unccmadison-blog

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They’re back! An all-new posse of Potty-Mouth Princesses drop F-bombs for feminism to raise awareness, funds and a little bit of hell about the fact that 1 o...

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FCKH8.com Uploaded The Video: Little Girls Drop “F-Bombs for Feminism” in Bluntly Comedic Viral Video Educating Adults On Sexism.

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While choosing my article for the civic literacy I was inbetween this video and another feminism video. This was a Super Bowl commercial this year that highlighted the term “Like a girl” and brought forth its often negative connotation. 

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I agree that your dance team is a good example of a discourse community. Another good one l would recommend thinking about would be our dance major community. Take into consideration how we communicate differently than other groups and think about our common goals. 

I found this reading kind of difficult for me to comprehend, but I did find that overall it gave a better idea of what community discourse was. Swales states six different characteristics that make up a a group discourse community. When describing these characteristics, Swales notes several...

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Discourse Communities

Swales recognizes these six characteristics of a discourse community:

1. A broadly agreed set of public goals

2. Mechanisms of intercommunication among members

3. Use of participatory mechanisms to provide feedback and information

4. Utilization of one or more genres

5. Some specific Lexis

6. Threshold of level of members

Although this passage was difficult for me to understand I was able to pick out a few different discourse communities that I am in and have been in in the past. For example, I am currently in the community of UNCC, my dance program, a dance troop, and I was in ROTC. 

In each of these communities we have different ways of communicating, for example, in dance we communicate through movement but in ROTC we communicated through commands. We have different goals set for each community. For example, a broadly agreed goal of UNCC is to graduate. Discourse communites can be very diverse. Some can be massive such as UNCC’s 27,000 or very exclusive like my 12 person dance team. They all have their own characteristics and differences of communication.

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Writing Across The University

I found this article to be very relatable. As a person who is new in college and fresh out of high school I felt like this article was speaking to me. I too have had had the idea of a 5 paragraph, times new roman, 12 point font, three part thesis statement, double spaced paper drilled into my head. In fact after arriving to college I found it hard to break this habit. I was very nervous about having to learn a different style of writing outside of MLA. I think they should teach highschoolers about other styles too so they aren't dealing with even more new things in class than they already are. The transition between high school and college can be stressful for many reasons, a new style of writing shouldn't be one of them after we've already completed twelve years of school. However, I enjoy the idea of the world of writing opening up to me in new ways. Lets break the mold of what we used to think writing as and see what we can create.

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I found this article very relatable to my experience so far with writing. In high school I was taught one certain way to write: Opening paragraph, three main paragraphs and a conclusion. Then here at college when I was assigned my first paper in a different kind of style than was I was used to it...

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Radical Revision of Literacy Paper

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Shitty First Drafts

This article reminded me of something my junior english teacher drilled into our heads. While writing our junior exit paper every day he would remind us of the importance of havimg a rough draft. This was often linked with the importance of not procrastinating. If you procrastinate you are forced to turn in your first draft. Which is typically shitty. Even professionals agree that their first drafts are horrible. This reading reminded me of the importance of revising our own work so that we can give our best

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"Learning to Read" by Malcolm X was one of the most inspiring stories of self education I've ever read. Malcolm X transformed himself from a street hustler sentenced to prison and rose to become one of Histories most powerful and articulate leaders. How do you make a transformation so profound? Malcolm X tells us about the power of self determination. In fact, while in prison Malcolm was so dedicated to his own education that he copied the entire dictionary down by hand. Studying every page as he went and then applying that knowledge t the books he read. He was already seeing progress by the first page. In this passage from his autobiography, Malcolm speaks about the power of the dictionary and its long lasting effects on his literacy. All of the power the power he came to have was entirely because of his own dedication to learning. He was his own sponsor of literacy.

did you ever look up at the word “black" in the dictionary?

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Sponsorship and Access

This article followed the stories of two very different Americans on their journey to become literate. One, a upper class European American man, was given every opportunity in  the world to obtain literacy while growing up. The other, a middle class Mexican American woman, describes how hard she had to pursue an education. Brandt’s article highlights the social and political inequalities in our culture in regards to the opportunities given to people in different groups. Although both lived in America where we are all supposed to be “equal” and have the same chances in life, one was obviously having to work harder at gaining an education.

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Literacy in Three Metaphors

Literacy in my mind was a simple concept and had a straight forward definition until I read Sylvia Scribner;s “Literacy in Three Metaphors”. This paper was Scribner’s attempt at defining the seemingly undefinable. Scribner’s contribution to what she described as a “definitional controversy” was broken up into three metaphors. The first metaphor, literacy as adaption, was a more functional idea of literacy, originally used during WWI for describing the skills needed to be a soldier. Literacy as power was the second metaphor and it strives to describe literacy and its connection to community growth. The final metaphor, literacy as a state of grace, focuses on the significance of someones interaction with the “creations and knowledge of humankind”. Although these three metaphors are very different the all shed light on the ever evolving, fluid idea of what literacy is and means to us.