For Thursday...

Hello all,

Today we discussed writing and the writing portfolio. We really focused on aspects of academic discourse that is important when crafting successful academic texts. Please refer to the handout as you begin to craft your first drafts of the texts. Please make sure that you refer to MLA requirements (Please use the Online Writing Lab at Purdue for online help, refer to the Hacker section on MLA, or I have handouts which can help).

Remember the important aspect of writing is to guide your reader to understand your perspective and your inquiry. Clear and specific guidance and focus is important for allowing your audience insight into your perspective.

We also had a lively, engaging, and salient discussion and debate about American Identity as it is constructed in reference to moments and events of trauma. I think that the discussion and investigation that we had truly captured the purpose of this course (just to remember from the course description--The course focuses on exploring how the American culture constructs subjectivity and identity in relation to various traumas. As such, the course investigates collective and personal traumas and how the interactions with the traumas create a unique opportunity for creating texts that address the traumas from a variety of perspectives. The spectatorship of destruction is part of making meaning of the modern world. In journals, magazines, television, YouTube, or on the Internet, traumatic events are rhetorically packaged and sold to the hungry audience, an audience who repeatedly "looks back" in order to construct themselves. The course focuses on exploring how trauma affects identity in personal narratives and social structures. Students explore trauma in relation to rhetoric, examine various cultural traumas and their effects on the construction of self, and position themselves as subjects in the creation of rhetoric on trauma.

Have we accomplished this? What have we accomplished? What have you accomplished?

For Thursday-

Read-No readings

Write-Complete your draft of your research

Do-Bring your draft to the writing workshop tomorrow starting at 10 am.

Take care,

Kat