Pb2B They Say, I Say

The book They Say, I Say it has a guide in the back to show you different templates for moves that most authors use in their writing. They give you twenty one different types of moves that an author can make—however that is not close at all to the actual numbers of moves authors have at their disposal. There is no limit to what, you, as a writer can make as a move. These moves are meant to impact the piece positively, which is why people use them so often in their own writing.

They Say, I Say is so accurate with the moves template that they use, you can see many of the moves used inside our course readings. In “Why blog? Searching for Writing on the Web” Alex Reid uses the template for Adding Metacommentary (A section in the guide about moves) when he says “In other words…” Carol uses moves from the template as well when she writes, “Now as you performed this kind of analysis, you likely didn’t walk through each of these questions one by one…” and continues on with her assumption. What move she uses comes from the “Introducing Something Implied or Assumed” section of the appendix guide. She also uses another move from the explaining quotes subsection when she starts to say, “Lloyd Bitzer argues…” Even Kerry Dirk uses the “Embedding voice markers” move when he says “I think it’s time…” in his article Navigating Genres along with using “Saying who is saying what” move when he states, “Taking what Devitt says into account…” The point I am trying to make here is that these moves are similar to conventions, they help build your argument and writing, however there is never a set combination or set of moves that you are required to use.

One of the moves I found was in Laura Bolin Carroll’s “Step toward Rhetorical Analysis”, in which she wrote, “The last piece of the rhetorical situation is the constraints.” The move made here is listing off her main points. Throughout the article she uses many transitional phrases that purposely make help better organize the essay. Without this, the article might seem messy and unorganized which would reduce the credibility of the article, so this move is an attempt at pathos.

In another section of her article, “Step toward Rhetorical Analysis,” she uses the phrase “Can’t judge a book by its cover,” this is her using a very common idiom to help the reader understand what she is talking about. She goes on to say that this inherently isn’t true because it’s a daily occurrence when people are faced with snap judgment. The impact of the move – using an idiom—is in the fact that people have undoubtedly heard this saying more than one hundred times throughout their life; so by saying a popular cliché it should not be taken as a fact that grabs the reader’s attention.

Alex Reid has a couple of interesting moves that he implements in his writing too; first off, he decides to use rhetorical questions. “What does this have to do with blogging?” Reid uses this question as a sort of pause in the reading to give the reader a moment to gather his or her thoughts. He starts off by giving myriad information about blogging and then after the introduction he gives this rhetorical question so to give the reader a moment to comprehend this said information. Then Reid continues to answer his own question. This helps the reader understand his assertion about why you should blog.

Lists are great way to present the information you want to give to the reader. Reid uses multiple lists throughout his article for this very reason—to present information to the audience. He lists off the top twenty five blogs as of June 2010 for the sole purpose of providing evidence to his claim, it strengthens it. It is very effective in the sense that the lists help you understand what he is trying to say. He even creates a table titled “Types of course-assigned blogs” where he lists different types of blogs in order to get even more of an idea as to what type of blog we are supposed to create.

Every author uses moves as part of their writing. It strengthens their essay by implementing techniques used by previous writers that are known to be an effective tool for their writing. They Say, I Say highlights this by actually creating a guide for you to look at common moves used in many writings, illustrating the almost formulaic tendency of praised pieces. 

Thlog of the week

Moves. Everything in the world is a “move” for something. If you look around a bar you’ll definitely she a couple guys trying to “make a move” on a girl, otherwise known as flirting or hitting her up. When someone makes a move it means they are trying to achieve something. When an author makes a move, it means he’s trying to affect his writing by implementing certain things into their writing that enhance and give purpose to their writing. Sometimes authors have their own move, their own signature that gives readers an alert that says loud and clear “this is mine!” Many people know this, but are used to seeing it in other things such as Picasso’s unique paint strokes or Zayn’s high pitched voice in one direction. Just like your signature on a legal document, these signatures let people know that this is something that is yours. Whether you know it or not, everything you read has some sort of move in it, such as a news article; they give you the facts while also posting their opinion to sort of persuade you. That is their move. When you listen to a protest they are trying to move you into supporting their beliefs.  So it was pretty neat to me to see how every author actually tries different tools/moves to achieve a goal an impact their writing. Something I am interested about is whether or not a famous celebrity accidentally made a “move” that made them famous, like maybe Michael Jackson was actually falling down but saved himself in time and just rolled with it calling it “the antigravity lean”.

If you like creepy music videos, check this one out: Panic! At The Disco: Emperor's New Clothes

Scholarly articles might not be so helpful.

When you hear that something is scholarly you tend to assume that it’s researched and most of the time correct. I also tend to assume that whatever they are talking about is way out of my field of comprehension. Scholarly articles tend to be peer reviewed and made sure to be perfected long before they are ever published to make sure that they represent the correct traditions and customs of their respective discipline. You won’t find a “scholarly” article that pokes fun at Trump’s wig. They are always on topic and constructed with the utmost formalities.

In the scigen generator you can find samples of so called scholarly papers.  They used common phrases that appear quite frequently in other published scientific papers such as, “Many mathematicians would agree that,” or “Suppose that there exists cache coherence.” And people are sometimes fooled by this. The crazy thing about this generator is that publishers in real life have actually been fooled by this and have published “papers” even though the scientific paper they received was nothing but jargon they obviously didn’t understand. A scientific research paper is obviously a genre, and the makers of this website just used multiple conventions of the genre and meshed them together into what appears to be a research paper. They put enough fluff into the papers where people will just skim through it and accept it as fact, because they honestly have no idea what the ‘article’ is talking about. This is really important to note because the fact that it can be passed as a scholarly article shows that it has enough of the same conventions as the actual article that it passes for the real one.

 In the article “VISUAL DISORIENTATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO LESIONS OF THE RIGHT CEREBRAL HEMISPHERE.” The author is talking about something that he obviously knows a lot about. Or maybe he is spitting out random phrases like scigen. The point is that the actual article published by Oxford University and the text junk spewed out by the Article generator are indistinguishable for me as a reader. They use so much jargon that is inconceivable for me to even attempt to understand the title of the article, let alone what the body is trying to tell me. The only difference between the two publications that I can see is the layout. SciGen is laid out like a lab project while Oxford’s looks more like the page of a lengthy boring article. However they both do include pictures that show you want they are trying to tell you—so the use of visual images helps convey the message to the reader.

The absolutely most important piece of any scholarly article is the title. The title is the first thing you look at. When you are late night researching up topics to write about in the morning before your paper is due—like I am currently—you look for articles with titles that contain the key words you’re looking for. Thankfully Google quickens this process for us. You’re not going to pick an article titled “Young minds use interpersonal manipulation between allies to influence potential mates” for your research article about economic theory. The point I’m getting at is that with a scholarly article the title has to present itself to the world and basically tell it who its audience is meant to be.

Scholarly articles are the bane of anyone who isn’t interested in the topic. Oxford’s article gives most people shivers when they find out that it is the reading assignment. However so does a nonsense article form scigen. They both have similar conventions such as pictures and jargons; however they have contrasts such as structure and actual reality of the articles. 

WP1 was due this week.

WP1 was due this week and that was almost a disaster for me. At first I totally misunderstood the prompt and so I basically rewrote my whole essay. I guess it was indirectly a good thing because if I didn't find out I would have a much more worse paper than I submitted. From writing the paper I actually learned some things for myself there, especially about genre. I know my last thlog I said I learned about genre, but I swear I learned even more about it this week from frantically researching what to write about. What finally clicked with me is that genre is even broader than I thought before, practically everything you see is part of some genre. The blog you are reading this on is a genre; if you think about it hard enough, your clothing “style” is a genre-- granted it’s not literary-- but close enough. Most of our learning this week has been from our papers that we did.

All of my lessons this week were aimed at me becoming a better writer, which would be a miracle in itself. I realized that I need to use a lot more evidence in my papers to construct an actual defense of my argument, otherwise it wouldn't be much of an argument. The last thing I learned is that flow of writing comes with how comfortable with and how much you actually understand what you're talking about, so if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re going to have a really tough time trying to get your paper to flow well.

Oh if you're ever feeling down: Be yourself

Who cares about week 2?

So I found out that my writing 2 class in college is the class I have to write most in, but I guess that is to be expected. At least I learn when I am actually paying attention. We learned even more about genres and conventions. We read the article “So what? Who cares?” and I thought it was relatable, because as a college student I find myself asking “who cares?” probably way more than is healthy. It helped me to realize that I need to make it absolutely why you should care about my writing? AT the same I need to ask myself who cares about my writing, and hopefully that will give me a little something extra in my writing—a purpose.

               

  Writing is a way to convey your emotions to the world, and to do this you need to incorporate into your writing pathos, logos, and ethos. Pathos is an appeal to emotions it helps the readers to visual vivid fighting scenes and magical settings in medieval Europe. Logos is a more logical attempt to appeal to readers, usually by using tools such as metaphors or analogies. Finally ethos is basically when you give reliability to your argument, such as citing your sources or just being straight confident when you give your reasons.

I honestly believe I learned so much this week that I’m surprised I wasn’t overwhelmed.

Song of the week:House of Gold

Pb1B: Genre Generators

I visited four different online generators to find out more about how conventions and genres work. It gave me a better understanding of what exactly a genre is by demonstrating that when a couple conventions are meshed together, they create a recognizable genre. The way these sites work is that the creator of the site first creates a template while leaving in some empty places that are like missing puzzle pieces. These puzzle pieces are the conventions. The reason why these sites are such great examples of conventions is because they actually show you a randomly made story, research paper, or writing prompt all just by plugging in words from a set of words or phrases that have already been defined as conventions themselves.

For example on my first generator (pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen) it gave me a whole research paper that looked rather legitimate. They used common phrases that appear quite frequently in other published scientific papers such as, “Many mathematicians would agree that,” or “Suppose that there exists cache coherence.” The crazy thing about this generator is that publishers in real life have actually been fooled by this and have published “papers” even though the scientific paper they received was nothing but jargon they obviously didn’t understand. A scientific research paper is obviously a genre, and the makers of this website just used multiple conventions of the genre and meshed them together into what appears to be a research paper.

Another site called http://pandyland.net/random/ chooses from its database three different images, and places them into random order, creating a comic strip. The site advertises over 74,000 combinations, meaning that they have around 75 different panels and then choose three in any random order. The comics work because they give crude humor that usually have an awkward comment, crude humor, or something rather violent which people all find funny sometimes. Each of the panels follows some sort of convention of the genre, that’s the only reason why you’re certain to find a comic that makes sense eventually.

Memes have become immensely popular, and it’s very easy to tell when a meme is used correctly or not. Bad-luck Brian is classic for having the worst possible outcomes. The first world problems meme allows people to complain while at the same time acknowledging that it could always be worse. The Scumbag Steve meme is used when you want people to know how bad of a person your roommate is. Each different meme has its own genre, and its own conventions. If you ever decide pick a meme and use it incorrectly and post it on a website like 9gag.com or reddit.com you’ll certainly get backlash from the community because it’s expected that you know which memes to use for which situations. So basically, when you use a meme you’re telling the viewer what to expect, but if you use the wrong conventions, people won’t like the meme.

Many people who want to become writers will experience writer’s block a couple times in their career, and need either motivation or a new and unique idea. My last example is a writing prompt generator I found off the internet, it is a site called seventhsanctum.com/generate and all you do is ask the generator for a prompt and it spits one right up. Some examples of the prompts it gives are “A fusion of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur and the legend of Orion” and "A fusion of the story of Hamlet and the tale of the Good Samaritan that concerns a group of band members." The prompts that created are entirely just a random person involved with another random event. Writing prompts are a genre on their own, they are all created to give inspiration to a writer that is fizzled out of ideas, and this generator does purely that. Just like every other generator this one gives results because it uses common conventions of the writing prompts and mashes them up hoping that they will inspire young authors.

Anyone who needs to understand what a genre is and how conventions are the building blocks of genres needs to visit any of these website generators. These websites were amazing in the sense that they can give you actual example of how conventions and genres work.

Generator websites: pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen, pandyland.net/random, memegenerator.net, seventhsanctum.com/generate

Buzzfeed's genre

Buzzfeed is a website that is notorious for hooking in internet viewers with taglines such as “26 things you won’t believe we found on other websites!”, or “Do you know how to make this vodka watermelon?”.

They use this convention because they know it works. They know that people will scan this headline with a quick glance while browsing their Facebook newsfeed and think to themselves ‘Why yes! I do want to know how get drunk from a watermelon!’ The people at Buzzfeed aim to grab the attention of the bored reader. The normal conventions of a Buzzfeed article include a short, attention grabbing headline, a list of things that apply to the headlines, or a quick quiz that tells you what Disney princess your husband is.

The main audience of a Buzzfeed article are bored teenagers and young adults that are just sitting at home, or waiting for the teacher to dismiss them, or just taking a break from working. You’ll see people busy on their smartphones swiping down the Buzzfeed page just trying to find an article or quiz or even a list that can distract them from their boring day. Because of this they produce articles that sufficiently waste enough time for them to cure their boredom for the few minutes that they have.

The purpose of these articles is to give the young adult mind enough stimulation that it keeps drawing them back for more each time they are bored. Curiosity killed the cat and the writers at Buzzfeed utilize this by drawing in our attention by interesting titles and quizzes. Quizzes give the readers a kind of pleasure from knowing that they were already ‘correct’ about what cereal flavor fits them best for their personality.

Articles on Buzzfeed usually contain funny videos and quizzes that peak the interest of readers. Some examples of these quizzes include “What Nintendo 64 game are you?” and “What Game of Thrones character are you?” I believe that the reason people are so interested in these quizzes is partly because of their boredom and partly because of they think it would be funny to see what the answer is for them, out of novelty. I remember when there was a quiz which Full-Metal Alchemist character I was and I got the main character, so being the fifteen year old I was, I rubbed it in the face of my best friend since she like that show.

Finally, the usual tone of a Buzzfeed article is a happy-go-lucky tone that tries to be as cheerful as possible. I think they do this on purpose because people are usually more receptive of a tone that is friendly and accepting over a tone that is condensending and critical of things that people have very different views on such as politics. This is what makes Buzzfeed different than other news and social media sites; it sometimes lets its readers to be exposed to what is happening in the world, while still giving a tone that can be seen as constructive.  They give a sense of humor while being serious when they need to be.

Buzzfeed articles have become a genre of their own, with their cliché titles and their just ridiculously named quizzes. They might sometimes be annoyingly abundant, but people do enjoy them when they have nothing to do.

First week of Writing 2

My first week of Writing2 was filled with a lot of information.

I learned about a couple different things about writing. I learned about the different levels of writing, such as first order and second order. I also learned about genres and the general conventions of certain writings. To explain a little bit more about the different orders of writing, I'll give some examples of first order and second order. First order writing is the creative and stream of thought subjects, such as when you forget to write that speech you were supposed to give in front of the whole class, and have to do it all ad lib. However second order writing is a lot more refined and relevant to the subject, which happens when you actually complete a rough draft to your speech and revise it multiple times before standing up behind the lectern. Genres are kind of like different species of writing; sometimes they share similar key body parts (conventions) like how cats and monkeys both have legs, however have unique elements like the monkey have thumbs. To give a more literal example, country music and country pop music both have very similar conventions, such as their country twang, however they are different genres because of the speed and tempo of the songs. Country music vs country pop.

That is basically everything I learned this week.