For accessibility purposes, here are the transcripts for the video lectures for this week. Captions have been enabled for the videos. If you notice I keep looking at different things, please be aware that I write my lectures in advance and read them, because (a) I am non-neurotypical and have difficulty going off the cuff sometimes, and (b) I’m just self-conscious and weird like that 😅
2.1 Unit 1 Introduction
In Unit 1: The Discourse Community Narrative, you’ll be thinking about analyzing the language of a discourse community, which is a group of individuals who share an identity and a broadly agreed upon set of common goals that are realized through the use of a specific specialized language, or “lexis.” A lexis might be jargon, as in professional language; it might be slang, as in Internet slang. You’ll consider in this essay how language locally determines and sustains community membership goals and values through expressing multiple meanings. So, words mean things explicitly, and they also mean things implicitly: there’s an obvious subject matter of the lexis itself, and there’s also underlying connotations or tones that might form or reinforce communal bonds. (For instance, if you understand the language without having to have it explained to you, it’s fairly obvious you belong to that community. If you can’t immediately grasp it, you’re labeled an outsider.)
So in looking at the various ways that lexis constructs a community, you’ll come to better understand the variances that exists within and between communities, as well as how communities require speakers and writers to adhere to specific expectations around the use of language, whether that’s professional jargon or slang, any stigma associated with use of certain language, the appropriation of language, the way tone is used, punctuation, emoji, and so on. For a face-to-face ethnography (if we were doing that), you might consider how members of a gym community speak to and interact with one another in the weight room, how they’re informed by the language of social media or magazines, and what their use of language would tell you or reader about that community. For a virtual ethnography, such as a look at Reddit, you might investigate how a word like “karmawhores” on r/AmITheAsshole distinguishes authentic users from trolls and polices community boundaries. So the discourse community narrative ultimately will tell a story about the community you’re examining in a way that allows you to think critically and question what you think you know about it, even if you don’t necessarily have answers to those questions. Remember, critical writing is about thinking through and then rethinking through. You can think of a narrative essay as not necessarily proving a point, but exploring complex ideas or thoughts about members of the community, and how language functions within and for those groups.
The essay, like all of our essays this semester, is divided into three phases of drafting. The first phase–which will generally include just your introduction of the community and maybe one to two paragraphs where you’re beginning to establish your controlling idea, possibly two to three units of lexis that lead you to your claim–this phase at minimum should include a tentative claim that you’re making, essentially the hypothesis about the role of a specific aspect of language and how it’s used in your community. How does the type of speech sustain the identity of the community? How does it reinforce hierarchy? How does it make new users feel welcome or unwelcome? What values might it imply? What values might it reinforce? And these values might be explicitly spelled out in the kinds of words that are being used, or they might be implicitly contained in connotations that the word might have accumulated in that community space, or outside of community spaces, if it’s appropriated, like from a different community or from the mainstream. Your claim must specifically apply to the subreddit you choose. So it should be fairly unique to the subreddit you choose or to Reddit in general, if it’s more like Internet slang, or pop culture slang. And this phase will begin to set up a paper that will analyze specific words as evidence of this claim that you’re making. Remember, every time you reach a claim, or a conclusion, a kind of research hypothesis, the central question to be asking yourself is first, “What do I know?”–so ultimately, your conclusion–and then follow that up with “How do I know what I know?”–that is, what evidence or signposts led you to that claim. And spelling out all of that is what will comprise your entire essay in the end.
By Phase 2 of drafting, you’ll be building on Phase 1. So everything scaffolds, you’ll never be starting over from scratch. So Phase 2 will build on Phase 1 by substantively revising and improving your controlling idea if needed, and it will create an essential relationship between the lexis and the values of the subreddit you’re looking at. So this claim will be substantiated through maybe three to four examples of how community priorities or values present themselves in speech patterns on the subreddit. This could include phrases, it could include words, it might include the use of tone, the way that replies take place, the way emoji is used or not used. This phase should approach the length of a full draft, and it should include the evidence–the lexis–as well as analysis, which is why or how the lexis constructs these community priorities or values. I recommend–even though this is a draft–I recommend that you work towards one to two paragraphs of analysis for each word and phrase. So you’ll be engaging very, very closely with each unit of language that you select. And of course, through workshops and one on one meetings with me, we will keep pushing you to be more and more specific and more and more engaged with these units of language.
And then finally, Phase 3 will be due at the very, very end of the semester in the Final Portfolio. This will be your formal draft, so your most final version, and this will meet the word count. Finally, it will account for all the feedback you’ve received on the previous phases. This could be feedback you received in peer review, it could be feedback from me that I’ve given you in writing or in one on one conferences, and it could also include feedback you’ve received from the Writing Center.
Speaking of the Writing Center, you can use it during any point of the brainstorming and writing process. And remember that you are required to go a certain number of times depending on the grade range you want. So make sure that you’re looking at the Grading Contract to figure out how many times you need to go. In past semesters, writers working on this assignment have found it useful to go to the Writing Center for brainstorming examples of language use. So you might, you know, set up your virtual conference with a tutor and pull up the subreddit you’re talking about and try to go through certain threads and figure out what words, language use, or grammar/mechanics use you want to analyze in your essay. You might also go to make sure that the examples of language you are talking about demonstrate the specific values of the discourse community you’ve selected. And you may also want to go to figure out ways to balance narrative and analysis. So by the formal draft, at least, you’ll be using some narrative elements in this essay. The emphasis will be on analysis, but as it is a discourse community narrative, parts of it will incorporate more narrative style or creative techniques. And finally, writers have found it useful to go to the Writing Center to talk about how to negotiate transitions between your own personal experience if it’s relevant, and that of the discourse community on a national global scale, if that’s relevant. And remember, all of this ties back–fairly reductively, it all ties back to the the connection between language and culture.
So that’s really the focus of Unit 1. We will continue to talk about this in class when we meet and throughout this entire unit. The assignment guidelines are available to you on both the blog, linked to on D2L, and they’re also available under the Week 1 module on D2L. So make sure that you read these assignment guidelines closely and come to class with any questions you might have about this unit.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
2.2 Critical Thinking and Pulp Fiction
So I expect most of you have learned the five paragraph model in high school, the template where you have an introduction, three body paragraphs, one of which might be a counter argument, and a conclusion. In critical writing, you’ll be introduced to a new model of the college essay, one that builds on the five paragraph model by virtue of being longer, being more complex in nature, and by asking you not to prove a point through broad insistence and generalization, but through openness and perpetual inquiry. In some ways, the model of the college essay asks you to try a bottom up approach where you draw a tentative conclusion, or a hypothesis about a phenomenon you observe in a narrow sector of society or in your own experience, begin with that conclusion as your claim, and then explain how you arrived at that idea. The academic essay is more often than not an articulation of your thought process instead of attempts to prove that you and only you are correct. So I suggest we turn to a new vocabulary for the college essay, moving from “arguments” to “controlling ideas” or “interpretive problems” or “claims.” So the claims you’ll make for most of your humanities papers in particular will likely be kinds of controlling ideas or interpretive problems, where you begin with an idea and explore a tension, disparity, irregularity, gap, or unquestioned aspect of that idea. These claims operate like research hypotheses in a sense, tentative conclusions you draw about patterns that you notice in observable phenomena. Research and writing are processes of constant interrogation and self reflection. So controlling ideas and interpretive models are preferable to unsubstantiated opinion, binary opposition, and solely agreeing or disagreeing–or both agreeing and disagreeing–without taking any real firm stance at all.
So let’s take a moment to talk about each of these things. Binary opposition is when you approach another concept with complete disagreement, like with a purpose of tearing it down. And this is unfortunately, how we’re trained to see academic argument. And it’s not really an effective way to either get your point across or to question another idea. The only points that can be utterly invalidated are bigoted ones and bad-faith arguments–so, that is, when someone is making an argument just to provoke. For the most part when engaging in academic research and writing anyway, approach ideas first by assuming that there is something in them that you can validate, and that you can build on, something that will help you better think through your own ideas.
And while opinion is fine in academic essays, it must be the kind of opinion that you can substantiate. For example, saying “My cat is the best cat” is an opinion I might have, but I can’t really substantiate it in any meaningful way. I can offer evidence, but another cat owner could do the same for their cat, and another could do the same for their cat, and it would turn into a never-ending back and forth. By contrast, saying, “I believe students are led to prioritize location extracurriculars and facilities when choosing which college to attend instead of looking at departments or faculty members”–now that’s a claim that begins with an opinion, but it’s an opinion that could be researched beyond a “he-said/she-said/they-said” framework. The initial specificity helps ground this so that any following interpretations are less likely to be overly broad or generalizing, you can and should offer your thoughts. essays are largely about how you think and arrive at ideas after all, but make sure that those thoughts go beyond just your feelings. Feelings and feeling-based beliefs are extremely difficult or impossible to substantiate in academic writing. Feelings do not substitute for fact or truth. And this is paramount since we exist in a disinformation/misinformation economy, where feelings are often swapped in for truths. And because discourse becomes based on feelings, productive discussion or questioning becomes impossible. Defensiveness is all that’s produced in questioning a feeling or belief. And this leads me to the suggestion that you remain open to being challenged and questioned in college classroom discussions and in your essays. Learning improves with curiosity and a willingness to rethink, and the interpretive model of the college essay encourages this.
And finally, the college essay is largely not prescriptive. So that is, it does not often begin with “should” or “ought to” claims, claims that insist on change. And change is often imperative. And you may want to ask for change in your essays, but save it for a “so what?” paragraph at the end. The difficulty with proposing in a claim that things should be different is that it becomes your task to offer concrete solutions in a sort of activist-oriented mindset, and usually, this takes many, many, many pages to do. It’s usually better to leave it as a suggestion for future work at the end, or save prescriptive claims for much, much longer projects, probably outside the scope of this class.
So to this end, I also propose looking at the ending monologue in the movie Pulp Fiction–which I hope you have seen, it’s an excellent film–as an example of the interpretive model of the college essay. The video clip is posted to both the blog and to D2L. So you’ll find a handout with the transcript of the speech in one column, and a blank second column, also under the weekly module on D2L. I recommend pausing me now and taking a few minutes to watch that clip.
So presumably, you have watched it, and in the monologue you presumably just watched, Samuel L. Jackson’s character begins with the passage he’s recited throughout the film, Ezekiel 25:17, and through repeated self-reflection, keeps challenging his view of the passage and its meaning and his particular usage of it. So let’s think of each section as a paragraph in the college essay, as indicated in that handout, and let’s think about the function of each of these paragraphs, and this is the “What the Essay Does” column on the handout. Before our next class session, just for yourself, I’d like you to try to identify the purpose of each paragraph and the signposts that tell you what the purpose is. Signposts are like signal words or phrases that indicate where a sentence or paragraph might be going: for instance, “however” suggests a contradiction, or “the truth is” suggests the finality of a conclusion that can’t be reworked any other way. So for the first paragraph, you might identify that Jackson is introducing a significant passage he’s about to interpret, a Biblical passage that, because its religious, comes with a sense of high moral authority. Note that what I just said avoided repeating the content of the paragraph. Instead, I tried to focus on the function of the paragraph in the essay. At minimum, it’s an introduction, but in more specific detail–and specificity is always valued in college writing–it’s an introduction doing this specific work, introducing something of significance to this character, introducing something with a high moral authority attached to it. Signposts that tell you this might include the name of the Biblical passage and the fact that he’s “got it memorized,” suggesting its importance to him. So do this for the remainder of the clip, and we’ll discuss your responses further in class. We’ll keep talking about how to formulate specific claims throughout our class. But for now, begin trying to internalize the structure of the college essay: more complex than five neat paragraphs, a process of thinking through a non-factual, non-obvious, and very specific idea, and of demonstrating or thinking about a previously unconsidered tension or gap in an interpretive problem.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai