if he is hopeful that tens of thousands of people will read his book, but how can he possibly be writing to an audience that large? A good writer, like Hemingway, shapes his audience to feel the emotion he wants to feel or favor a character he wants the audience to favor, but he does it through sharing like experiences with the audience.

In my style of writing, I usually do not think about who will be reading the paper. I write what sounds good to me. I guess this means if what I write sounds good in my mind, then it must sound good in the readers mind. The concept is very presumptuous I realize, but after reading Ong's article and understanding the importance of writing to an audience, it will give me something I can work on for my next papers.

Donald Murray and Janet Emig's Articles

Donald Murray discuses, in his four page article, about how a major trend in teaching writing in today's classroom is dependent on students' writing product and not on process. Murray preaches about teachers should be rewarding the writing process by applauding works-in-progress or in other words work that students will continue to develop long after the due date has passed. He goes on to say that "we work with language in action" meaning that language is dynamic and it should continuously developed. Murray states that the writing process is developed into three sections: prewriting, writing, and rewritting. Prewriting is the process of learning about the subject or person you are going to write about whether it be through research or interviewing. The writing section includes developing a rough draft and getting your ideas down on paper. The rewriting stage is about reresearching and revising your subject and rethinking your paper. Murray believes the best way to achieve this process is by letting the student go and develop the paper on his own instead of giving him an assignment to write and therefore directing where you want the student to go.



Janet Emig believes that "writing is originating and creating a unique verbal construct that is graphically recorded." She refers to part of Murray's article when she says that talking is considered part of the prewritting process. Emig believes that writing is a unique language process that is valuable with in the process of writing and the product of writing. Throughout Emig's article I felt like she was making a case for writing to be continuously included in the process of learning. She gave lots of examples on how writing uniquely impacts the modes of learning, which I feel should go as unsaid. Writing will never not be taught or developed in future classrooms to come; it is just not realistic. Writing may change in style and format with new technologies being used to help facilitate and develop the writing process, but the core of developing ideas and researching topics of paper, the process, will never go away.

James Berlin's "A Short History of Writing Instruction" 1960-1975

In James Berlin's "A Short History of Writing Instruction" he seg ways into the section covering 1960-1975 by describing the launch of the Russian Sputnik in 1957. Berlin comments suggested, in response to the launch, that U.S. leaders felt their established technological superiority, that was displayed in World War II, was fading. Their response was to cultivate socially and economically charged students to help maintain technological superiority and national defense. In public schools course emphasis on math and science was becoming more apparent. Furthermore, the government gave selective service deferment to students that were enrolled in college or graduate school to concentrate the nation's "talent pool." Conservatives challenged the new agenda in education stating that too much focus was being given to the student rather than the subject matter.
The 1960's started a trend in America's youth that is still apparent in today's youth and that is the concept of the individual. More focus is being sought on the individual person rather than the group. This was never more prevalent than what was being taught in English and composition. Instead of dwelling on composition form from intellectual established writers, there was more focus on Bruner's "process" of writing and how an individual came to learning a concept through their own work. This idea of "hands on" experience spread to other subjects and disciplines. "The student was to engage in the act of doing physics or math or literary criticism, and was not simply to rely on the reports of experts. Bruner believed that students learned the structure of a discipline through engaging in research as a practitioner of the discipline." (Berlin 208)
As a student I whole heartily agree with Bruner's philosophy. My best work in any subject is not by studying text of an expert and spitting it back in test form, but by actively engaging in the subject matter and learning from my experience.

Exercise #2 "They Say, I Say"

In the Introduction to "They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing,Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein provide templates designed to help generate a thought process that helps organize the author's thoughts into coherent work. Specifically, Graff and Birkenstein argue that the type of writing templates they offer focus on the structure of the paper. As the authors themselves put it, "templates, focus writers attention not just on what is being said, but on the forms that structure what is being said." Although some people believe that modifying your writing style through trial and error is best, Graff and Birkenstein insist that following a template helps the writer generate ideas. In sum, then, their view is that following templates in your writing process can drastically help develop a successful writing style.
I agree for the most part with Graff and Birkenstein's ideas especially when dealing with younger students. For the most part, I was taught a basic template in writing a paper or essay that always included a introduction, body, and conclusion. The detailed templates the authors discuss would have made a lot of my papers from high school and early college more coherent. However, I feel as a student becomes more adept to a set writing style that works, he/she should consider developing their own individual style of writing.