Prompt: To illustrate the three moves of countering, Harris analyzes three writers’ rhetorical moves: Berger on Arguing the other Side, Millar on Uncovering Values, and Nehemas on Dissenting. For Wednesday’s work, I’d like you to do two things: 1) Choose one of the sources you’re using for your revision project and isolate a passage in the way Harris does. This passage should be one in which your source is working with his/her/their own source(s) and creating that critical distance Harris talks about in Chapter 3. Quote that passage and follow it with your own paragraph of rhetorical analysis that describes and explains how your source is doing it. 2) Your second job is to think about how you’re positioning yourself in relation to your sources. We’ll use Harris’s “Skepticism and Civility” (72-73). No doubt you’re forwarding some ideas, but for this exercise, you want to think about the limits of the arguments or approaches you’re engaging with. Write up this assignment as a Remote Learning journal entry (to distinguish it from our regular numbered entries). It should be posted by Friday along with regularly scheduled Friday assignments.
Quote: “Critique needs to lead to alternatives. Correcting the ideas of another writer may seem an intuitive way of rewriting their work— you identify what they’ve gotten wrong and then you show them how to get it right” (56).
Quote/Definition of Countering: “Countering looks at other views and texts not as wrong but as partial —in the sense of being both interested and incomplete. In countering you bring a different set of interests to bear upon a subject, look to notice what others have not. Your aim is not to refute what has been said before, to bring the discussion to an end, but to respond to prior views in ways that move the conversation in new directions” (56).
Quote: “As writers we participate in the discourses of our culture in ways we can never fully control, and may not always be aware of. Rather, the values and attitudes of our society are often insinuated in the very metaphors and turns of phrase, examples and images, stories and characters, that we are given to work with in writing” (63).
I am hoping to use these Gee sources (“An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method” and “Literacy, discourse, and Linguistics: and Introduction”) as they are, but I would like to expand on them further by relating them to my own experiences within the sciences and the humanities. I haven’t selected specific arguments yet and have quite a bit to work on in that sense, but I will definitely take them further than Christina Haas did in her piece “Learning to Read Biology”. I currently don’t have access to her work anymore and will need to get it from Cripps, but I describe her argument in my original paper as a way of learning how to think differently in order to gain access to a certain discourse. She gives student examples on scientific discourse entry. I want to compare this example of the student Eliza to my own experience of entering the science discourse; I’m hoping to take this a few steps further by explaining the changes I had to make to enter the humanities discourse and how I have to alter my learning styles to adapt to the mini discourses found within the humanities. Likewise, I don’t have access to “Scientific Writing and Communication in in Agriculture and Natural Resources” by Nair and Nair and will need to request that from Cripps as well.
