5 December 2008

WC: 1442

The Troubles of an Eight Year Old

Trying to think back on a pivotal moment in my writing career has been like trying to remember what the inside of my mother’s womb looked like. It’s not because I hate writing, I enjoy some writing quite a bit. But when I had given up hope on trying to find a memory, when I just stopped thinking about different experiences in my writing, I found a pleasant memory to focus on. It was during third grade when I finally was able to learn to write in cursive. The lead up to learning cursive and the events occurring in my young life melded together and reflected each other, now that I look back and examine the events.

I had just moved, for the first time, into a house. It was a summer day in June, the trees were a brilliant green, and the smell of fresh cut grass was wafting through the summer air. I was disappointed because I had to move and change schools. None of my friends lived close by, and I had also found out the girl I had been crushing on since kindergarten liked me back. I was a little irked at my mom, forcing me to move.

The neighborhood itself was quaint. On each side of our new house lived two little old ladies, one nicer than the other, but generally, they were both kind. The rest of the neighborhood was the same, old people everywhere and not a kid my own age in sight. Later that summer, a young couple with two little girls moved in, but the new kids were too young to be bothered with, and besides, they were girls.

However, all my solitude changed in August when I went back to school. There were more kids than I could shake a stick at, and I didn’t want to admit it... I was excited. The smell of school does that to me though; the smell of Elmer’s glue in the classrooms, mingling with the coarse construction paper, with the sound of scissors slicing through the paper, creating monstrosities that were supposed to be our mommies. That was beside the point though; I was in a new school and I was now a “big kid.”

Third grade was the place to be since I started elementary school. They were big, smart, could do math with weird symbols, and most of all could read cursive. Ever since the first grade when I had been introduced to writing, such as learning when a sentence was not at the end of the line, but where a thought stopped (it took me until middle school to realize what the hell a thought was). I also found out what cursive was, and it haunted me. Cursive was an elusive mistress, just out of my grasp, but still within sight. Teachers always sent me on errands at my other school, with a note pinned to my shirt, written cursive. I knew two things when I went on these errands: first, the note was about me. How could it not when the teacher asked me to go here or there. The second, and the one that really angered me, was that the teachers knew I couldn’t read the note and got their kicks out of watching me trying to decipher their loops and zig zags.

Not this year, though. This year, I was the big shot. I was wrong though, as most little kids tend to be. The new school I was at had mixed classrooms, that is to say, grades were mixed together. I was with fourth graders, kids bigger than me… well some were. I had never mixed with grades before, and I was a little intimidated. It felt too much like I was being vaulted into, not the big kid world I thought of but the young adult world.

After I had become accumulated to the older kids, I started to stress out again. It was cursive time. The year I had been waiting for, for two long years, had come. I thought that I would be solving world problems and having groupies of pretty girls massaging my massive brain in a matter of no time. Again, I was proven wrong. I witnessed my teacher and the girls in class make graceful strokes and curls and loop de loops with their letters, while mine looked little better than scribbly vomit on a page. After weeks of practicing, I couldn’t get my letters to look the way I wanted. On top of that, my hand was killing me from the constant writing that cursive entailed. Cursive writing was not what I thought it was.

My life, on the other hand, was the opposite of my adventures with cursive writing. I had a couple friends, my awesome skills in football were respected and admired in class, I was the smartest kid in my class, and I got in a fight and kicked some kid's “A.” Everything going wrong with cursive was going right in my life. My life was not forced like cursive, nor did I have an achy feeling after participating in life. I felt a conundrum; the place I was hesitant about was treating me well, but the thing I wanted to learn was arousing my fury.

My life did not get a break from the drills we had to do with cursive. After finally being able to write legible script, I now had to write my spelling words, 15 words ten times each, on a paper three days a week. I remember being so focused on my cursive, that the only word I can remember learning to spell was “nickel” and I’m pretty sure that was fourth grade. One thing that did happen that I enjoyed, was finding letters I liked to write in cursive. Any lower case ‘f’ would make me salivate. I went crazy with joy every time I got to write words like 'of' or 'off.' But that has always been me, always trying to find that silver lining to go with those grey clouds.

Surprisingly, my life had taken a turn for the worse. My mother was not dying nor did I get drafted into some war going on, but the friends I had made were all fourth graders. The end of school promised me to finally be the big kid in the classroom, the one everyone else looked to, like my best friend Nick. However, that happened at the expense losing my best friend to the fifth grade. The pretty girls had left as well, seeing as they were all fourth graders. That was not as sad to me though; they always thought that because I was a third grader I was gross (which was probably true) or short (I do remember looking up at them) or weird (I admit whole heartedly to this and still do).

However, the one thing that I was excited about the end of the year, was that I had conquered cursive writing. I could write it, I could read it, and I could not understand it (who really knows the use of cursive writing anyway, besides my teacher’s excuse, “It’s faster!”). Cursive writing did not turn into the bane of my existence like I thought it was. If anything, I would have to say, me and ol’ cursive were on an unsteady truce. I would not use it, and it would not hurt my brain or my hand in return. This truce did not last long, just the summer. I was so focused on being the big kid and smart guy, that I did not remember my friend Nick’s dilemma all year long: everything that I would have to write as a fourth grader had to be in cursive.

Those were the days. I can still remember some of those things clearly, like the smells. Elmer’s glue will do that to a guy. That year was the last year I truly felt like a kid. Responsibilities had begun to pile up more and more and year after year. The only responsibility I can remember my eight year-old self having, besides the standard house chores and personal hygiene, was my self appointed task. The innocence of the task still strikes me as naïve, learning a technique that I’ll never, ever use for the life of me again. However, the proudest thing I can and will say is that: “I can read your code now, teachers. I have broken it, and it will never be used against me again!”  

WC: 240

Muckelbauer Summary

In Muckelbauer’s paper, he starts off exploring whether imitation is dead, alive, or just to what extent it is still in effect in Academia. He explores many philosophers’ takes on the matter from Plato, Aristotle, Quintilan, and Nietzsche.

The first form of imitation he examines is repetition-of-the-same. This is just copying something adding nothing or taking away nothing. Muckelbauer acknowledges that this method is conservative and fundamentally has to oppose the idea of invention. He quotes Quintilan early on to say that to even make whatever is being imitated better, one cannot do this or they would fail at their original goal of making a pure copy (Pg. 68). Muckelbauer goes through this history of imitation, designating that it shows up in antiquity. Overall, Muckelbauer explains the use of this imitation exercise in that it helps students who have copied enough of one person to start writing like that person.

The second imitation exercise Muckelbauer identifies is repetition-of-difference/variation. This idea is one that embraces the short fall of repetition-of-the-same to say to repeat, one must vary (Pg. 77).  This means that one cannot copy the model, but differentiate their copy from the model.

The final exercise is “difference and repetition,” or just inspiration. This one was hard to understand, but from what I gather, this imitation is supposed to surpass the model in quality either through exact imitation (determinate content) or through the second exercise, through difference (differential reproduction). 

David Noble

Eng 319

Word Count: 304

Ancient Rhetorics Summary

Sharon Crowley begins her book by explaining that rhetorics is a good thing and that contemporary media has villianized the word. Crowley goes on to explain that hearing countries or other entities disagreeing about something, as opposed to fighting, should make us thankful of the use of rhetoric. Later, she explains the importance of where rhetoric came from in ancient Athens and how the term evolved even during ancient times. Next, Crowley writes about the differences between ancient and modern rhetorics, such as ancient Athenians not caring about facts. Later on, Crowley makes an important point about why Americans tend to be adverse to arguing, that is, ‘attacking’ someone’s opinion is seen as an attack on that person. Following brief examinations of various arguments and other rhetoric stuff, Crowley examines the ideas behind different words like dox and ideology. She does this to show why they were important to the ancients and why they are/should be important to us. After introducing a few examples of ancient and modern ethos, she offers a writing sample of Richard Seager, whose ethos is good, because it’s casual, but still uses big words that a smart person in his field would use. Some time after that, Crowley discusses various methods on how to argue using rhetoric in discourse. While talking about first, second, and third person discourse in rhetoric, she explains what they are, when we should use them, and also gives various examples of what each discourse would look like in an argument. Crowley then discusses various ‘grammar’ type rules for rhetoric discourse and closes with “Situated Ethos” and how to situate rhetoric in a social context. This is applied for situations like engaging an audience/hearer/reader to view your rhetoric and argue back with you.

9 September 2008

English 319

Dr. Allen

Foundationalism and Anti-foundationalism Summary

This section of Bizzell's book focuses on her defining Foundationalsim and Anti-foundationalism, what it means to practice both, and what the writing community has come to due to these ideas. Her first big idea is that in the nuance of trying to fight against foundationalism and establish a freer way of thinking, anti-foundationalism has become in its own sense, a foundationalism. In this way, she describes that anti-foundationalism has taken on the idea that ones mind is able to transcend normal thought and to think critically in historical contexts. However, the very definition of anti-foundationalism that Bizzell gives states that one could never transcend and no absolute could never be found (Bizzell, 204). Bizzell then goes on to discuss idea's such as the “theory hope” of anti-foundationalism, which is the idea that mental powers will be possessed by one in the same way knowing absolute standards would in foundationalism, which is pretty much like the idea behind foundationalism, hence the pitfall of anti-foundationalism (Bizzell, 205).

Bizzell later goes on in depth talking even more about academic discourse and writing-across-the-curriculum (Bizzell, 209). In this section, Bizzell offers the idea that professors should merely teach the discourse, but try and offer their student an in-depth study of the discourse. Bizzell finally concludes her diatribe by declaring that the reason for all of this mess is the enduring feature of American anti-Intellectualsim. She states that the American Academic is not only relcutant to emerge from their own disipline, but refusing to 'help out' or engage their University on a larger scale, as a whole, is seen as something less than an academic (Bizzell, 220).

WC: 334

Pratt Summary

Mary Louise Pratt starts off her lecture with describing a conversation between two seven or eight year olds talking about baseball cards. She chronicles the life of her son and him learning a language. She eventually translates this over to an Andean indian who wrote to King Phillip III in the seventeenth century. According to her, his work was found at the turn of the twentieth century in Copenhagen. In it, he relates Incan history through words used by Europeans. He related christian events dating back to Adam and Eve and put an Andean spin on them. Pratt details how he used, in his drawings, the positioning of the one in power, symbols, and how the Spanish ended up subverting Andean way of life.

The main reason for bringing up this guy is to show the power of imitation. He used Spanish words and language to show how the Andean people felt through the going-ons of the time. Pratt shows how he used the language to not only get his point across, but to also parody and imitate the Spanish themselves.

Next, she talks about European bourgeoisie and how they 'invented' themselves. She explains that they used the printing press to produce revenue and elevate themselves to riches. She uses these ideas to explain how in later life, people had become more 'simpler' because they were following the doctrine of their leaders who wanted a complacent electorate. I am unsure how this jump came about, but Pratt used this to illustrate current Americans lack of diversity and understandings through this, thus not comprehending dialects like the Andean guy and his parody of the Spanish.

She then goes on, talking about multicultural classes and how they act like a 'mind f***' the students and the origin of their language and history. She concludes with talking about Americans and the contact zones and how Americans need to learn to identify histories, cultural contexts and the like to value literacy and such.

WC: 1023

On Diarrhea of the Mouth

Voice is style. In my mind, there are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. It is indeed a strong assurance that I have made, but I am absolutely, positively sure I am right. I am right because I have worked hard to cultivate my voice. For fourteen years of my adult life (I became an adult when I was eight, I’m sure of it), I have strived to have a different voice from everyone else’s. Even until today, walking into any classroom, everyone has part of the same voice, the substantive part, which is “Valley Girl Lingo.”

Every other word out of somebody’s mouth seems to be “like.” The problem with that is no one is making a comparison. People also tend to “go” somewhere when they talk as well. This is the reason why I have cultivated my own voice, because when these words, when this diarrhea of the mouth spews out of people, I cringe. It might as well be nails on a chalkboard or two pieces of Styrofoam rubbing together. I feel my teeth crack when I hear these words as my teeth grind together, the socket’s of my eyes bleed from the rage coursing through my veins.

Listening in on a University classroom grates on my nerves, as each one sounds like a “Little Valley.” The stories students tell each other, how one “was like…” and “he went….” I made it a crusade for myself to make people feel as dumb as they sound while they talk like this. Before their story can even kick off, I have to start immediately asking “It’s like what?” and “He went where?” Because if we do not have linguistic standards, our communities will falter and we will end up feeding our crops Gatorade for the electrolytes.

I apologize if I make everyone but I seem like they talk like this. Indeed, in this classroom, I have never heard more individuals shed their valley girl lingo... for the most part. The array of voices ranges from pompous to reserve, but they are all a hell of a lot better than valley girl lingo. But, I can still see the damage of VGL, even in me. For instance, while I am drunk and talkative, I get the diarrhea of the mouth and spew “like” every which way I can. The sad part is, I catch every “like” seconds after it spews forward, causing my own pain.

Sadly, through this discussion, I have gone about proving myself wrong. Before I began this paper, I was sure that voice was style. I had imitated a section of Frankfurt’s book and laid out my plans for this paper. But, reading back through the paper, before I began my analysis, I realized I had shot myself in the foot and contradicted myself within the first paragraph of the paper. I had not planned it that way.   

I still do believe that voice consists of style. I have tried to convince myself that this is the case. However, I have realized that style is only a sub point of voice, and it is the content that is voice. Looking through pop culture only reaffirms my conclusion that voice is substance. For instance, Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin is spot on. Fey uses Palin’s style, but the contradicting and amusing pieces of the act is the content that Fey uses, establishing her voice of critique of the Vice Presidential hopeful.

My imitation exercise proves this as well. For this paper, I ended up doing two. The first one, making Frankfurt’s piece into my own words ended up more like a translation. I understood that one little section better, it flowed better, but I didn’t “write” the content. Anyone who has studied a foreign language knows this. After studying French and Japanese, copying words out of a book, or translating some sentence or paragraph, the piece still is not your own. Translating any piece into the English language could end up coming out five different ways, but neither piece ends up in the translator’s voice. Another instant of this would be to talk normal, but kick in an “Arnie” accent and sayings. The style used changes your voice, but the content you are talking with retains your voice.

However, my second imitation piece was my whole spew about Valley Girl Lingo. Through reading Frankfurt’s book, I felt like I could actually imitate his words, but not lose my voice. The content rang through, but I focused on using the slightly pompous, academic style Frankfurt used. I have no doubt that I flubbed some sentences, but overall, I felt happy with the piece. I never had to sacrifice my personal feelings. All I had to do was use Frankfurt as a mouth piece.

But what I had discovered was that voice is intrinsic. Style is an “outside” force, dictating how you talk and how you form everything else. Substance, however, concerns the what. What you say, what forms you use. When in an argument, no one examines how you say something, but what you say. The ‘how’ is superficial while the ‘what’ is intrinsic.  

However, even though I have come to the conclusion that voice is substance and style can only refine one’s voice, I still feel uncomfortable pigeonholing voice. I like to think that voice is indeed one’s own spin on the world in language form. But I feel voice is something I do not want to argue over. And I love to argue. But, I would with someone on religion or politics before ever arguing on where voice comes from. Voice is personal, it is us. To try and convince someone, other than yourself, that they are wrong on where voice comes from is just bad business. You might as well and tell them there kid is ugly and they look just like you. So, while I feel voice is substance, rather than style, I feel more happy in calling voice a personally intrinsic expression and leave it at that, and let whoever wants to, to decide what that really means.

He was going to have a good night of it, as he walked quickly through the narrow alley to the Temple bar, muttering that they could all go to hell.

Expression:

He went through the narrow alley of the Temple Bar, quickly muttering to himself that they could all go to hell, because he was going to have a good night of it.