Written Discourse Six

1. News as Narrative 

Finally, something with a bit of meat on it. And also a lovely excuse to share this with everyone again –

Written Discourse Five

I think, maybe, here we’re starting to get a bit closer to something resembling a point. An answer to that ‘Why?’ question I asked last time out. Nothing definitive, but it’s beginning to present a utility beyond the merely descriptive.

1. Some Sort of Sub-Heading

The note’s claim that ‘The Sydney School does not acknowledge any debt to Longacre’s work’ seem quite odd. Not because it’s wrong, I’m sure it’s entirely accurate, but because, once again, a lot of this seem to be hanging off the bones of classical rhetoric, which is a far, far older debt. The section covering definitions of genre (5.9) seems awfully similar to the standard modes of rhetoric. It’s not just me seeing this, is it?

Written Discourse Four

Ah, OK. So I wasn’t totally off with the jigsaw analogy last time. Now we get to look at the edges and see how they line up with each other.

I have to be brutally honest, I’m not entirely sure where this unit, or indeed this module, is going. It’s all very descriptive – which is fair enough and I’m definitely not going to get into the whole Descriptive vs Proscriptive argument here – but we do appear to be just listing features of ‘good’ writing.

You have to start somewhere I suppose, but for the first time I find there’s really nothing all that interesting in my notes. It’s all just highlights and asterisks. I’m not against breaking it down into manageable schemas, but I’d be lying if I said it was particularly interesting or attention grabbing.

Spoken Discourse Two

“[I]n the classroom teachers spend most of their time asking questions and evaluating pupil responses…”

I wish this were true. The following might be a bit disjointed and ranty, but hopefully will come together to make some sort of sense. Eventually. I highly recommend reading up on the CONDUIT metaphor I mentioned in WD2, it’ll help bring a lot of this into focus. Perhaps.

Written Discourse Three

1. Simple, Logical Steps

Again, we seem to come back to Grice’s Maxims regarding what is expected and what is ‘good’ writing. The continuing assumption is that ‘good’ writing is the desired outcome, and I’m still not sure that the case for that has been sufficiently argued. It goes back to the Gender unit in Sociolinguistcs and the ‘conversational shitwork’, which presupposes that your ‘typical’ male conversationalist actually wants the conversation to progress in the same manner as your ‘typical’ woman.