Post 12

Mirabelli definitely begins his article, "Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers," very differently than most authors. The first word of his text alone is very different, as he begins it with a website address, "Bitterwaitress.com." The first paragraph goes on to talk about that website as a popular website which has links to gossip about things like celebrity behavior in restaurants, chefs and restaurant owners, accounts from famous people who were once waitresses, as well as customer related horror stories. Then, Mirabelli goes on to talk about a section of the webpage that is titled "hate mail" in which email criticisms are followed by rebuttals from waitresses. A lot of these hate mails portray waitresses are ignorant or stupid. Mirabelli includes a sample piece of hate mail in his article in which the author of the hate mail is portraying all waitresses as stupid, and that they are only waitresses because they are too unintelligent to land a "real" job. I think Mirabelli's way of beginning his article really gets people interested in reading the rest because a lot of people can relate to it. Many people have been servers themselves (who I believe was Mirabelli's intended audience) or have experienced others being blatantly rude to servers (who could have also been his intended audience). I think his first paragraph really stirs up a lot of people's emotions and makes the readers engaged, wanted to read more,, which I think was his purpose of starting his article this way.

Post 11

A discourse community I belong to is the place I work in the summer, called Canoe Island Lodge, a resort on Lake George, New York. I am the bartender at the resort. Other employees there hold jobs such as servers, boat boys, groundskeeping, housekeeping, cooks, a childrens director, a maintenance worker, a manager, and the owners. The owners live in a house right next to the resort, and almost everyone else who works there is from out of town, including myself, so we live rogether in lodges across the street. Accoring to Swales in "The Concept of Discourse Community," there are six criteria that discourse communities contain. The six criteria are: common goals, intercommunication, info/feedback, genres, lexis, and members. Canoe Island Lodge's common goals are a little different for each employee but a shared one throughout the resort would be that all of the guests are treated politely, and are having fun. Intercommunication between employees takes a few forms. employees text the manager with questions/concerns when needed, we can email them during the off season with questions/informtation, the groundskeepers and housekeepers have walky-talky type things in order to be able to be contacted quickly, and there is usually someone in the office, so you can call or stop into the office whenever you need to communicate with a manager/owner. Info and feedback generally comes from the manager, Joe, if you need to be talked to about what your doing well/bad, or what you need to work on, he is the man that does the talking to. Occasionally, one of the maagers will say something too you, but there is generally for severe cirsumstances. There are many genres used at the workplace. The boat boys have a "water wait" list for people who want to go water skiing to sign up on. As bartener, I have a ticket for each room number for writing bar tabs on. The office workers have endless amounts of genres used, between tip chart sheets, to insurance papers, to bill papers, etc. Canoe Island Lodge has some Lexis used by workers at the resort. One might consider the table numbers in the dining room a lexis, or certain names of places around the lodge such as the names of the boats, decks, cottages, etc. The members of the Lodge are all the employees who work there. There are about 35 employees, one manager, and two owners. The owners names are a couple named Tom and Carla Burhoe. Carla's father built and started the resort. When he died, her husband bought out the resort from her brothers and sisters, and therefore became the joint owner along with his wife.

I am interested in using this as my example of a discourse community because I am involved in it, and I feel there is a lot of different areas/jobs within this discourse community in which I could expand on. It is also a very tight-nit community. Everyone is knows everyone very well, unlike some other larger, or corporate societies in which you really only interact with a select few of the members.

I am thinking of interviewing either one of the owners, the manager, or my close friend, Kirsten, who is a boat girl.

Texts I can analyze would be either emails, forms, or menus.

Post 10

A discourse community I belong to is the place I work in the summer, called Canoe Island Lodge, a resort on Lake George, New York. I am the bartender at the resort. Other employees there hold jobs such as servers, boat boys, groundskeeping, housekeeping, cooks, a childrens director, a maintenance worker, a manager, and the owners. The owners live in a house right next to the resort, and almost everyone else who works there is from out of town, including myself, so we live rogether in lodges across the street. Accoring to Swales in "The Concept of Discourse Community," there are six criteria that discourse communities contain. The six criteria are: common goals, intercommunication, info/feedback, genres, lexis, and members. Canoe Island Lodge's common goals are a little different for each employee but a shared one throughout the resort would be that all of the guests are treated politely, and are having fun. Intercommunication between employees takes a few forms. employees text the manager with questions/concerns when needed, we can email them during the off season with questions/informtation, the groundskeepers and housekeepers have walky-talky type things in order to be able to be contacted quickly, and there is usually someone in the office, so you can call or stop into the office whenever you need to communicate with a manager/owner. Info and feedback generally comes from the manager, Joe, if you need to be talked to about what your doing well/bad, or what you need to work on, he is the man that does the talking to. Occasionally, one of the maagers will say something too you, but there is generally for severe cirsumstances. There are many genres used at the workplace. The boat boys have a "water wait" list for people who want to go water skiing to sign up on. As bartener, I have a ticket for each room number for writing bar tabs on. The office workers have endless amounts of genres used, between tip chart sheets, to insurance papers, to bill papers, etc. Canoe Island Lodge has some Lexis used by workers at the resort. One might consider the table numbers in the dining room a lexis, or certain names of places around the lodge such as the names of the boats, decks, cottages, etc. The members of the Lodge are all the employees who work there. There are about 35 employees, one manager, and two owners. The owners names are a couple named Tom and Carla Burhoe. Carla's father built and started the resort. When he died, her husband bought out the resort from her brothers and sisters, and therefore became the joint owner along with his wife.

post 9: "From Pencils to Pixles: The Stages of Literacy Technologies"

After reading Dennis Baron's, "From Pencils to Pixles: The Stages of iteracy Technologies," I'd have to say I don't entirely agree that the message of this piece involved him shruging at technology, founding it hard to imagine new technologies as fundamentaly changing the shape or nature of writing. He does claim that new technologies create new opportunities for fraud, however, I think his point was more along the lines of the evolution of technology, and how these evolutions (and evolutions to come) are affecting literacy. Pencils were infact considered technology when they were invented. They weren't (and aren't) as simple to make as you might think. You must have the exactly right amount of lead and clay proportions. You must also make sure the wood around it is stable enough not to break in a pencil sharpener, and the eraser must have the right consistency of rubber. The secrets of making pencils were as closely gaurded as computer companies software secrets are. From pencils and paper, to typewriters, to the first computers, to the modern day computers, what Baron wants us to really ponder is, "whether the computer will one day be as taken-for-granted as the pencil" (440).

post 8: "The Future of Literacy"

Elementary school through high school, I remember being forced to read books picked out by my teachers. My parents also strongly encouraged me to read, and tried putting me in the more advanced reading groups, or honors English courses, which was probably a mistake because I was always the student in those groups of classes who didn’t read, or didn’t know what was going on in class. Teachers also encouraged us from a young age to do projects on the computer using all the different Microsoft programs, especially “Word,” “PowerPoint,” and “Publisher.” In middle school and high school I had to take keyboarding classes, which were the most pointless classes I’ve ever taken. They were taught to us as if we had never been around computers before in our lives. The truth is, most of us had already been so familiar with the key board through programs like AIM instant messenger, or Xanga (an online journal blog), that we could already type at a fast speed while rarely having to look down at the keyboard. I think a lot of the school systems ways of “teaching” literacy are outdated. Instructors need to prepare students to be able to function effectively in online communication environments of the 21^st century. As stated in the text, “To accomplish this task, educators, certainly those who teach English composition only in its more conventional forms, will need to change their attitudes about literacy in general, and they will need additional technology resources so that they can work more closely with students to earn about the new, self-sponsored media literacies these youngsters are developing and practicing online” (419).  

"Sponsors of Literacy"

In Brandt's article, "Sponsors of Literacy," she goes into detail about the relations between sponsors and sponsorships. Sponsors, as Brandt describes them, are the "figures who turned up most typically in people's memories of literacy learning: older relatives, teachers, priests, supervisors, military officers, editors, influential authors" (335). Brandt agrees that sponsors never lend out their resources in an altruistic manner. There is always gain. Both ends are mutually getting something out of the agreement. Their gain might not be obvious, it might for example, be a gain they recieve somewhere down the line in the future. One example that I can relate to is a program I volunteer for called "Respite." It is a program designed for my major (communication sciences and disorders) in which you pair up with a partner and get assigned to visit an individual with some kind of disability for two hours every week. The idea is to give the care giver a break, as well as give the individual with the disability some entertainment. What I gain out of this volunteer program is not only a resume builder, but also experience with all different kinds of people, which will help me in the working world.
An example used in the text has to do with Little League baseball players who's jerseys have logos of a local insurance company on their uniforms. They don't wear the logos because they care if people buy the product, they just want to be able to afford to play ball.

Wikipedia Reflection Essay

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia in which anyone can create an account to edit or create other articles. How it works is, people add in information they think would be appropriate and helpful to an article, providing sources of where they got their information. If their information is unreliable, poorly written, contains other flaws, etc., people on Wikipedia will edit the information. The type of writing on Wikipedia is a process, just how Anne Lamott describes it in her essay, “Shitty First Draft.” It uses a network of knowledge from individuals across the globe, and it is constantly being edited for improvement. More than likely, the first drafts of Wikipedia articles were very poorly written and unorganized, but the more work that goes into them, the better they become.

When I began working on my Wikipedia edit about pre-lingual deafness, I remember feeling overwhelmed. One, because I was still getting used to using the program, and two, because I had no idea how I was going to get all the information together and organized in a clear fashion, while intertwining it with the work that was already present in the article. However, I remembered what I had read in Lamott’s essay, “Shitty First Drafts,” about not getting discouraged in the beginning of the writing process because it always tends to be the most overwhelming part. After you get over the hump, the writing process gets a lot easier. As she claims in her essay, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible efforts” (Lamott). I knew I needed to take it step by step, and in the end, my work paid off. My finished article, although not perfect, was a major improvement to what it was before. The next time someone takes time to edit the article, it will be even more insightful to those looking to gain knowledge on the subject.

Porter’s text, “Individuality and the Discourse Community,” exemplifies the fact that all text is inter-text, meaning it comes from pieces of work from other authors. Many students confuse this idea of borrowing work from others, and tying it together to form new text, with the idea of plagiarism. As students, we must get past that point of view and realize that all text is inter-text, our knowledge and ideas come from many different places, and we have the ability to combine that knowledge and put it down on paper as a new piece of work. Writing should not be thought of as “individual, isolated, and heroic” (Porter). Written work that becomes published is rarely (if ever) solely the work of one person. It goes through a series of rigorous editing before the final product is released. Wikipedia is somewhat similar to this, except it is constantly being improved, and is never actually “finished.” It is not “isolated, individual, or heroic” (Porter) as each article is the work of many individuals combined together in order to make it as complete and correct as possible.

I found Donald Murray’s article, “All Writing is Autobiography,” to be related, in a sense, to my Wikipedia edit. He claims that all writing is autobiographical because even if it doesn't come from your own experiences, per say, it still comes from somewhere in your head. The information you add to Wikipedia is expected to come from reliable sources, unless of course it is considered general knowledge. I agree with these expectations, because if you don’t have a source to back up your information, who’s to say you didn’t make up that information? On the other hand, I have a lot of background knowledge on the article I was editing (pre-lingual deafness) because I am a Communication Sciences and Disorders major. I noticed that while I was typing up my information for article, that some of it came from the knowledge in my brain, things I remembered my professor saying in class, from my notes, from reading my textbooks, etc. I don’t remember where or in what book or class the knowledge came from, but I still have that knowledge. Therefore, should I not add in that information because I don’t have a source? Or should I add it in anyway because I know it is correct and quality information for the article? As Murray states in his article, "I don't know where what I know comes from. Was it dreamt, read, overheard, imagined, experienced in life or at the writing desk? I have spun a web more coherent than experience."

Although I struggled with the assignment at first, when I saw my completed Wikipedia article finished online, I felt a great sense of accomplishment. I think that having Wikipedia open for everyone to use can be detrimental, but is mostly beneficial. If people want to, they can easily edit bull shit information into an article. Just know that when you are using it, to use it with caution. Everyone has knowledge to share, and if we all work together in combining, sharing, and borrowing that knowledge, we will all benefit.