Written Discourse Ten

Right, this is pretty much what I’m doing my essay on: trying to work my way down to some practical applications of CDA. I’ll keep it on ice for the time being, but if any of the few of you reading this (“Bueller? Beuller?”) want to get into it in any further I’d be more than happy.

Written Discourse Nine

You know how I said that CDA felt very wooly? I take it back, I take it all back…

Written Discourse Eight

“They were also concerned with ‘scientificity’; in other words, a description meant ‘objective investigation’.

Also:

“observation done in a scientific manner has the status of value-free facts.”

Oh, be still my aching sides… 

  

Written Discourse Seven

When reading up about performatives, all I could think of was this –

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.

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.

Written Discourse Two

I can’t quite believe I’m going to open this by linking to a TV Tropes page, but I can’t not. Here you go:

The Death of the Author

Also, the CONDUIT metaphor FTW!

Written Discourse One

1. All Natural Ingredients
People do seem very keen on recipe books as a genre, don’t they?

As with most other introductory units, this one seems to be the standard statements of the obvious wrapped up with a new, but fairly slippery, terminology. ‘Infuriating’ is exactly right, but I am at least heartened by the promise that, “Discourse Analysis is… a tool that we can use to take social action.” Lots of linkages to be made here back to the Language and gender module from sociolinguistics.

I’m curious about Stubbs’ specification of naturally occurring connected speech or written discourse. The ‘naturally occurring’ part. As opposed to what, exactly? Are we heading off into Turing Test territory here (again)? Even the most contrived examples of language (as with the examples in the Bloor and Bloor reading) are ‘naturally occurring’ within the specific discourse, it just so happens that it’s a meta-discourse about the discourse of discourse with smaller bugs upon their backs to bite them. And now my head hurts.