Hello and welcome to the course blog for Exposition and argument HM Fall 2016. You'll be adding content to the site regularly throughout the semester. I will also occasionally offer feedback on individual posts or write general updates, so be sure to check in frequently.
A few rules for posting: we need to be able to sort posts, so be sure to use tags. Any post that you create as a homework assignment should be labeled "Assignments." In addition, if you are making reference to one or more texts, you should create a tag for the author(s).
You may also find un-assigned material on the web that seems relevant to our course; this should be labeled "Extras" along with any other identifying tags you deem necessary (e.g. if it is a response to a reading from The New Humanities Reader, tag it with the name of the author of the NHR piece).
And finally, you should feel free to use this blog as a forum for discussion outside of class: ask questions, seek advice, offer suggestions, particularly as you begin your research projects. These posts should be labeled "Meta."
You may suggest more tags as the semester continues, but these should be useful ground rules to start with.
How does the NHR’s vision of writing differ from your previous experiences? (~250 words)
ReplyDeleteThe New Humanities Reader’s vision of writing is “to use writing as a way of thinking new thoughts” (xviii). This vision of writing greatly differs from the majority of my previous experiences in writing, which have primarily focused on using writing a medium for conveying existing thoughts. The New Humanities Reader emphasizes the importance of intertextuality and recognizing connections between multiple works, whereas the majority of my writing involved recognizing connections within a text. Furthermore, the New Humanities Reader notes that “the writing process closely parallels the process of reading” (xxxii). This observation is entirely new me as the approach to writing that I was taught involved getting one’s existing thoughts onto the page, and then revising and editing to achieve closer, improved, and more precise approximations of what intended argument is. The New Humanities Reader also encourages students to challenge the viewpoints and arguments of other authors in their essays. Contrary to the common belief that “knowledge [is] true once and for all,” the New Humanities Reader proposes that knowledge is “always subject to revision given further evidence or new circumstances” and that students should use their writing to challenge others’ ideas and develop new ideas which may be challenged in turn (xxxiv). This particular vision of the New Humanities Reader represents an extremely novel viewpoint for me, as the majority of my previous experiences in writing were centered on the idea that the words of other authors should be taken as fact and that our essays should use those “facts” as building blocks for new ideas. Overall, the New Humanities Reader promotes a vision of writing in which writing is a natural extension of the writer and not an artificial construct created by the writer.
I need to take this course in order improve as a writer and develop the writing skills and approaches which will grant me success in the real world. Additionally, I believe that this course will enable me to find and make connections across various texts, events, or sources, and thus cultivate a style of thinking and looking at the world which will make me a more effective communicator and a more creative individual on the whole. However, I took a course at my high school called “English IV College Composition,” which is offered through Middlesex County College, and this course is essentially “Exposition and Argument.” Therefore, from my perspective, I am simply repeating a course that I have already completed and so I should not need to take this course. Yet, my own counterargument is that writing has generally been one of my weaker subjects, so the more practice, experience, and feedback I receive, the stronger I will become. Furthermore, even though I completed a course similar to “Exposition and Argument” at my high school, I did not complete the course at the collegiate level and thus stand to benefit greatly from completing this course. One of the key skills which I hope to gain is, as expressed in the NHR, “to use writing as a way of thinking new thoughts” (xviii). I interpret this statement to mean that writing should be an organic extension of the writer with the purpose of deriving originality from already-published sources. Just as The Party in George Orwell’s 1984 claims that “2+2=5” and gestalt psychologists argue that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, I, too, believe that an essay written to “thin[k] new thoughts” should reach a novel, surprising, and interesting conclusion by drawing support from two or more, possibly unrelated and vastly different texts (xviii). In effect, the writer should synthesize his or her sources in a manner so as to prove how the synthesis of those sources results in an end product which cannot be obtained from any one source and is also more profound that the conclusions reached in the constituent sources.
ReplyDeleteAlong these lines, I strongly agree with the idea that “whatever form knowledge eventually takes, it always emerges from a process we might describe as connecting” and feel that this idea best encapsulates the NHR’s rationale (xxv). The NHR is predicated on the principle that as a reader and writer, we should be able to make connections between different sources as we read and then express those differences as we write. The NHR also discusses at length and emphasizes the importance of the processes of prospective and retrospect view, however, both of these terms are subsumed under the process of connecting. Furthermore, the NHR frequently mentions that knowledge is an emergent property, always subject to revisions and new interpretations, so by explaining how knowledge arises in the first place, this one statement neatly and concisely summarizes the majority of the key points made by the NHR. The concept of the “shared horizon” arises from this process of connecting. In a sense, the “shared horizon” is region or theme which serves to synthesize two or more otherwise unrelated and disparate texts or sources into a new, cohesive argument or essay. The key importance of the “shared horizon” is that it is what allows the process of connecting to occur, and without it, there would be no emergent knowledge and no way “to use writing . . . [to] thin[k] new thoughts” (xviii).
Although I was familiar with the idea of retrospective view, the concept of prospective view is unfamiliar. In essence, prospective view is “a guess at the argument that might lie ahead” (xxvii). This is a novel concept for me as I am accustomed to relating what I have just read to what I previously read. However, by attempting to determine what the author might argue in what I am about to read makes the process of reading much more engaging and interesting. The prospective view would better allow me to gauge my understanding of the author’s argument and to better understand the author overall.
As a whole, the NHR presents a new perspective on the process of reading and writing. I feel that its main emphasize is on recognizing and forming connections between texts, and in essence producing an essay which abides by the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Overall, my impression is that taking this course and utilizing the rationale of the NHR as I read and write will improve my skills as a writer and an effective communicator.
Delete