Sunday, September 16, 2012

Porter


This quote intrigued me and made me think. All texts are interdependent and relate to other texts in some form.
“Not infrequently, and perhaps ever and always, texts refer to other texts and in fact rely on them for their meaning” (87).
I thought that it was interesting to find out that Jefferson’s writing in the Declaration of Independence wasn’t actually his. Jefferson borrowed most of his traces to make him seem like a creative writer.
“An examination of three sample texts will illustrate the various facets of intertexuality. The first, the Declaration of Independence, is popularly viewed as the work of Thomas Jefferson. Yet if we examine the text closely in its rhetorical milieu, we see that Jefferson was author only in the very loosest of senses” (89













Summary:
In his article, "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community, Porter attempts to show that ideas originality and plagiarism don’t actually show how texts work and how writers write. He also goes on by telling student writers the two key concepts of writing are intertexuality and the discourse community. Intertextuality is the idea that all texts contain “traces” of other texts. A discourse community is a group that communicates through a common interest and has a regulated discourse. Intertextuality should help students learn to write for the discourse communities they choose to join.

Synthesis:
Porter's article, "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community" is very similar to Kleine’s article, “What Is It We Do When We Write Articles Like This One.” Both these articles deal with writing and how everything has been written about. Kleine talks about hunting and gathering information before you start writing to find your audience and Porter does the same thing by finding a discourse community.

Thoughts:
I thought that this article was difficult to understand and was not able to fully understand the main concepts. The main points Porter made about intertexuality and the discourse community were interesting to read about and could be useful to students.

2 comments:

  1. I also had some trouble following certain parts of the essay, but you seemed to get the general message. We should be able to use other's ideas,as long as we don't copy word for word. So good job!

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  2. I also found this article to be a little hard to understand, but I did like how Porter explained what a discourse community was. I'm still not sure if I fully understand the intertextuality part. Good synthesis and summary!

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