Writing at Cross Purposes/Pro-Verbal Boxes - For Feb 6

Hello All!

Was having major computer problems over the past few days - (A helpful hint, don't upgrade to Windows Vista unless you are prepared to hunt and search for each individual driver your computer needs & for the love of everything BACK UP EVERYTHING OF ANY VALUE ON YOUR COMPUTER) - at any rate, I'm here to comment on the readings for the past two classes and make some general statements about today's upcoming class readings.

Pro-Verbal Boxes and Writing and Learning at Cross Purposes:

All of these texts make very valid points; that confining the concept of composition simply to "written texts" instead of new media texts ignores the many other medias that surround the first-year student in an academic setting. It is also very important to note that perhaps these new medias are just as important (if not more important as some experts would argue) as traditional modes of composition - however - one point that I strongly agree with in the Pro-Verbal box article is that "composition is largely a conservative discipline." This is a really important idea. Why? First-Year Composition (which I believe this article to be largely centered around) should (in my opinion) be focused primarily on development and production of traditional linear text-based works. Yes, during these classes you will probably develop texts that will utilize new media, however, you will develop these texts in traditional formats, which I believe is the goal of a first year composition course - to allow you to create these "Traditional Texts." I would like to put out there that I am not against the creation of new media texts, however, I think that these texts should be taught in other classes, such as classes focused just on new media instead of composition courses. The other work, which discusses writing across the disciplines, comments on why students are writing. Students, and I say this simply from my own experience, write to satisfy the requirements of their audience in an academic setting. That is to say, students write for the grade. This is unfortunately true. If a student likes to use complex metaphors and similes in their writing and a teacher specifies that he/she does not want "flowery writing" (and yes, this is a term I've heard before) then for the most part the student will adapt his or her writing to fit this purpose. The article also made the point that students tend to develop more complex and rhetorical stances on topics when the topics are within their fields (i.e. a math student writing about differential equations). I have to completely agree with this - the idea that a student who is interested in the topic he or she is writing about will develop deeper meaning and complexities with the topic just makes sense. If you were to give me a paper on the biochemical properties of the human brain (a topic I know nothing about and have no desire to learn about) my arguments would be largely a "summarizing of facts" with a very low level of rhetorical argumentation whereas if you were to present me with a prompt discussing the processor speeds of computers and how it relates to a computers ability to complete complex calculations in a specified amount of time then my argument would be much more complicated and would also, unlike the 'brain paper,' implement the language of the discipline in a more natural manner.

As for the happenings...
The works often used the word "random" but coupled it with statements such as "controlled" or "order." Looking forward to discussing this in class today...should be interesting...