WP3

Summary: In Charles Bazerman’s article A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model, Bazerman introduces this connection between what a person reads and what he then writes and how that leads us to the conversational model. He believes that every reading should be looked as an ongoing conversation between the reader and writer. Bazerman also states that it is the teacher’s duty to implement techniques that helps students develop their writing and to make this connection clear. He emphasizes that students should have a deep understanding of what an author is trying to achieve and should know how to react to a reading as well as knowing how to evaluate a reading. Through techniques like paraphrasing, reading journals, and informal essays, Bazerman believes students can learn how to tap into their inner voice and become better writers. Bazerman concludes that if students are not taught the right skills teachers become “parrots of authority” and only offer students anecdotes of what a writer should look like rather than how to become one.

Younger Audience:

(link if its hard to read)

Older Audience: link 

Analysis: 

            For this assignment, I transformed Charles Bazerman’s article A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model into two different genres. Even though the new genres I made were completely different, they were actually very alike. The clear difference between the two was that one was for an older audience and the other was for a younger audience.

For my younger audience, I decided to construct a “Wikihow” article. From the Bazerman article, there was one sentence that stood out to me and served as my inspiration in creating this piece. Bazerman states, “By establishing the importance of the voice of the writer and the authority of personal perception, we have learned to give weight to what the student wants to say, to be patient with the complex process of writing, to offer sympathetic advice on how to rather than what not to, and to help the student discover the personal motivations to learn to write,” (Bazerman 576). Wikihow articles are all about the how to, like Bazerman suggests. Coming up through high school I feel like we are always told what not to do. With that in mind, I decided to target the age groups of high school students, specifically freshman.

There were many aspects from the Bazerman article that I could have included but I decided to focus on the “How to Respond to Reading” aspect part of the article. I did this because before any writing we should always focus on understanding the material first. I broke down my how to article into three parts - annotations, reading journals, and informal reaction essays. I did this because these three were the best to describe and show how to create them. These three parts were also in Bazerman’s main recommendations to teachers. He suggested that these techniques should be used to help students become better writers. For my moves in the genre transformation, I decided to use really calm and simple language. I was careful with the words I chose because I did not want to tell students what not to do. I made sure to address them in the second person point of view making it seem more personal. To keep the reader’s attention, I used simple pictures that were also a main convention in the “Wikihow” article genre. I feel like many students can find the article helpful. The topic I chose in my article will help students become better writers. I also feel like my article follows Bazerman’s main goal of wanting to help students.

For my older audience, I decided to transform Bazerman’s article into a college professors lecture slide - specifically the very first lecture. The main audience I decided to target undergraduate students in a writing course. For my inspiration in creating this piece, I looked at multiple professors’ first lecture slides and this is what I came up with. The first half of my slides were normal conventions that make up lecture slides on the first day. The slides may look plain but this was done on purpose. After looking at multiple power points from different professors, most were done with minimal effort and kept that same ‘plain’ look that I used. My first half of power point slides were these typical, normal slides. I named these slides as introduction, syllabus, and so on. I used these because these were the common slides I saw from previous professors. This also gave more a ‘classroom/lecture’ feel to the power point. The next half of power point slides were more content based slides from the Bazerman reading. Some slides that I used were “accurate understanding of prior comments”, “reacting to reading”, and “evaluating to reading.” These were direct concepts from the article Bazerman. I did my best to add talking points and not directly define them on the slide. I did this because a professor usually does not type out or read out from slides directly. This is why I kept my content on the slides shorter than longer.  

In Spaces for Writing by Losh and Alexander, they state, “Each writing situation has it owns demands…its own expectations…and its own sense of how writing is to be presented,” (Losh and Alexander, 9). Although each transformation had the same general idea, each demanded its own way of being presented. Thus, this lead to the creation of two different genres. This was because they each needed to reach a different audience. This can be seen first-handed by our WP3 and how we created one thing to another. Even though this specific WP required a more first-order approach to it, it cemented the idea of genre and wraps up the class nicely.