Blog 3

GRR: There are many places that I go for help and ideas when I am writing. The first way I would get help is asking my friends for their ideas and inputs. After that I would go to teachers and parents. But when it comes to proof reading a paper I will always go to my teachers first because it is their corrections that I would trust most out of anyone’s.

Porter article summary: In Porter’s article Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” he try’s to define exactly what plagiarism is, and how to define it. I really like how he uses the example of Jefferson on page 89 and 90 about if he turned the Declaration into a teacher it would be considered plagiarism. Porter brings up the idea on page 93 that every new writing is just an addition or and update to previously written things. Porter believes that all writing assignments should be intertextual. I think that overall this was a good chapter to read, but the last three pages were a little hard for me to understand what Porter was talking about the whole romantic writer.

2. Im not 100% sure that I understand what Porter is talking about when he says intertext, but I think he is just say that people take bits of pieces from everyone else’s writing to make their own writing. If this is what Porter is say then I do agree with him that by doing this it does take away from the individuality and importance of peoples writing.

3. I think Porter calls an autonomous writer romantic because when people read there writing they think that it is so much better than it actually is because they think it all of the authors own words and thoughts when really they came from other people.  

4. Prior to reading this I thought that writing should be evaluated on how a teacher grades it or what grade you got on a specific paper determines how good it was. This is always the way that my writing has been evaluated in the past, and sometimes I feel like it is not fair for teachers to evaluate you just based on the format they gave you to write the paper. Sometimes even if you go outsides the format or what the teacher conciders “acceptability” it is still good work, but the teacher is just so caught up in the format that of how it’s supposed to look, and when they do not see that they automatically say it is no good.

5. I think that if Porter believes in the whole intertextuality idea, that he cannot possibly believe what he has just written in this chapter are all of his own words and original thoughts. Therefore I think that it would be impossible for him to write an original article on anything based on this idea of intertextuality.

6. Porter says that the harm in imagining writing like this is that it is really never an individual piece of writing, all of those ideas had to come from somewhere. I think that in the classroom setting it brings up the problem of, well if these are not my own thoughts and this paper is not individual, than whose is it? This also causes problems for students because it can cause them to try and become great writers without taking all of the necessary steps.

MM: Porter’s study has greatly changed the way I look at writing. Before I thought that everything I wrote was original and my idea except for the quotes. But after reading this article, it has taught me that nothing is really mine I feel like and someone before me had already that idea or said those words. I don’t know that his article will change the way I write, but it will definitely make me look at writing in a different way than before.