McCarthy sees how students have to produce different kinds of work, and writing for different teachers. She notices how a student must adjust the way they talk to different teachers depending on their style of teaching and what they are looking for in your work. It talks about how writing processes in classrooms are all different and in every different class, students are presented with new speech situations. Therefore, it analyzes how students figure out what is required for each class and how they go about producing work for each class. To see, a researcher followed a college student named Dave around to a class in every semester of his freshman and sophomore years.
I felt I could relate to Dave because I too have to adjust my writing styles for different requirements of different classes. The fact that we are reading this article now is almost startling to me because I noticed myself encountering the exact same thing specifically in my politics class. The first essay in my politics class (as with many classes) was my worst. I did terribly and I thought it was because I had never taken a politics class before and never noticed the requirements of what it meant to write politically before. Therefore I had to be more informed, use different more politically correct language, pun intended, and also just use a different rhetoric than what I was used to in other classed. I adjusted and by the times my second paper came around, did so much better. I was able to change my writing style to fit the needs of the class in order to fulfill its needs. Therefore I understand that like Dave you will eventually get to enjoy writing once you understand what it takes to write for that certain class. You have to be a chameleon and adjust to your surroundings in order to be a successful academic writer.
I felt I could relate to Dave because I too have to adjust my writing styles for different requirements of different classes. The fact that we are reading this article now is almost startling to me because I noticed myself encountering the exact same thing specifically in my politics class. The first essay in my politics class (as with many classes) was my worst. I did terribly and I thought it was because I had never taken a politics class before and never noticed the requirements of what it meant to write politically before. Therefore I had to be more informed, use different more politically correct language, pun intended, and also just use a different rhetoric than what I was used to in other classed. I adjusted and by the times my second paper came around, did so much better. I was able to change my writing style to fit the needs of the class in order to fulfill its needs. Therefore I understand that like Dave you will eventually get to enjoy writing once you understand what it takes to write for that certain class. You have to be a chameleon and adjust to your surroundings in order to be a successful academic writer.
McCarthy, L. P.. (1987). A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing across the Curriculum. Research in the Teaching of English, 21(3), 233–265. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40171114
No comments:
Post a Comment