I get worried about leading the people we’re helping towards the answers and styles we think constitute “good” writing. Just coming from my own experiences there’s always a point in a class where I discover if I’m going to be able to say what I think without restraint, or if there is a way of thinking I’m going to have to emulate to get a better grade. I don’t think anyone would disagree with me when I say that we should approach this situation with the intention to empower our students own ways of thinking and their own approaches to articulation through writing, but as Wiley points out:

“…teachers who want to create classroom environments where students openly discuss their interpretations in order to grow and see and appreciate differences and recognize that interpretations grow and develop have great difficulty escaping familiar pedagogical routines. These are the routines in which teachers lead students to find the “best interpretations,” have students retrace the plot, look for the “author’s message,” and use class time to fill in what the students “didn’t get.” These are the practices where the students make all the important decisions, and students simply find material to satisfy what they  eventually realize is “what the teacher wants” (Wiley 65).

So it seems that sometimes, even if we are cognizant of the dangers that lie in normalizing acts of “appeasing the teacher” that can occur within the context of a single class, and even if we actively try and create an environment conducive to exploration and free-thought the role of Teacher and Student, and the dynamic that lies between is one that comes with some cultural-baggage that’s hard for a class to unpack and overcome in the course of a single semester.

You can’t change an individual’s perspective in a semester if they’re not receptive to change, and you certainly can’t do it in a two hour session at the ESL center. I’m loving ESL, but I had an experience with a tutee where I felt like me and the lead tutor where leading him to the ‘more polished versions of his sentences we thought worked better.” We worked line by line, tried to pick up the rules of his “ballgame” by cross-referencing what he wrote with the assignment sheet, and I think we did send him out the door with a number of changes to make that will ended up getting him a much better grade (the real object of his activity in this case).

What bothered me is that when looking at each sentence we’d ask him things like, “What are you trying to do here?,” and “Can you maybe explain the concept to me in your own words?” The tutee always helped, but his answers were often brief, and he passed the ball back to us as often as he could. So we were asking questions to try and center the activity around probing his own thoughts and getting him to work with the writing and the prompt, but often in correcting and explaining little tense errors and adding or changing articles we’d suggest other changes in his sentences, places to break up big chunks of writing in to smaller paragraphs, and in doing so I really feel like we were leading him down our way of thinking and not necessarily helping to develop his own.

Now I think there’s some validity in thinking that he’s getting exposure to the ways in which ESL tutors think about and approach writing, and that is probably good because then he can evaluate whether the strategies we used are ones he could attempt when facing a similar task in the future (that would be something like transference). But I doubt he came into the situation with an awareness of what he had the chance to observe (how someone else thinks about writing), and I doubt he’ll be doing any reflecting on the whole experience outside of following the notes we gave him, making the changes, and turning in the paper.

There was something less than ideal about the whole exchange, at least this one time, and I was left feeling a little blue after the fact. Even knowing our tutee was about to get a much better grade I still felt a little down because I worry that it’s something he can’t yet begin to do on his own, and in this case we functioned on some level as enablers, doing the thinking for him when we should have been better at throwing questions back at him until the only thing on the page were his own thoughts and ideas. This feeling and that quote up above is something I’m going to try and keep track of going into the next session, but I think part of the lesson here is that there are real limitations that we are going to run into; the stated objectives of the class vs. what we hope we will be able to do, student receptiveness vs. our own patience in regards to managing our own hopes and the objectives we have to meet in terms of the class, and probably so many others.

I often feel like there are Ideals and then there’s the Reality, and if you can shoot for somewhere in-between those two points you manage the pursuit of ideals responsibly without them taking on the quality of self-destructiveness. Our Ideals are screaming to us that the development of thought, the ability to articulate them in a way that others can understand, and developing the personal agency to know that your thoughts have worth in the world and should be regarded at least as much as the next person’s are all ideals we hope to shoot for. And the reality as it’s defined currently is that as teachers we will be expected to meet certain objectives in the classroom, and it is by these objectives our effectiveness will be measured, and as the Wiley article points out; if these objectives are linked to formulaic writing, we could be doing more harm than good if we don’t take the time to unpack the objects of our writing and help show our students how these exercises might transfer outside of the FYC class (or the ESL center). But then there’s the finite time we have in class or in a session, and a moderate employment of ideals might not be enough to reach someone who isn’t receptive to the idea of trusting their own thought process just yet. leaves me with a feeling like, “I can show you the door, but you’re the only one who can walk through it.” And somehow that doesn’t feel good enough, you know?

Anyway, that’s all the boring and brooding stuffs.

I really am having fun in this class, and I’m glad that there’s a whole group of future teachers (maybe) who are looking at what a role as an English teacher might look like, and what are some of the dangers connected to playing an authoritative role in the life of a learner of English (regardless of whether they are a primary or second language learner). It is truly heartening. Even if we don’t yet have all the answers, we seem to be looking for them, and this is a great conversation to be a part of.

I’ve been thinking about what writing might sound like if he or she were personified. We said we wanted to have fun with this, and I thought I’d try and write a thing for this class. So I personified writing, made it a man, and took the approach of Writing reflecting upon itself in a FYC course. He use to be about expression and changing the world you know, and now he seems to be about confining people into more acceptable and more manageable modes of thought, and I think that’d be young Writing would have a hard time recognizing. It became a rap about personifying writing. I think I missed the mark a little, so there’s more work to be done when I go back in there and put the character in the bars, but this is where it’s at right now.

So:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbsto_6emgc&t=13s

“I know abuela’s never really gonna win the lottery/ So it’s up to me to draw blood with this pen, hit an artery/ This Puerto Rican’s brains are leakin through the speakers and if he can be the shining beacon this side of the GWB and shine a light when it’s grey out…”

-Lin-Manuel Miranda

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94rLhcxfdOY

 

For some people being able to write is passport out of poverty and omnipresent alienation. This is one of my favorite tracks from Miranda’s “Hamilton Mixtape” (The other one being Immigrants), and I wanted to share it with you because writing and the circulation of ideas plays a central role in Hamilton, and it’s just interesting to see this awareness of what role communication plays in organizing people in societies across a broad array of artistic and academic fronts (including this class).

I for one am glad we are having this conversation.

 

 

-begin-

“GWSI helps to mask the role of social selection in the US” (Russel 22).

We’re aiming for this^, so wish me luck.

I was in this class that was taking a close look at American poetry over the course of a semester. The prof. made a statement like, “Poetry isn’t insanely productive, and it’s kind of an obscure field, and you can’t really make a living in poetry anyway…” He’s a good guy. He often plays devils advocate, or takes it upon himself to voice some of society’s harsher critiques of the things that interest us because he wants us to realize that we will run into people who will ask us to justify our fascination with something who’s (← weird linguistic thing. Must ask Saundra about the use of who’s in this case unless one of you can tell me why this sounds so strange) value is ambiguous and subjective. But I’ll admit it does feel like bullying in the moment.

I was perplexed though. His position ignored hip hop and rap. He’s a fan of jazz and says things like, “jazz is dead.” But there is insane amounts of improvisation and expression in freestyle rap, and battle rap is defined by not only collaboration but also competition, and I think those are qualities a jazz musician would love to play with in his or her own art. This prof. thinks poetry is dead, dying, and highly undervalued too, but poetry is flourishing in rap and spoken word forms.

When I voiced these objections he asked me, “is rap bigger than ever?”

I’ll admit there’s almost no rap or hip hop on the radio in Chico, but Sacramento is a different story, and DMX had a sound cameo that made Deadpool friken awesome, and more than that Hamilton is still a Broadway phenomenon that shares all the qualities we prize in the most mythologized works of theater past. The Broadway employs epic history like in Shakespeare (think Julius Caesar) when it re-creates the world of Alexander Hamilton and distills it into a sequence of 50-ish songs, and each of those songs is at least the equal of the most subtle and complex Restoration era stage drama. In Hamilton we see meaning rapped in meaning, and just like “The Way of the World” (← this dude loves this shit!) or “School for Scoundrels” (←more of the same) you have to have some awareness of culture to even begin to appreciate all the levels Hamilton is playing on. All this to say the language is acrobatic and dexterous which is a description I’ve heard applied to the great stage champions of the Victorian theater.

So why are some of us hesitant to recognize Hamilton, Hip hop, and rap for the role it’s playing in society right now?

In mapping out some of the foundational tenants of Activity Theory for us David Russel has this to say about the historical and dialectical nature of how we as a culture make certain judgments (sometimes without even being aware of it).

“…activity systems have histories essential to their workings. For human beings, these histories are predominantly cultural (though phylogenic change may also play a role). New interactions with the present environment arise from a dialog with the cultural past, preserved in meditational means (artifacts, texts, etc.). Meditational means (tools) may consist not only of tools in the usual sense (hammers, computers) but also semiotic tools: speaking and writing, as well as gestures, music, architecture, physical position, naturally occurring objects…” (Russel 5).

When he talks about historical he means that what we perceive around us, the world, is the result of a complex system of happenings that we now get to be a part of, and all of it continues to culminate in what we call, now. When he talks about a dialectical nature (or dialog with the past) he’s talking about how a conversation between two people (or a group of people) exerts influence on each other to navigate and interpret the present.

If one person speaks and has a message they are trying to communicate, even it the other person ignores the message and doesn’t respond the other person or group of people are making statements about how they are judging the situation, and that will have some effect upon the future and the individual actors who simultaneously navigate their awareness of the past and present to try and achieve (and even define) their goals on a day to day (maybe second to second) basis. I know this sounds crazy… It’s hard to articulate man. It really is.

When he talks about mediation (as in the Meditational means) he’s talking about the “tools” we use as a society to aid ourselves in forming our understanding of the past and present, the complex and ongoing relationship that exists between the two, and what directions we think we want to go having been exposed to the discourse between those two points. Remember in our last reading that writing is a relationship between the writer, the reader, and the text… so the lines that separate things and people from each other start to get a little blurry when we start to imagine history, the world, and roles we play in our world as a dialog, and not something that is more deterministically set in notions of complete autonomy, and free will.

In this case individualism, independence, and the meanings we attach to said words are cultural constructs that arise from a history we had no control of and have played at least some role in shaping our current world-views, who we where when we believed in those words inherently, and who we became when we realized maybe the world could be a little stranger. It seems this line of inquiry is designed to avoid reduction.

Anyway to bring it back to hamilton, hip hop, and rap later on David Russell starts to talk about the ways writing and displaying “competence” in writing (often as defined by an a series of encountered individuals who may not always agree and what constitutes competence with regards to writing) starts to inform the way individuals are selected to fill certain roles in our society (which doors we open for them, and which doors we hold closed for them).

“To successfully work, for example, as an editor for the New York Times or as a top congressional aid, one must be able to appropriate tools from various “educated” activity systems, including aspects of their genres. And people in these activity systems tend to be recruited from certain institutions of higher education that provide exposure to these activity systems” (Russell 16).

We have not been trained to appreciate forms of art and expression arising from things that might be considered counter culture. It’s a little pessimistic, but the fact that Hamilton is a Broadway musical has been the warrant for huge demographics of people to even begin recognizing rap and hip hop as the versatile art form it truly is (it can compete with the best of them in my opinion). But this highlights the fact that until someone made an effort to assimilate “rap/hip hop” into a genre and art form culturally and historically accepted as a “place where ‘high art’ that is worthy to be regarded happens’ rap was still viewed as a place and a genre worthy of “Othering” and maybe ignoring to the point that in 2016 when I took this class a highly intelligent individual could not recognize rap or hip hop as one major refuge of the qualities he so admired in poetry and jazz.

So if we pair this with previous reading about literacy, and the ways in which we ignore the potential literatures of other non-mainstream demographics then for me at least it becomes a little more clear that some of the preliminary comp courses might actually be agents of assimilation. You can have your culture, and we’ll encourage it, but this culture we’re teaching you here is your passport to some culturally defined notion of success and, more honestly, financial and economic security (hopefully) so if that’s something you want you’re going to have to become fluent in this culture too… but once again we do encourage you to hang on to any artifacts you deem valuable from your culture of origin (this too was pessimistic as hell. I apologize, but I feel this kind of thinking moving in the world sometimes). Russell perhaps says it best when he writes, “GWSI helps to mask the role of social selection in the US” (Russel 22). You can’t write for the New York Times, or be that top tier congressional aid unless you learn the culture we’re peddling and are savvy enough to prove yourself should certain opportunities come your way. And you can’t expect Rap and hip hop to be heralded as a modern day Renaissance of art and expression that is highly democratic and so in tuned with topical interests that it’s hard no to see it functioning the way pamphlets did in the days of John Locke and Erasmus and Martin Luther (the monk) unless you are purposefully ignoring it (or if the historical dialog that has shaped your understanding of the present is steeped in the ignoring of works produced largely by certain demographics of people as well). Rap had to had a Hamilton, a beastie boys, or a Love Below first before the mainstream would begin to examine it, and that is an act of assimilation disguised as an olive branch from a certain perspective… and from my perspective innovation.

Maybe sometimes innovation and compromise are synonyms, or at the very least functions of each other.

 

From section 1.3: “The expression of meanings in writing makes them more visible to the writer, making the writer’s thoughts clearer and sharable with others, who can attempt to make sense of the words, constructing a meaning they attribute to the writer. While writers can confirm that the written words feel consistent with their state of mind, readers can never read the writer’s mind to confirm they fully share that state of mind. Readers share only the words to which each separately attributes meanings. Thus, meanings do not reside fully in the words of the text nor in the unarticulated minds but only in the dynamic relation of writer reader, and text” (Wardle and Adler-Kassner 22).

 

This is like the fourth time I’ve tried to word this opening sentence. In thinking about who is going to read this (Kassandra and Kim most likely, and hi guys!) I’ve had a hard time negotiating with myself how to begin. I thought maybe I’d start with a story, something like:

Today in class our group was working on our literacy theory poster, and having a good time when they let me put a crack on the face of our phone.

This was attractive because it’s on the verge of storytelling, which is something I enjoy, and because it assumes that the people I’m addressing in this particular piece of writing already understand the context of which am speaking. I like that because it makes me feel like I have a degree of familiarity with you, and maybe makes me feel like you guys are “on my side,” and I can relax a little because of it.

 

I also thought about beginning in this way:

I really like the quote above and thought it would be a good place to jump in….

What I hate about this approach to inviting y’all into this particular blog post is that it’s kind of redundant and obvious. Why would I put a quote at the beginning of my post if I didn’t like it, or think there was something profound to be gleaned from its examination? I wouldn’t. Why would I call attention to “jumping in” when you guys already know that’s exactly what I’m doing?

 

Sometimes you just need a way in, and this second approach would have served that purpose, but it wouldn’t have been flashy… and I hate to admit it (or do I?), sometimes I act like a flashy individual. I’m working on it. I promise (or do I?).

I apologize for that^

Anyways, I decided on this last approach because I think it demonstrates something in this particular quote at least to a degree (<- transition sentence lol).

By calling attention to a few possible intentions behind my writing, and by by cluing you into the mechanics behind these writerly moves I am making (at least to the best of my abilities and awareness) I’m trying to show you that writing is a relationship.

In trying to be as aware as I can of you guys (my audience) I’ve attempted to construct an opening, however bizarre it might have felt to begin with, that shows the rhetorical intentions behind different possible introductory sentences and thereby call attention to the process of decision making in writing. But, I can only be so effective. You will have to work with me and this blog post and try and reconstruct what I’m trying to say on your own. And you will have to grapple with multiple possibilities as to what I might mean. Those of you that know me might have an easier time constructing something that closely resembles my meaning, those of you who have done the reading might even alter or correct my meaning, but eventually you will settle on a “best estimation” of what I am trying to articulate in this piece of writing, and when you do that you too will have made a decision about what my writing means, whether or not my ideas have any validity, how you might respond to the writing, add to it, poke holes in it, and whether or not these ideas fit within your own theory of writing as it stands thus far.

So If I can alter the original quote just a hair, which is fantastic and mindblowing as is, I might write; meanings do not reside fully in the words, but in the navigation of minds through a written text on either side of its production. The best writing and reading (or just processing of messages put forth) on some level is active and never ending (or if it does end, it’s hard to mark the place of its ending).

 

Now finally there is this:

This part will sound crazy, and I apologize in advanced.

I’ve been immersed in the world of social theory and perspectives (modes of production, and perspectives and interpretations), and I’ve noticed at least one thing. As a people or a public we change over time, and our relationship to history, or our perspective, always changes in relation to the challenges that face us in our present, or maybe some “idealized version or reality” we hope our world will one day fit.

I’m talking about Paradigms (1. a typical example or pattern of something; a model.: “there is a new paradigm for public art in this country. 2.a set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles.: “English determiners form a paradigm: we can say “a book” or “his book” but not “a his book.” ).

I think both definitions are useful, and I wasn’t expecting to run into a linguistic definition but that is fantastic!

I think that these texts we have been reading are holding up a previously existing paradigm of writing, and asking is this useful to us anymore? In what ways is it still useful? And in what ways is it maybe holding us back?
Kassandra pointed out a quote from the first page (sorry I’m going to steal it from you!), ”writing is often seen as a basic skill that a person can learn once and for all and not think about again” (Wardle and Adler-Kassner 15). And I believe this way of thinking describes at least one aspect of an older “Paradigm of Writing” that is limiting us as a Globally reaching people, capable of speaking many languages, and wielding a vast array of ‘modes of communication’, that are more connected than ever before… and because this ‘more traditional Paradigm’ no longer serves one of the (hopefully goals) of our time (the hope that we can communicate with each other and work together with greater and greater levels of proficiency) we are calling its tenets into question, and asking questions that hopefully will begin to lead us in the direction of a “new Language Paradigm” that will enable us to better reach for the goals and objectives we have defined for ourselves today, and will continue to define with each new understanding we achieve.

So you think about the crack on the phone (on the graphic our group made), and I like it because to me it represents a physical relationship with a technology of communication. Any technology we have wears out over time and is replaced with something more tailored to our current needs. Just like phones, even the newest and shiniest phone won’t serve our needs forever, and a crack in the screen is a reminder to us that one day we will need to replace it if we want to enjoy any kind of traction within this modern society of ours… and is it possible that the same thing is true of a language paradigm? Maybe we are realizing that we all need to upgrade to the new Language 7s, because our old Language 5 that we have is starting to run slow, and the updates are becoming too big for the old ios to handle, and we are sensing a need to move on.

IDK guys. Everything I write is convoluted. As fun as they are, these ideas hurt. I’ve had a lot of fun with you guys so far, and am looking forward to where these readings will take us (canned closing remark :P ).

Have a great day,
David

PS- looking forward to reading the comments.

Hi,

My name is David Puerner, and this is my 3rd semester at Chico State (though I love and hate to admit it I’ve got the 6-year associates from Butte college… and you’re absolutely right, there is no such thing strictly speaking). I love English as a study because it has afforded me the ability to articulate a variety of ideas in a variety of ways, and also I suspect it has introduced me to a number of concepts that share parallels in other fields… aiding my understanding of concepts and ideas in say, Sociology, for example.
I also enjoy Sociology.
I currently work at Burger Hut on Forest avenue where I am fortunate enough to work with the kinds of fantastic individuals who will analyze passages of Walt Whitman for me on their breaks (should I ask them), and who will quietly engage in philosophical debates with me about the benefits of “Psychopathy and the psychopath’s ability to cloak his or herself within Society” to Humanity as a species while the customers in the lobby gently munch away without an iota of frustration or any inkling of what might be being discussed not more than a hundred feet away from their quiet and comfortable meal… there is something appealing to me about that. We can talk about that sometime if you like.
I very much enjoy Beareoke, I enjoy but am not great at Ballroom dance, and I’m alright on the guitar. I love Hamilton the musical, and La La Land (More than even Rogue One, which I enjoyed very much), and have a great desire to learn jazz piano and guitar.
There’s more, but I’m sure you’re all falling asleep right now. I apologize.

So: Class things

In regards to what I read in a given day, and our essay about literacy we read for Wednesday, I would say that little to no time in the last three days has my reading and writing come from a book. I’ve printed out Syllabi and academic articles for multiple classes, and have read from those sources which, I think, are more typically construed as mediums in which high levels of literacy must be employed on the part of the reader in order to achieve some level of comprehension that is productive in some way (I’m having trouble being definite describing these things. See what I mean. Lots of qualifiers).

But a lot of my day is spent navigating my iPhone home-screen and my favorite apps (Facebook, Messages, Gmail, Apple Music and …I hate to admit it, Bumble). In fact, this is the first time in three days I’ve had to open my laptop to do anything. Anytime I’ve needed access to a computer in the majority of the last three days I have had my needs met through the computer lab in the library. Twice I’ve listened to the BBC World Report, and I think that there is an element of audio literacy that is required to make the act of listening to the news while multitasking something that is “worthwhile and productive” (for me it is easy for such podcasts to become background noises from which I derive nothing of value or significance if I don’t monitor myself and engage in some form of active listening).

The most interesting thing is this: between the hours of 4pm and 9pm the bulk of my reading is occupied by reading and interpreting “tags.” As stated above I work at Burger Hut, and for those of you who have never worked in food service “tag” is the jargon we use to describe the little slips of paper that print out on “cook side” with the customer’s order. We are responsible for reading, interpreting, and turning the order into reality… and we do so under varying levels of pressure. What I mean by that is sometimes there is one customer and one tag, and other times it feels like all of Chico has dropped everything they were doing to drop and make our lives hell (I’m talking of course about volume of orders here).

In this last example I think there are layers of literacy required of an individual in order to fit within a very narrow definition of success as defined by the situation.

1. Cultural literacy. What role are you occupying within society at this moment? And what are the expectations that come along with it? If you accidentally engage in a few tabooed things in any kind of professional capacity there can often be heavy consequences.
2. Language literacy. Actually reading and processing the tags.
3. Situational literacy. Understanding that the operations you must engage in to make sure certain orders all come out at the same time require the understanding that not all operations should happen linearly the way they are printed on the tag, but must be arranged in time and space so that the illusion of function, flow and efficiency is maintained and rarely burst (Bursts are how you get poor yelp reviews).
4. Social literacy. From my own perspective, I often adjust my style to the capabilities of my fryer. Some are superstars that make my look pro as hell…. and others require a lot of help to keep things flowing. I’ve found it’s easier for me to accommodate their capabilities than it is to correct every behavior to my own personal liking, and I suspect that they too are engaging in some kind of compensation for every different cook they end up working with too (so mild irritation is likely to reciprocated across the cook-fryer divide for every alternated pairing). But reading people and making adjustments base on context and situation is social literacy, and that is a skill that can be the difference between acceptance within mainstream society, and varying levels of pariah-hood in my opinion.

Below is comentary on what I’m calling quote 3, and a couple quotes that I really enjoyed from the reading.

I’d like to focus on the question specifically (The third quote below). “Is the ability to read and write a prerequisite for achieving certain social statuses, and, if so, how are these statuses elevated by other members of the community” (Szwed 428)? These standards that we are talking about become our metric for valuing an individual within our society. In my opinion (and thanks in large part to my experiences with Sociology. These are not all my original thoughts!) regardless of whether a person is considered successful or unsuccessful by society at large, a lot of agreement has to take place. The successful person takes their interactions with our system of grading and begins to build an argument for their relative success in the future. Both the system and the individual have to agree that some definition of success must be the result of their having been measured by our grading system (part of which is defined by literacy, which I think this article has shown to be an arbitrary construct in a lot of ways that is in no way divorced from politics and a history of colonization and imperialism). Likewise a lot of agreement has to take place between a society and an individual when they have been placed on the track to “less than successful,” whatever that might mean. An individual in this case, might start to understand that their interaction with our grading metric and our understanding of literacy is proof of something lacking within their own character. In my mind, when this is believed by both sides of the equation a lot of damage is possible, both to society as a whole, and especially to the individual who’s self esteem must be undermined from the first argument made for their settling for less than maybe they’d be worth if our system of grading and evaluating were constructed differently.

Convoluted I know^

If any of you could help me out I would greatly appreciate it.

further quotes:

1. “It should not be surprising to see differences in literacy between members of different ethnic groups, age groups, sexes, socioeconomic classes, etc. Indeed, one might hypothesize the existence of literacy-cycles, or individual variations in abilities and activities that are conditioned by one’s stage and position in life. What i would expect to discover, then, is not a single level of literacy, on a single continuum from reader to non-reader, but a variety of configurations of literacy, a  plurality of literacies” (Szwed 423).

2. “We must come to terms with the lives of people without patronizing them or falling into what can become a sociology of pathos. We need to look at reading and writing as activities having consequences in (and being affected by) family life, work patterns, economic conditions, patterns of leisure, and a complex of other factors. Unlike those who often attempt to understand a class of people  by content analysis of the literature written for them by outsiders, we must take account of the reader’s activities in transvaluing and reinterpreting such material” (Szwed 428).

3. “Is the ability to read and write a prerequisite for achieving certain social statuses, and, if so, how are these statuses elevated by other members of the community” (Szwed 428)?

Finally the hard one: On Ethnography of Communication

4.

“Dell Hymes has provided the framework for such studies, by isolating types of communication acts and by analyzing them in terms of components which comprise each act, in the light of preliminary cross-cultural evidence and contrasts. Such components include the participants in the act (as well as their status, role, class, etc.), the form of the message, its code, its channel of communication, its topic, its goal, its social and physical setting, and its social function” (Szwed 428).

Thank you for reading and putting up with me!

Sincerely,

David

PS- I’m running out of steam for delving into quote #4, but a lot of it rings a vague recollection from a communication class I had to take at Butte many years ago. I was wondering if any of you could unpack a few of the terms in quote 4? Again, you’d be the best forever! Thank you

PPS- sorry about the language in this post. Just having fun with the whole academic thing.