blog 5

Allen Summary: Allen explains how she doesn’t always like writing and that it doesn’t come easy to her. She also talks about how many great scholars in her field struggle with writing such as Bartholomae. She talks about the inspired writer and how it works against us. She argues that writing is “alien” to us. She tells us to not just send our writing to anyone to look over it, you have to send it to people that you believe are better that you at writing.

Allen response question: My experiences do compare to what Allen writes about. I have always thought that people who are good at writing, it just comes easy to them as Allen said. But after reading this article I do not believe that to be true anymore.

Murray Summary: In Murrays article All Writing is Autobiography, he tells us to not be afraid to make our writing personal. Murray writes mainly stories about himself nd about his life.

GRR: I have always been taught that when writing formal writing to never put yourself into the writing, such as the word I.

Questions:

1.     Murray wants us to consider making all the writing that we do more personal.

3.     Murrays writing is autobiographical, he doesn’t use quotes or other sources, he writes a lot of fiction. I think that Murray wanted to break out of the normal rules of scholarly writing because he wanted to show us that even if the writing is not completely true or if it’s about yourself, that it can still be good scholarly writing.

4.     There are many thinks that make Murrays article scholarly. He spent a lot of time it, it didn’t just come to him, he had people read it over and approve it, and many people like his writing.

5.     I think that Murrays idea of writing will change mine in the way that whenever I write from now on I will consider it to be more personal and to put myself into it. Yes I think that after reading this article it will encourage me to write differently.

MM:I think that understanding Murrays writing can help me to better understand how to put myself into everything that I write.

Dawkins Summary: In the article Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool Dawkins try’s to convince us that handbooks for writing may not always be true. Dawkins says on page 143 that we need to get our sentences to say what mean and with the emphasis we intend. Dawkins is trying to say in the raising and lowering example that you can make a sentence really stick out with punctuation, or not if you don’t really want it to.

GRR: The treehouse was made of wood scrapes and cardboard, and was a great place for my sister and her friends to play.

My sisters treehouse was made out of wood scrapes and cardboard, and was a great place for her to play with her friends.

My sisters treehouse was a great place for her and her friends to play, the treehouse was made out of wood scrapes and cardboard.

What I did to write these sentences was just use different wording in each to explain the same thing.

Questions:

2.     Dawkins believes that not everyone needs to follow the same laws of writing. Dawkins says that handbooks get many things wrong. Punctuation rules in handbooks are not always something all good writers us, punctuation such as commas are not always so important.

3.     Raising has to do with using commas and semicolons where they are needed, it also brings emphasis to the sentence. And lowering is the opposite of raising. It impacts the way we use punctuation because it can make more emphasis on a specific sentence.

5.I think that main thing that I know about punctuation after reading Dawkins article is that depending on where you put punctuation in a sentence can make or break it, or make it really stand out or not stand out.

6. When I write, I always worry about punctuation. I mainly worry about commas and if my sentence is running on for to long. I think that I worry about these things because I never really understood how to use them. I think that after reading Dawkins article I will not worry as much about them while im writing.

MM: I think that we read this instead of getting it explained to us because I think that Dawkins view of this article is much more assertive than a teacher could be while explaining it to us. I think by reading this article I gained how to use punctuation better than I did before.

Comments: I think that the Dawkins article was very hard and confusing to read, and I don’t think that I got much of the main point out of it.