Since my second entry in the Ethnography Notes, I have had an influx of writing assignments, particularly manifesting in essays and analyses of other people’s writing. By now, I have quite a lot of practice in writing essays, but the fact that I have been working on three in quick succession gave me time to reflect on how I write them. Normally, I start with a rough outline at the top of the page, which I highlight in a bright color so I don’t forget to delete it when I’m done with the paper. The outline for longer essays can take up a page in itself, since it has several subcategories and tangents under each heading. From then on, I start with the introduction, and highlight my working thesis so I can remember to change it to something that fits the topic better if I think about it. I tend to write the paragraphs in the order in which they appear. However, for one particular class I had, in which a series of four essays were the only assignments and grades given out, I changed this strategy by adding a special paragraph just after the introduction which I finished writing after every other paragraph, which included all of my sources and relevant criticism from experts in the field. Aside from that, the manner in which I write essays is not substantially different from the way I wrote them in middle school or high school: it’s just that the stakes are higher now.
Commonplace 10
These are some of the lyrics to the song Waterloo from the band ABBA: one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite bands. The whole song is an extended metaphor using Napoleon’s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo as an example of how a person has been overcome by a lover’s advances and finally gives in to them. I know the song is meant to be sweet and about finally realizing love after trying to deny it, but these particular lyrics out of context always seemed to be oddly violent to me. It sends the exact opposite message as the rest of the song, as it seems the singer is being physically assaulted by their partner and, at the end, gives up on living a life for their own. Rather than learning to fall in love, it seems the singer is either being coerced into a loveless relationship by violence, or is so enamored with their lover that they cannot bear the possibility of being without them. That later theme is actually part of the subtext of SOS, another ABBA song, which has a singer who struggles to even imagine how to live now that their lover is gone, so my interpretation of these lyrics from Waterloo may have been intended.
Ethnography 2
Since I wrote my first entry in the Ethnography Notes, I have started to change the way I write in my log. For one, I have started to use choppier sentences, closer to how I actually speak in real life. This is probably because I have become aware of how I was writing before, and realized that writing formally for a private log is not worth the effort. Aside from that, I am still writing for The Caravel newspaper, with my writing style still unchanged — probably for the better, since people read it to understand the world around them instead of for an exercise in freeing oneself from grammatical limitations and conventions. I think it would also be disrespectful to write about a disaster using slang. On the subject of The Caravel, every article I write goes through at least two phases of editing to iron out any errors and make the writing more concise. I noticed that the editors prefer to split any longer sentences I may have in two instead of using semicolons, even in cases where I already had semicolons. I’m not exactly sure what the purpose of that is, but I think the editors naturally expect someone to read a newspaper article in a more meticulous manner than any other type of writing, so any longer sentences may cause the reader to become fatigued. Regardless, I have had practise with formal and informal writing this week, so this should serve as a good baseline for future ethnography note entries.
Ethnography 1
I very rarely write in a non-formal setting. Aside from writing essays for class, most of the writing I do is either for The Caravel newspaper or for emails. The one exception to this is that I began keeping a log of everything I do in a day for future reference, so that I can look back on it later. Since that is only meant for myself, I naturally don’t have to follow the same grammatical conventions as a more formal piece of writing. That being said, I think the language I use in my log is just about the same as I would use in a formal letter; the practices are so ingrained in my subconscious that I can’t shake them. The one place where I tend to ignore highly-structured grammar rules is in my Creative Writing class. That class is structured in a way in which each assignment has a certain theme in mind as a goal, but the way in which you are meant to get to that goal is completely free. I think my writing is at its best after 1:00AM, because I take fewer precautions in thinking about what I should or should not say. It also helps to be in silence, so that I can be focused on the task at hand. I would rather write for an audience than for myself or for a teacher. I think, in a better world, essays could be written to be performed in front of a crowd. I say this because the academic world as it is is so detached from the rest of humanity that they essentially exist for the same reasons circuses do; they occasionally provide something interesting to look at and don’t cost particularly much to upkeep.
Reading Summary 4
In one chapter of Winning Arguments titled “Academic Arguments,” author Stanley Fish claims that the world of academic discourse, which attempts to give the appearance of presenting facts in an unbiased and opinionated manner, is in fact beholden to an unwritten decorum. He theorizes that modern academics have formed an “interpretive community,” defined as a group of people who follow an ingrained precedent on how to act without an authority to force them to do so, in the same manner that a university class knows how to behave during a lecture.
Fish expands upon this claim of group uniformity by stating that true originality is shunned upon in academic circles; ideas cannot simply be presented out of nowhere, they must be presented in relation to an existing argument in a way that proves the existing notion to be lacking. This type of interconnectivity, which may be useful for forming synthesis arguments, leads to completely unorthodox ideas with no relation to mainstream academia being shunned.
As an example, Holocaust deniers, a group which contains “historians, heads of state, public intellectuals, and entertainment stars” (“Academic Arguments”), and those who question if Shakespeare is the true author of the plays attributed to him are seen as psuedo-intellectuals for their breaking from the academic mainstream. This can lead to disconnect between the academic and non-academic worlds: a sizable percentage of the population believes in Creationism and Intelligent Design, yet the world of science strictly adheres to Darwinism and Natural Selection. Fish clarifies that the presence of the interpretive community does not eliminate change, but renders it into a slow process, with the proponents and detractors of the status quo limiting themselves to ideas that they consider to be acceptable in relation to the mainstream.
Source
“ACADEMIC ARGUMENTS.” Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn’t Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom, by Stanley Eugene Fish, Harper Paperbacks, 2017
Reading Summary 3
In her essay “Says Who? Teaching and Questioning the Rules of Grammar,” Anne Curzan argues that the way schools teach English to students is fundamentally flawed, in that it insists invariably on a set of arbitrarily selected and enforced rules. According to Curzan, this type of language, which she refers to as Standard English, discorages interpretative and pedagogical thought in the field of language, and that teachers have a responsibility to foster questions about grammatical rules.
Curzan also questions why many people, including those who aren’t English professors, are resistant to variations from Standard English, even if they still understand the meaning of the sentence. As an example, she writes how several of her colleagues asked her to instruct her students to avoid using “they” in cases where the subject of a sentence is a singular person. After doing research, Curzan found that not only were there examples where “they” is a more suitable word to use than “he” or “her,” but the basis for such a rule was posited in a grammar book written in the eighteenth century. Curzan expresses her frustration that English grammar, unlike every other field of study, is locked to conventions that predate every living speaker of the language.
Additionally, there is a discriminatory aspect of Standard English. Nonstandard dialects and their speakers are immediately dismissed as incorrect, even if they are still comprehensible. Therefore, a single arbitrarily decided, form of English is inherently dismissive towards diversity and inclusion. To solve these problems, Curzan posits that teachers should allow their students greater freedom to choose the manner in which they speak and write, so that English can become a language that evolves with its people rather than being stuck in the past.
Source:
Curzan, Anne. “Says Who? Teaching and Questioning the Rules of Grammar.” PMLA, vol,124, no. 3, 2009, pp. 870–879. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25614330. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.
Reading Summary 2
In his essay “Getting Rid of the Appearance-Reality Distinction,” Richard Rorty argues that the philosophical trend of searching for a supposedly purer form of existence – or as he calls it “Reality with a capital R” (67) – is flawed and unnecessary. His reasoning is that the overwhelming majority of the world pays no heed to the possibility that what they are seeing in front of them is an impure form of reality. Therefore, any such distinction made between the appearance of an item and its nature in Reality must be artificially imposed. Rorty suggests instead that practitioners of ontology, the study of being and reality, should instead accept that there are certain insurmountable limitations to human perception that would prevent us from even acknowledging Reality: that is, if it exists or ever has existed. Our natural creativity allows for great freedom in what we can imagine, but even that has its limitations. Rorty hypothesizes that ontologists fear this truth, and seek a direct access to reality, without any mediators, such as language or any other form of expression.
To counter their fallacy, Rorty suggests a fundamental chance in how we perceive human reason; it is not a matter of seeking the truth, but “ a social practice—the practice of enforcing social norms on the use of marks and noises, thereby making it possible to use words rather than blows as a way of getting things done”(69). In other words, we should not think of ambiguous terms – Rorty uses gravity and inalienable human rights as examples – as the name of a mysterious true entity whose form has been diluted in purity by the nature of language and expression, but as “noises and marks”(70) which serve as bases that constantly change as our understanding of them improve. Therefore, the purpose of philosophy should not be to search for a purer form of Reality, but to build upon our own knowledge.
Source:
“Getting Rid of the Appearance-Reality Distinction.” Philosophy as Poetry, by Richard Rorty, University of Virginia Press, 2016.
Reading Summary 1
Casey Boyle argues in his article “…something like a reading ethics…” that there are fundamental flaws in the way that schoolchildren are taught to read through academic texts. Specifically, people are taught to read “in only one moment of our lives with only one type of material and in only one way” (Boyle), that being, in the way that novels are read; from first page to last, in sequential order. This insistence of only one form of reading invariably leads to two problems: moral and ethical. The moral problem arises when people are dissuaded from continuing to read a cumbersome book and subsequently feel ashamed: in Boyle’s words, “reading is born as a moral practice, one that good girls and good boys did well and completely and aloud for all to hear”(ibid.). It is ingrained in us that reading in this particular way is the only moral way to read any text, with any deviation from this norm being considered cheating. The ethical problem lies in that the way one ought to read an analytic text differs from the way people are taught to read. Boyle suggests that we ought to read non-literary texts in the same way that one reads a dictionary: “situationally and productively” (ibid.). He encourages this style of reading in his class by intentionally requiring too much reading for any student to reasonably be able to handle in such a short period of time. Therefore, students naturally learn to spot the key points of an academic text, rather than waste reading every line meticulously.
Boyle offers a six-step solution for how to efficiently read an academic text. Step one encourages the reader to sum up the purpose of the entire paper in a single sentence, while step two entails a short response. Steps three and four detail the key points of the paper and the sources used to support them, respectively. Step five and six encourage the reader to ask questions about specific points made in the paper, and speculate the response the author would have.
With these steps, Boyle argues, readers can learn to read in a different way, one that is more suitable for academic texts.
Source:
Boyle, Casey. “READING AS A MORAL PROBLEM.” Casey Boyle, 16 Jan. 2016, caseyboyle.net/2016/01/16/something-like-a-reading-ethics/.
Commonplace 9
I saw a video about populism that used this quote in relation to how news organizations can present the same event using different language in order to reinforce the opinions of their target audience. What Michel de Montaigne is essentially saying here is that falsehoods come in several forms, varying in the degree of separation from the absolute truth. The “opposite of truth” may be anything from a fact simplified in terms understandable for a mainstream audience to an outright fabrication meant to push a certain agenda — and everything in between. Of course, it can be debated whether objective truth really exists, or at the very least if it can be processed by human beings. Nevertheless, the Monsieur de Montaigne is right in saying that most everything we hear from others is detached from what is entirely true.
Commonplace 8
I find this quote to be especially powerful because I, like many people, often find myself concerned about things that I can’t control, even if they don’t affect me in any meaningful way. Even the most powerful people on earth (that is to say, not freshmen students at college) have a limit to what they can control in the outside world. For this reason, it is best to concern oneself with one’s mind, since that is something that doesn’t belong to any other person. Instead of being consumed with fear for things that ultimately don’t matter, you can find the inner fortitude to survive anything that comes your way.
