Porter

Discussion and Journaling

4) Writing from what I get from this article is evaluated buy certain forums, which is basically a group of people that have knowledge of what they are evaluating and also have guidelines that they have to adhere to.He feels that the key criteria for this is the "acceptability" within the reader's community. The piece of work being evaluated must contribute something to the field along with demonstrating familiar characteristics of previous pieces of writing. It also has to meet specific criteria within the group and testing so to speak to be considered an acceptable piece of work. This community will influence other writers also.

I did not really have a basis to go on prior to reading Porter's article. However this makes sense to me and I can see how a piece of work is evaluated by a certain group of people and how they influence writers and their work.

The only thing I have to compare to would be writing as a high school student. The only person that evaluated my work was the teacher who may have had knowledge in writing in general but not knowledge on a certain topic that I was writing about. Where as in Porter's article the community that is evaluating the pieces of work he is talking about is very educated in this field and has a background in what they are evaluating.


5} Porter's article I feel reflects the principles that he is writing about in that he is discussing the ways that intertextuality affects research and writing and how it is also affected by an audience or forum that analyzes pieces of work. He is not writing as a autonomous person in that I think his writings in this article are taken from other authors examples and Porter's own research on the 4 examples that he gives under the Presence of Intertext. He also states in his writing that intertextuality can also come from audience expectation. So as we read this article we may have more of an influence on how it is perceived then how Porter wrote it.

Applying and Exploring

2) Plagiarism has always been a very strict rule when it comes to writing. The school definition basically allows you to not use any part of any ones work unless it has been  quoted and referenced too. My definition of plagiarism using Porter's example would be that you could use other authors ideas as long as you could be creative enough to put your own twist on them to make it your own and showed that you did the research needed to make it your own. My definition is probably not strict enough and would lead to plagiarism being a big problem in writing class. However I do feel at times the current rule of plagiarism can be too strict and can cause writers to not be able to write about things they truly want to write about. If their was a way to meet in the middle between plagiarism as we have been taught and my example using Porter's views writing may become a little more interesting.

MM

Porter's article seems to imply that writers spend more of their time researching and talking to people to get ideas and information for their text. It does not seem like writers spend a lot of time on their own because the basis of their writings is their research and discussion with others.I always pictured writers as people that would go off for months at a time and lock themselves in a room and write until their work was done.Porter's article seems to state that authors actually do the complete opposite. I feel that I would most likely be the writer portrayed in Porter's article.