Course Reading Reflections
At the beginning of this course, I personally thought that it would be a much more boring and complicated class. I felt that it would be very old fashioned classroom with many boring readings. Luckily, I was wrong. We had many readings this semester, but I will mostly talk about the ones that stuck out to me the most. I think that a few of the main concepts that will stick to me for a long time will be that of Intertextuality, Discourse Community, Rhetoric and A Cognitivist Analysis of a Writers Block. Overall, all of the readings that we had were fun to read; especially that of Malcolm X because I did not know much of his history. I think that his reading was one of the most remarkable because he was such an admirable man and to know that he was never like that in his past is very shocking. I also remember reading the article by Sherman Alexie, “Superman and Me” and thinking how similar we were. We both had so many similarities and it was quite shocking to know the things that he went through, and realizing that there are many people who go through the same is very relieving because you know you are not alone. Some of my favorite, but most complicated readings that we had in this course included “The Concept of Discourse Community” by John Swales. This was one of my favorites because I was able to learn what a discourse community is composed of and how everyone contributes to it even when we are not aware of it. Having the ability to read “Intertextuality and Discourse Community” by James E. Porter was something that made me realize something very important. In every class we are punished if we use ideas that are used in other texts; but aren’t all texts written by using ideas from other texts as well? I do not recall ever writing a paper about a topic that has not been spoken about before, and that was a very interesting topic to point out.
When it comes to relating each reading to our assignments, I think that every reading we had was somewhat connected to our next major assignment. For example, that of Malcolm X and Sherman Alexie were very impacting towards my Literacy Narrative. For my Discourse Community Ethnography, I used that of John Swales, and James Porter. Lastly, for my Researched Argument I was able to understand my assignment in a more clear way with the help of the article by Stuart Greene.