Reading Response 8

Getting Ready to Read
When I write I get help from my family if I am around them, my friends, and my teachers.  I also use the internet and books.  All of these people and sources give me help, ideas, advice, feedback, or assistance.

Summary
In his article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community" James Porter argues for a theory called intertextuality; that all texts are connected and all writing is borrowed from other writing.  This redefines plagiarism because it calls every writer ever a plagiarist by the definition of plagiarism taught in high school.  Iterability and presupposition are the two different types of intertextuality.  Iterability is the borrowing anything from "explicit allusions, references and quotations" to "cliches, phrases in the air, and traditions"  (89).  Presuppositions are assumptions that you make about a text based on the text.  He also explains discourse communities, groups that circulate and review pieces of writing.  What discourse community you are writing for determines how you will write and what views you will have in your writing.

Synthesis

This article relates to Margaret Kantz's article "Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively" and Michael Kleine's article because they all discuss how writers gather information from sources and use it to make one document.  These three articles are all for different audiences.

Review
I found the concept presented in this article, intertextuality, to be interesting but the article as a whole was dry and boring.  It is interesting t think that everything you write is a result of what you have read and what has been referenced to you.  Is intertextuality still relevant for young children who have not read much?

QD
4.  In the past I have thought that writing should be evaluated differently depending on what kind of writing it is but in general creativity, persuasiveness, grammar and spelling, and educational qualities.  In the past my writing has been evaluated mostly on grammar and spelling and how to follow directions.

5.  To write this article he must have gotten inspiration, facts, opinions, and arguments from other sources.  This supports his principles because it means that he in his discourse community he has gathered information to write this article.  It means that his article is the result of the synthesis of other articles, and that is intertextuality.

AE

2.  Plagiarism is claiming credit for someone else's work.  People are sometimes charged with plagiarism because they use the ideas of other authors.  Porter argues that all ideas are borrowed so that should not be a part of plagiarism.  Porter would write a plagiarism policy that allows students to borrow work from other authors as long as you are not directly taking their ideas.  The original policy is more stricter and would get more people accused of plagiarism.

Meta Moment

This article has less made me change the way I imagine writers and writing and more made me think about them in this way for the first time.  Adopting this idea would change the way I write because it would make me use other sources and other people's writing much more.  I would not think of myself as alone when writing papers, I would use other papers written by other people.





intertextuality the principle that all writing and speech arise from a single network. 88
iterability and presupposition two kinds of intertext 88
intertextuality examples 89 91