Writing Self Analysis
Due on this course blog by 5:00 p.m. on W 9/9/15Context
For the next couple of weeks, we'll be considering an epistemological question that we identified during last week's discussion of "origin" stories – What is writing and where does it begin? – but we'll be extending that question toward an ongoing discussion of what should be the value of writing, personally and publicly, and whether writing can be tied to knowledge-making in any concrete terms. In calling this first unit "The Politics of Self vs. Other," I'm not encouraging us to think about these ideas as a simple debate or a binary construction; I'm merely inviting us to consider writing as one possible site of contention for other conversations about the value of writing as a public or private act. I really hope you enjoy digging into this next unit.Assignment
For your second TIRP Assignment, I am asking you to compose something like a Writing Self Analysis. This will require that you begin to actively apply some of the theories we are discussing to your own writing – specifically, to a piece of writing that you have already done – based on what you are starting to understand about- epistemological debates about the value of writing and what it can achieve (personally and intellectually)
- cognitive or expressive theories about how writing works
- key issues that writers are known to face when it is seen as an academic task.
Now, these are very broad understandings, but I have a feeling that one of them might interest you enough to actually guide your completion of the self analysis. So, I'm inviting you to draw on the claims of Bartholomae, Bizzell, and Crick in order to conduct this analysis of your own writing. If you'd like – and if you find you need to do so – feel free to draw on parts of the Phaedrus in addition to what we are reading for this week.
You may select any past piece of writing you have done for a class or within an academic context. In your self-analysis, I'll be looking for you to account for as many of the following as possible:
- the situation of the assignment (this will be useful for all of us reading your blog posts)
- how you approached it
- issues you faced in terms of your positioning as a student or a writer
- challenges you faced in completing it
- strategies you might have used to meet those challenges and complete it (in this sense, "strategy" can be taken abstractly)
- larger questions the assignment might have raised for you about the value of writing or the purpose or outcome, especially about the question(s) of where writing begins or whether writing should be done for personal or social gain.
Again, I am asking you to reflect on your writing from the perspective of a scholar of writing – someone who studies composition as an art that follows certain conventions and strategies that lead to success or failure – by using their claims, their discoveries, and their terms to help you analyze your own past performance in a way you might not have done before. In a way, you are using yourself as a case study for the expressivism/cognitivism debate we'll begin discussing next week.
While you will post your self-analysis to this course blog, I will ask you to submit to me next week a copy of the piece of writing that inspired this self-analysis. I won't be able to evaluate this TIRP without it.
Evaluation Criteria
Quality and Completeness – Because I'm asking you to compose in a blog space, it seems odd to suggest a page length. I need you to write enough to adequately perform an analysis of your writing by taking up some of these scholars' key questions and concepts. However, I can say that enough in this instance is typically several screens' worth. Overall, your self-analysis should be justifiable and grounded in the theories we are learning, but it should also show your comfort and competency in terms of talking about your own writing.Content – You're writing for a fairly public audience, so your self-analysis should be interesting, though it should retain a sense of objectivity, given that you are using Bartholomae's, Bizzell's, and Crick's arguments and terms as your analytic lens. I'm also looking for you to perform your analysis by relying heavily on textual evidence, and for you to move elegantly between making claims and quoting their material. Please write with purpose and keep your readers engaged. Feel free to embed links or illustrations into your self-analysis if those would help you explain certain concepts.
Evidence and Justification – Since you are using scholarly texts to help us see your own writing task as more complex, you will likely need to provide specific examples from the piece of writing you are analyzing, as well as from the scholarly texts you are using to analyze it. This will require you to move somewhat elegantly between various kinds of texts, and always be clear who is saying what.
Coherence and Framing – Your self-analysis should be guided by an argument/thesis statement of your own. In fact, it should be organized in such a way that an unfamiliar reader could follow along and extract a series of points. If you're uncertain of how to arrange your ideas, you might try organizing the analysis issue by issue, or challenge by challenge, or realization by realization, or concept by concept. Be sure to give it some kind of framing statement in the beginning that helps us, as readers, understand why we are reading, and some concluding statement at the end that leaves us fulfilled while also wanting more.
Clarity – In the blog space, your challenge is in genuinely communicating your thoughts, ideas, values, and arguments to unfamiliar readers. You are writing for a public audience and this isn't Facebook. Paragraphing, spelling, and polish all matter in this context.
Attribution – Please be specific and accurate about names, dates, locations, authors, and titles. Since it isn't typical for bloggers to include a Works Cited list, you'll have to find other ways to include the full names of authors you discuss in your actual post, and you can even reference the titles of their essays, and when and where those essays were published (if you think those details are relevant to any point you want to make in your analysis). If you do quote from their essay, you still can include a parenthetical citation (page numbers in parentheses). If you refer to something we haven’t read, provide us with enough information that we could find it ourselves, or embed a hyperlink allowing us to access the document.
Titles – Title your posts, and feel free to make them interesting! Titles should reflect what you have thought or written or are trying to argue. They should not simply restate the name of the article or assignment.
Posting – Post directly to the blog by logging in and selecting "new post" when you are ready to do so, and remember to consult the "blogging" handout in Canvas if you have any questions about logging in, posting, publishing, or editing. Or, feel free to send any questions my way.
This is work, and these were a lot of instructions (apologies for the latter), but try to have fun with it.
-Prof. G
