Robin Sandhu

Prof. Gabrielle Turgeon

UWRT 11o1-008

2 May 2017

Journal

Week 1 - Write about Swales' article "The Concept of Discourse Community"

Discourse Communities is a group of people involved in and communicating about a

field or topic. Wherever we go there is a discourse community. For example, Group of students

studying in English and Track and Field players practicing for their tournament. After reading all

the six concepts of Discourse Communities. I feel like it has a communication which are

centered around the community goals. Our class also forms in discourse community. On the

other hand, Speech Communities is something that people typically join through birth or accident

which are specially based on linguistic forms, cultural concepts and regulative rules. As

discussed in the class, Undergraduate student is a discourse community it is because they have

the same goal of their interest. Though Graduate student are not in discourse community because

they are doing something under specific form or in concept.

Week 2 - Write about Ch. 1: Thinking Rhetorically and Ch. 2: Rhetorical Situations

in EAA
Write a no more than 25-word summary of the readings, then write 150 words about what you

learned from the article/this week.

Summary

Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 tells us about how to Thinking Rhetorically and Rhetorical Situations

helps. They just tell us how these things can work for us.

Article

From both the Chapter 1 & 2 I learned what Rhetorical situations are. After reading I learned

everything has a Rhetorical situation. All writings have a purpose like whenever we write,

whether an email to a professor or to a friend, or an English essay for all the things we must face

some rhetorical situations. For our writing, we should also start thinking about the rhetorical

situations like for a purpose, an Audience, a stance, genre, and a medium. As we write to explore

our thoughts and emotions, to express ourselves, or to entertain it can helps you to analyze your

rhetorical situations more accurately. For example, if we must write about something with

specific guidelines of medium and a genre. So, if we started thinking about the rhetorical

situations are writing will be more effective. From my point of view thinking about rhetorical

situations helps everyone.

Week 4 - Write about "Fanfiction.." by Penzato

Write a no more than 25 word summary of the readings, then write 150 words about what you

learned from the article and how it relates to this course.

Summary

Penzato challenges Sommers on his statement about the students by which he conducted a study

of the Connections between Extracurricular and on their writings.

What I learned

As Penzato was doing research on four cases with different peoples. I learned many things after

reading his researches. As Penzato knows about their like and dislikes. He asked them to write

the essays. One of the thing I found really interesting about his research that all the individual

were really comfortable in writing. They were comfortable because he gave them freedom to

write freely about their fan fictions. I personally also feels that if someone is doing something of

their own interest they will do really good in it. They enjoyed their writing in their free time. I

only do writing when it became mandatory for my courses. I liked their creative process of

writing. This article relate to this course because every time we get time to do our assignments so

we can do them whenever we are free which leads to do the assignment properly.

Week 5 - Write about either Tuesday's readings or Thursday's readings.

Write a no more than 25 word summary of the readings, then write 150 words about what you

learned from the article.

Summary

Arguing for strategies article is based on how you can support your argument or writing etc. It

consists of strategies like Analogy, Classification, Humor, Narration and Problems / Examples

etc.

What I learned

From this article, I learned a lot. In the starting of the article it tells us about what is Analogy.

Analogy shows a comparison between things by which we can find out the similarities which are

difficult to find. The next topic was Classification, It tells us about how we categories group. For

example, Group A, should make a project on environment and Group B, must make a project on

Humanity. Humor is something which we tell in form of a story for a good effect. As I explained

in the class, Narration which can help to support an argument or writings etc. For example, A

teacher tells student Never give up and after that student make a A in that course. These all

strategies give me a new way of thinking, writing and telling examples. These strategies are

explained in detail in the article.

Week 13 - Write about your experience (or lack of experience) in compiling a Portfolio. Do

you think they are important? Why or why not? Why do teacher's have you make them?

After reading the pdf file I got to know what I must do in my portfolio and what material I

should put. I think portfolios are important because it is a valuable tool by which we can tell our

learning professional development over a period. Basically, it performs a function

to demonstrate the student capabilities and accomplishments, achieved through documents,

artefacts and empirical evidence, judiciously selected and linked together in a theoretically sound

and coherent fashion. I think teachers tells us to make because by this they will get to know the

concentration of student in the course and reporting on student performance, particularly in

standardized tests, and attempts to rank.

Week 15 - Write a discussion about Ben Yagoda's text How to Not Write Bad. Was it a

helpful text? Would you recommend it to your peers? Tell me your thoughts in 500 words.

Ben Yagoda`s How Not to Write Bad was a helpful text. I would highly recommend my peers

to read this text. As English is not my first language and I was having problems with my

writings but after reading this book I can see the improvement in my writing. His introduction

was really interesting. At first I thought he will talk about the common mistakes made by

students in their writing but I found something enjoyable he talks about a a piece of writing

about how not writing bad is not only about grammar but also about choosing the right words to

craft a piece of writing that reflects your personality. Basically, in this book he tells us how to

not write bad which consist of ability, first, to craft sentences that are correct in terms of

spelling, diction, punctuation, and grammar, and that also display clarity, precision, and grace.

Then he focuses on crafting whole paragraphswith attention to cadence, consistency of tone,

sentence transitions, and paragraph length. Yagoda makes our writing more effective by simple

steps. He also explained the points in such a way so that in future you will not make that mistake

again.

In his First Part of the book he explained his one word version. As these days, no one likes

reading or writing. He basically says Writing is an opportunity. An opportunity to express

yourself, an outlet for your thoughts, frustrations and ideas. It provides the information that will

be needed to write amazing papers and includes proof and research from actual written essays

and articles of the mistakes and solutions. As Yagoda said, most students cant handle writing

well. Even the most brilliant student writers fails in their writing/typing out what they think to

be their best and then had their hopes says that this isnt the right writing as what I was supposed

to right. The fact that we never really talk about what is wrong and thats the problem we are

facing in the writing.

In his second part he talks about all the grammatical errors such as spelling, diction(word

choice), and punctuation and how we should correct them. This was the most interesting part of

the book and I learned a lot from this part. After reading this part I can see the improvement in

my writing. After reading this part I figured out my problem why I was making all these

mistakes. It was because while writing all my thoughts was in my head of what a perfect arguing

point would be, or the perfect sentence, but I struggle putting that idea into words that was the

reason I was having all these mistakes.

The third part was almost the same as the second part. In this part he tells the details about the

common mistakes which we make such as quotation mark, rhetorical Question, word repetition

which I do a lot and making sentences etc. He talks about many mistakes that you should not do

when writing, like dont use these words such as unique because it is a hatred word.