Summary on "H1N1 Virus and Video Production"

Michael Pennell introduces a new project in his first-year writing class as a tweek to his syllabus before school starts. This project consisted of an optional college video contest project that would push students to inform colleagues about the H1N1 Virus and health professionals to support them for prizes as an incentive. Pennell found this college video project as a good and new way to rhetorical approaches. 


The first few weeks in Pennell's class consisted of working on this project and students took into consideration their similarities with other students, but soon faced certain difficulties with technology. Some students didn't have cameras, the proper softwares, information, and many students found themselves imposing alternatives for limited space. Unfortunately, many students found this project as an obstacle with limited resources.


Although Pennell agreed with Jason Ranker who stated “Students who work in similar multimedia writing environments may find new, motivating, self-guiding purposes for writing as afforded within the whole activity of producing a multimedia, digital video text.” on the great rhetorical approach of  videos, he found that it was most definitely a project that could not be fully expanded with students' imaginations because of their limited resources. 


As a conclusion, Pennell found that most students preferred the usual techniques that a regular first year writing class would include rather than the new approach he took. Although he realized the attention grabbing was more effective than a traditional paper, he found that most students preferred not to deal with the difficulties of a new, different project. This relates to what I'm learning in my English 1311 course because we are currently in the process of a discourse community project that gives of the option of a video, billboard, or a pamphlet. I agree completely with Pennell because video production is a good way to grab attention, but there are limited resource that must be dealt with; as a result, my group and I chose to take the non-technological route prior to this reading to avoid the potential problems that we would have.

Pennell, M. (2010). H1N1 virus and video production. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 10 (3), 568-573.

Summary on "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love"

In Jim Corder's "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love," Corder creates his own definitions about everyone's life in general in order to prove that people have different stories, but can still coexist together by being loving, accepting, and understanding. Corder creates his own assumptions about everyone being a narrative and having their own arguments. Although this may be difficult to understand, Corder claims that we are all fiction-makers/historians and that we're each walking narratives. What he means by this is that we're all storytellers of our own lives. The narratives are life experiences and arguments define us as the people we are; we're constantly just standing some where in our lives telling others about our narratives. Corder explains arguments as what we've become. Argument in Corder's perspective doesn't mean what we all assume an argument to be, but it means perceptions that make us who we are, the decisions we've made, and how we've conceived them.

As story-tellers, what we do with our lives is just basically telling others about our lives and presenting it with the decisions that we've made and the experiences that we have within our lives. Corder states that we come upon other narratives that dont exactly have the same point of view as our own, and this can cause conflict. Unfortunately, Corder states that we must live amongst other narratives. Corder believes that it may be a little tough to compromise with other opposing narratives, but states that we can compromise by seeing each other, knowing each other, presenting each other, and embracing each other. Rather than avoiding the opposition, we can learn to live with them.

Corder's research deals with being able to coexist with opposing narratives and the certain methods that can be used to be able to live with them. He goes into detail about Carl Rogers's method. "the therapist-client" method and Aristotle's method. Corder goes on to explain Roger's therapist-client approach anf the certain requirements that mucst be met. Corder agrees that the therapist, acting as the audience, should be understanding and sympathetic towards the client, the story-teller.

As a result, Corder believes that we can all live in a world where we each learn to compromise  with one another and how we can learn to speaks and hear a commodious language. A commodious language meaning there's enough space and convenience  for everyone. This relates to my English 1311 course because we're currently working on a community problem research project that needs an opposing view. This is helpful because we can learn to see the oppsing view's prespective and try to accept it for their reasons on beliving this.

Corder, J.W. (1985). Argument as emergence, rhetoric as love. Rhetoric Review, 4(1), 16-32.

Summary on "Spanglish as Alternative Discourse"

As a professor at UTEP, Magelsdorf studies how often students use Spanglish as their common language. She states that linguistic containment, which is the segregation of students writing classes according to their language, has affected them and their perspective on what a standard language is. The consequence of linguistic containment is that people make assumptions about languages having standards rather than realizing the complexity of a language. Most Spanish speakers associate English as a standard language and become too focused on making sure everything is correct rather than acknowledging the actual language itself. The consequences of this are that people feel obligated to get everything right in the language and making sure they avoid the "wrongs" of the standard language.


Mangelsdorf described code-switching as the action of using two different languages in one sentences with one language as a base. This is obviously being spoken about how students use both languages that were learned together. Students living near the border have a variety of feelings about speaking Spanglish. Some students feel it defines them and makes them unique, others think that it is very improper because you end up not being fluent in either language, and some use it because certain words in either language are suited better for certain topics or feelings. 


Magelsdorf creates assignments to get a feeling about Spanglish and also invites her students to write certain assignments in Spanglish. Magelsdorf does this because she wants to get to know her students more, but she also studies the Spanglish language as well. She does not want students to feel pressured to use a standard language, which she considers both English and Spanish. Magelsdorf realizes that the mix of English and Spanish comes from learning both languages and using them unknowingly;  many students have been exposed and accustomed to Spanglish, therefore they use it quite often.Magelsdorf says that Spanglish resists the permanence of written text. This means that Spanglish is mainly a spoken language because it is more often used this way rather than in written language. Some students may feel discouraged to write in Spanglish because of the standards of a language. 


Ultimately, Magelsdorf believes that people should stop assuming these standards in language and just embrace what you already know. The barrier that standards causes discourages students to write how they would regularly write. Magelsdorf knows the languages are changing due to technological advances and believes people should accept Spanglish as it's own language in the twenty first century

Summary on "Momma's Memories and the New Equality"

In this article, Young speaks about racism, the new upcoming ages and his mom's view on the success of a black man in a predominantly white community. Young's mother has endured her pains with racism and realizes that times have progressed, but she still fears that her son will endure "microaggressions."

 Microaggressions are unintended racial slights and insults. This means that white people won't call out racial slurs like the "norms" of before, but they will use methods of being "color-blind" rather than just accepting people as who they are. This is what Young calls new racism, with gender being one of it's main fatures. This new racism has motivated white parents to encourage their children to become color blind or to ignore race rather than accepting it. Young uses the example of his friend's daughter, Shayla and how she experienced her first microinsult in her first grade class. A microinsult is an insult off rudeness that demean a person's hearitage or identity. Shayla was asked why she was darker than most kids in the class and Shayla began to cry. Shayla's mother asked Young for help but Young only determined that Shayla would only learn through accepting these faults in society.

As a coincidence, Senator Harry Reid made racial comments about Obama being light skinned with no negro-dialect unless he wanted to. Most people consumed this is a very negative way because it felt like a sense of less citizenship to them. English teachers are encouraged to teach code-switching. Code-switching is  taking a African American English and translating it into standard English. This is taught like it is a foreign language, but questions are asked about if African Americans are assumed to claim less citizenship because they're "foreign." This method has its obvious flaws, and new educators should promote code-meshing. Code-meshing is the mixture of racial rhetoric, dialect, and versions of English.

As a result, Young states that we can move on from this new racism by interrogating the new racism. By keeping silent and becoming racially isolated, people contribute to racism. People shouldn't base anything on race, but just let things be.

Summary on the Video "Let my dataset change your mindset" by Hans Rosling

Let my dataset change your mindset" by Hans Rosling is an informative video on research done over the past 100 years about the relation between health and success of various countries and regions. Rosling speaks about how misinterpretations have been made over other regions in the world. He proves his point right by showing data sets of countries and GDP. In most instances, regions such as Europe and North America were on the high scale of most graphs. Africa was usually one of the lowest.

Rosling's students defined Western World as a long life in a small family and a developing world is a short life in a large family. This means that the people which has large families had a shorter life expectancy due to limited resources and vice versa. They inherited these assumptions and preconceptions on world view from their teachers and the year from which they were born. 


When Rolsing breaks down the regional bubbles on his graphs into smaller bubbles that represent countries, their is a vast difference because the regional bubbles are higher on child survival rate making Africa the lowest on the child survival rate. Once the bubbles split into specific countries, Africa's countries get even lower from the before average of 80%. The new average of the countries within Africa drop to 70 percent (that being Sierra Leone).


The data set that Rosling represents challenges assumptions about global health because in general, the more prosperous nations have higher health and survival rates. Throughout the development of the world, Rosling's data set shows that the impoverished regions/countries catch up to the more prosperous nations. Rosling calls this "development" convergence because it's not exactly a development in the world, but a convergence of equal health and prosperity. Rosling also shocks the audience by showing that the more prosperous countries in Africa have higher HIV rates possibly due to situations faced with their heterosexual partners. He begs for people not to make the HIV "epidemic" a race issue because its not just all African poor people; his data set shows that the outlook we, as the more prosperous nations, had were wrong because we thought that the epidemic for survival was severe all over Africa, which is not true. 


As Rosling is demonstrating, the audience gets a sense that the more research we do in specificity, then the more we would learn about the assumptions we've had. Rosling gives a sense of hope in his speech because he shows that the convergence has moved in significant rates within the past100 years. By having the "industrialized" nations provide aid for the "developing" nations, we can have a complete convergence into a fairly equal world, in terms of health and survival. I agree with Roslings research because we, especially as Americans, have a mindset that is wrong because we're not developing, but we're converging. 






Bibliography

Rosling, H. (2009). Let my dataset change your mindset. TED Talks. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVhWqwnZ1eM

Summary on "Revision of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers" by Nancy Sommers

In the article Revision of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers, Nancy Sommers find distinctions between writers on different levels: experienced writers and student writers. sommers conducted a series of studies in the course of three years. Her research examined the revision process of student writers and experienced adult writers to see what role revision played in their writing processes. She conducted her research on twenty freshmen student writers from Boston University/University of Oklahoma and twenty experienced adult writers (them being editors, journalists, and academics) from Boston and Oklahoma City. Each writer from both groups wrote three essays (expressive, explanatory, and persuasive) and they also had to revise each essay twice. Sommers interviewed each writer and made a transcript with a scale of concerns that each writer had. 


Ronald Barthes was also a research conductor and found that writing and speech have vital distinctions; Inexperienced writers feel the need of constant revision and experienced writers imagine a reader. In this article, Student writers believe revision is defined as "a sequence of changes in a composition-changes which are initiated by cues and occur continually throughout the writing of a work." (Sommers, 1980). But, according to Sommers, revision is located after the first or second draft. The idea of revision being at the end, gives the writer better evolution in thoughts.


With this being said, she found that student writers would become too in focused on their revision. In addition while students were revising their paper, they would "scratch out" certain things for easy replacement; Sommers found that most student writers used certain operations: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering.  The student writers emphasized levels of revision which is being more on the specific words they were using, the phrases being written, the way the sentence is structured, and then their theme. 


The elements that were included in the experienced writers were that they envisioned a reader reading their product, their first draft would be made solely by figuring out what their argument is and trying to figure out what they want to say, and by seeking meaning in the engagement. Sommers  found that the emphasis on this rather than their organization was much more effective and stronger in comparison to student writers.


In concluding terms, Sommers found that Ronald Barthes theory of speech and writing is valid because you cant revise a speech. Sommers believes that writing should be more similar to a speech because through a speech the audience (readers) become more engaged. I'm in compliance with Sommers findings because my own personal experiences have led me to realize this. These ideas relate to the current topic in class because we're writing a paper and we're not focusing on any revision for the most part. 




Bibliography

Sommers, N. (1980). Revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers. College Composition and Communication, 31(4), 378-388. 

Summary on "Responding to Student Writing" by Nancy Sommers

In the article Responding to Student Writing, Nancy Sommers with Lil Brannon and Cyril Knoblach conduce research on teachers and their commenting styles of their students. Sommers explicitly emphasizes how comments have affected students writing in terms of the student writers derive from their original message, solely to meet the "guidelines" for writing a good paper. 


Sommers points out that comments are important because teachers feel the need to provide assistance for their students; without comments, students will feel that their paper has properly emphasized their ideas. Confusion strikes student writers, "The teacher appropriates the text from the student by confusing the student's purpose in writing the text with her own purpose in commenting." (Sommers, 1982)  The usage of the verb "appropriates" identifies that teachers don't necessarily pay attention to the paper, but rather set apart what's written to establish some sort of correction of their own. Student writers often level the importance of the correction over the importance of the meaning and ideas. 


This article states that comments are genuinely important when revising a paper, but the process of doing so conflicts with the normative of revising a paper. Sommers goes on to explain that generic comments or grammatical corrections aren't as useful as the years of workshop trainings go on to explain. Many teachers use the same "rubber-stamped" comments, which may not be effective. A rubber-stamp comment is a comment that can be interchanged between papers; this does not expose interest in students writing which may ultimately put students into an  unmotivated mood. 


Sommers concludes her research findings in a very ironic way by saying that teachers must revise their commenting/revising strategies. This will help writers organize their priorities of what their writing and how they're writing it. I completely agree with Sommers because of my own experience, It never struck me that my ideas were being pushed aside due to grammatical corrections and what professional writers expect. I can use this idea to cohesively write a paper/essay without thinking too much about "how" it should look like. Sommers findings are related to the current subject in my English class because we're always in a process of writing without concentrating too much on grammatical errors. 




Bibliography

Sommers, N. (1982). Responding to student writing. College Composition and Communication 33(2), 148-156.