Portfolio

Hey guys I wasn't sure how to show my Portfolio website to the class or submit the actual site for grading, so I thought I would throw a link up here. Check it out!

writing2bytyler.weebly.com

The Terminal Thlog

Thlog 10 - The End of a Journey

     I've found that life is seriously a roller coaster of ups and downs, with times of adversity and periods of thriving. While I have experienced many of these swings over the course of the quarter, this class has always been a positive part of my week where I got to interact with others and become engaged in the learning process. Unfortunately, I caught a horrific case of food poisoning this past weekend and had to miss Monday's class. This was actually pretty upsetting to me, as I always strive to achieve perfect attendance and give it my all in life. Monday was probably the lowest trough I have experienced for quite some time, but I think that in the end, extreme adversity makes us stronger. I plan to rebound out of this struggle and come back more fired up than ever! While I can't make up for the classes and work that I missed this week I know that I will crush it with my portfolio and finals. 

     In regards to this course, I feel as though I owe it to myself, the class, and the Brofessor to finish strong and put out some quality content to conclude this part of my journey as a writer and learner. Looking back on my work from the quarter and the concepts that I developed over the past ten weeks, I can surely say that this class has lead to great improvements in my productivity, means of expression, and learning process! This has affected my academic pursuits as well as improved my life overall. The most essential skill that I learned was to preserve my momentum and promote my creative thinking process with the use of first and second order thinking. By using computer software to record my ideas immediately and without discrimination or editing. I have already paused while writing this Thlog twice already to put some wonderfully random ideas into my online notebook! I find that with this skill, I am much better able to keep track of my thoughts and eliminate distractions so that I can focus on what really matters in the moment. This connects to the theme of mindfulness, which is an essential skill that both challenges and fascinates me on a daily basis. Use of this technique in writing and life seems essential for optimal health and productivity. 

    This Thlog has taken a turn for the random, but I just wanted to riff on a few of the things that this class has really helped me with and improved in my life. I was completely dreading this course prior to taking it, but found it to be a hidden gem in my UCSB coursework thus far. So for that I'd like to express my genuine gratitude for everyone involved in the class, its been great!

WP3 Tyler's Transfer

Inroduction

Transfer

          The real-world application of key concepts taught in modern academic settings must become a top-priority for teachers hoping to enable their students to succeed in the classroom and life. As a society, it is critical that we foster a sense of creative crossover between contexts and encourage students to use the skills that they learn in school over a broad range of situations. As Elizabeth Wardle argues in her scholarly piece What Is Transfer, “When students learn something, they can learn it rigidly and for the present moment only, or they can learn the concepts underlying it and recognize the potential value of this learning for another setting and task”. Teachers must strive to enable their students to recognize this concept and learn to apply their skills in multiple settings, effectively transferring from one context to the next. While this applies to a variety of critical thinking skills developed over the course of a student’s academic career, it becomes most crucial during the transfer of rhetorical skills across disciplines.

          Wardle expresses the interaction of students and their writing atmospheres succinctly – “Individuals and contexts never exist independently of one another”. By using a key set of strategies including rhetorical awareness, metaphors, and self-monitoring, writing program administrators should be able to assist students in the process of developing concepts and skills rather than memorizing rigid rules. Application of sound rhetorical practices throughout disciplines is a necessary skill to employ in any writing piece, whatever the academic context.

 Transformation 1: The Wardle Web

Transformation 2: Mr. Ettner's Excellent Example Journal

     

A Real GEM – WP3 Moves Self Reflection

            A picture is most definitely worth a thousand words! For my genre transformation project I utilized a variety of pictures and graphics in order to display the concepts from the article What is Transfer by Elizabeth Wardle. This piece is meant to urge writing teachers to promote the idea of skills transfer and foster an understanding of this issue within their students work across a variety of contexts. The idea of skills transfer lies in the fact that learning basic writing skills can assist in creating rhetoric in any type of medium or genre, and requires practitioners to craft a better understanding of fundamental “concepts and heuristics rather than rigid rules” (Wardle 151). This principle carries great implications for practical application, as the modern economy also requires professionals to transfer their basic skills between a broad range of situations. For this reason, my genre transformations involve a creative business skills mind-map termed The Wardle Web, and a writing professor’s instructional journal for high-school writing students.

            As I pass by the gigantic team whiteboard at the Goleta Entrepreneurial Magnet (GEM), a local startup incubator where I act as an intern of sorts, inspiration struck and a beautiful idea spawned the missing piece to completing my WP3 in style! Going forward with my Wardle Web, I began drafting it up on the board and soon after, groups of entrepreneurs, innovators, and small business owners took interest in the project. Through a series of discussions and informal interviews I got a ton of great content and really solidified my thoughts on the project. I took copious notes and discovered many key ideas that I learned which I deemed worthy to manifest themselves in my finished product. Seeing that the identification of audience is an important step in the writing process, I decided to target my mind-map towards a diverse group of budding entrepreneurs who seek to learn about the basic skills necessary for success, and how to apply them to different contexts within the modern business atmosphere.

            The very first startup team member that I talked to explained that one of the most crucial skills for an entrepreneur involves self-awareness and the ability to frame your ideas and goals into different contexts. This tied in so well with the course readings that I was taken aback, and clearly saw that the lessons we’ve learned from authors such as McCloud, Wardle, Losh, and Alexander really do transfer into real life situations. The example demonstrated to me involved a company developing train-cars and raised the question, ‘are you really just in the train-car industry, or is it the transportation economy as a whole?’ My colleague argued that this key framing distinction makes all the difference in the way that you work to provide value to your customer by focusing beyond the narrow scope of a specialized type of production and instead taking the entire travelling experience into account. I decided that this would be a major key in my work, and sought to frame my skill transfer web to provide value to entrepreneurs of all occupations and industries, rather than focusing on just one specific idea.

During the construction of my piece, it took a high degree of planning and drafting in order to put my ideas together in a coherent way. In order to achieve this, I looked back to the ideas presented in the course reader for some much needed support. In his piece Writing with Pictures, McCloud claims that the choice of frame “shows readers what they need to see” by “directing reader focus” (McCloud 37), which is meant to be a result of the structure of the Wardle Web. Key skills and attributes are located in the center as most essential and first priority, branching out and transferring to the four main bodies of a business model. In addition to the structural components, the actual skills that the mind-map brings to the attention of readers were also rhetorical skills in disguise. These included everything from ‘evidence expert’ to ‘audience appeaser’, and even ‘structure sensei’, meant to prove that these rhetorical and real world skills have a high degree of transferability across contexts and situations.

In stark contrast to the conventions of the entrepreneur’s mind-map, my second genre transformation for students took on a much different style. Just as Losh and Alexander express in Writing Identities, “When you [try to] specifically reach a younger audience, you [create] a completely different rhetorical effect” (Losh and Alexander 130). By changing the writing tone to be more casual and informative, I created a sense of ethos and crafted a new identity as an author in order to relate to a younger audience of high-school writing students. This transformation of Wardle’s piece took the form of a model instructional journal, which a writing teacher would like their students to emulate throughout the course in order to keep track of the concepts they would learn. ‘Mr. Ettner’s Excellent Example Journal’ includes various drawings and colors, and avoids following a rigid structure, in an attempt to gain the attention of a younger audience. Some of the text is even written upside-down, a move meant to force students to pause and become mindful of what they are reading. Just as Wardle urges writers to “learn concepts and heuristics rather than rigid rules” (Wardle 151), this piece encourages students to focus in on key concepts and express their thoughts in a creative manner in order to foster better comprehension.

The inclusion of bright colors and high-lites throughout the journal piece was a move meant to draw the reader’s attention to critical concepts or advanced topics that students are encouraged to follow up with if they aren’t familiar. Rhetorical skills or ideas such as genre, context, concrete evidence, and structure can be found throughout the piece, with accompanying quotes and sketches in an attempt to further improve cognition through the use of image and moment. By establishing a solid identity and following up with these creative moves as well as small tips and tricks marked with asterisks, ‘Mr. Ettner’s Excellent Example Journal’ is meant to convey Wardle’s teachings with clarity and show the real-world applications of her claims to even the most unexperienced of writing students.

The third and final writing project of this class really encouraged the development of a deeper understanding of the concepts of genre, taking key moves such as the identification of audience, establishment of identity, and use of visual components in order to transform an ordinary article into something much more. Transforming Wardle’s piece What is Transfer into instructional texts for two drastically different audiences forced me to identify the genre conventions that really matter when writing to these audiences, and ensure that my pieces took the audience’s skills, motivations, and natures into account. This proved to be an incredibly valuable writing experience, and helped to solidify many of the rhetorical skills which I aspired to improve over the course of this class.

Works Cited

Losh, Elizabeth M., and Johnathan Alexander. “Writing Identities.” Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing. 114-139. Print.

McCloud, Scott. “Writing with Pictures.” Making Comics. New York: Harper, 2006. 8-55. Print.

Pajares, Frank, and Gio Valiante. Chapter 11: Self-Efficacy Beliefs and Motivation in Writing Development. 158-170. [On Gauchospace]. Web. 3 Mar. 2016.

PB3A - Matters of the Mind

PB3A - Matters of the Mind

     I have always found the pursuit and application of knowledge quite fascinating, and am constantly on the hunt to find new ways to apply concepts towards solving problems in a variety of contexts. In her writing composition titled What is Transfer, Elizabeth Wardle explores this idea in the area of academics, explaining that there are different types of writing processes and skills that can transfer over to tackling issues in other academic contexts such as history or science. Wardle claims that if the writing process is taught in a certain academic setting a teacher can foster a sense of creativity and problem-solving that allows students to utilize their rhetorical skills towards other disciplines. I believe that this idea could be illustrated in two different ways: mind-mapping and journal writing.

     One lesson in our class this quarter involved exploring the idea of mind-mapping and expressing your thoughts in a creative form during the pre-planning process prior to composition. This displays an incredible transfer and connectivity between ideas and thoughts, helping students to synthesize them into a coherent, holistic argument. By brainstorming in this way, one can compose a piece with the structure and flow to really tie together all of the main ideas between a variety of contexts.

I find the idea of skill transfer and mind-mapping to be incredibly applicable to the modern business work-space, as we must all learn to develop useful skills and find ways to apply them to a variety of job types. This is why I would like to express the ideas from this article in the form of a startup business mind-map for an older audience hoping to utilize skills transfer to grow their business and apply these techniques to various parts of a business model. I am thoroughly convinced that mind-mapping and idea transfer would be extremely valuable for this audience and know that I could express this through my WP3! But I would question the reader to help me determine how best to display this work, though writing/drawing on paper, an online program, or even maybe a whiteboard? I doubt that I can turn in a whole whiteboard for my project, but perhaps I could take pictures of complex mind-maps? Let me know what you think!

     Onto the medium for a younger audience to grasp the idea of transfer between academic writing contexts, I would like to emulate a young student’s personal journal. This holds the potential for such a creative project, as I could include pages with daily reflections and insights, free writing pages, drawings, or even cut outs of pictures or cool quotes. I must admit that I have taken up the practice of daily journaling with great consistency every night this quarter, and have found truly astounding benefits from the practice. Having worked in this medium for personal development will make this type of composition for my WP3 a breeze, allowing me to create a high quality piece of work that allows for creativity and a high degree of self-expression. Please shoot me a message or comment about your thoughts on this idea, as I am seriously stoked to get started on it but want to ensure that it is a legitimate way to go about this project first. Thanks for reading! 

Thlog it Up!

Thlog it Up!

          Man has life been getting busy! I can't believe that this class is nearly coming to an end, time has been flying by recently. I can genuinely say that this class has been a great experience, I have learned a ton! Going into it I wasn't so sure that I would enjoy a writing class (dreading it actually) but it ended up being really engaging and has motivated to start writing a lot more! So for that I'd like to thank the Brofessor for his righteous class and the effort clearly put into making it a good experience!

          Getting down to business, I'd have to say that the concepts which really stuck with me from this week in the class include the mind-mapping idea as well as the activity where we observed a video of painters describing their process. While I have always tried to implement mind-maps and other creative planning processes for my work, going over it in class really helped me to realize how valuable of a tool it could be when applied in the right way. I now strive to do this on a regular basis, and will definitely make use of it while planning out my WP3 (which I REALLY need to start on today). Seeing the connections and mapping out different ideas is absolutely invaluable and has helped me to better formulate my ideas into coherent pieces of work. I only wish that I had utilized this tool more in my pre-planning for WP2, as I was having some trouble doing just that. I guess there's always next time!

          The second activity which really sparked my interest in class this week involved watching painters describe their painting method. The idea of analyzing your process and routine for doing any kind of work - from creative to academic - is a key step in understanding yourself and improving your work. I have started analyzing my writing much more than before, and am starting to notice patterns and routines in my process which I can improve upon in the quest for improved self expression through writing. I hope to implement this idea into all of my work, and take advantage of the valuable information I've learned during the entirety of the course!

A Thlog of the First-Order!

     This week went fairly well in class, but I've really found myself quite distracted by life as of late, and haven't been quite as dedicated to the writing process as I really should be. However, the other areas of my life that I have been pursuing do involve a good amount of writing, just not in the traditional sense.
     Earlier in the quarter, we learned about the differences between first and second order thinking, and I really took this lesson to heart, finding it increasingly useful in most areas of my life. Having the ability to put my thoughts into writing and record my ideas immediately and without discrimination has made a world of difference in the way that I approach problem solving and creative planning in every context. I have been using a program called Evernote to keep track of all my random thoughts, compiling them all into once place from which I can draw inspiration and find nuggets of wisdom that I never would have even put into writing without the use of first-order thinking. By putting my ideas into words without a second thought, I am better able to develop plans and ideas with a serious amount of depth. This is because my immediate recording allows me to ride my wave of momentum in thinking without stopping to edit and analyze every little detail, a skill which we learned to become aware of in this class. I cannot even to begin to express how great of an application this approach continues to have in all areas of my life, and am quite grateful to have learned to identify and utilize this style of thinking. This technique has enabled me to uncover new meaning and avoid stifling the lines of thought which I would have otherwise lost, and lead to profound effects on my efficiency as a student and learner. Thanks for that, Brofessor!
     I know I didn't hit on much of what we discussed in class this week, but I found it absolutely necessary to describe the ongoing effects of a key concept introduced earlier in the course. Still, I did enjoy the mind mapping/clustering idea that we went over in class, and have already began to implement it into my writing process. Here's to another great week ahead!

PB2B: Move to the Groove

PB2B

     The articles that we read in this class thus far have proven to display a high variety of moves which the authors implemented in order to help students in the quest for understanding the inner workings of rhetoric. These key moves allow writers to connect to their reader and capture their attention, which is essential for this type of academic text.

Take, for example, Kerry Dirk's first major move in the article Navigating Genres:

Funny Bone - Dirk uses a few article headlines from the popular online magazine The Onion, which effectively captures the reader's attention with humor. Using headlines such as "Myspace Outrage Leaves Millions Friendless", prompts readers to relate to the author and the concepts at hand through their sense of humor. Dirk effectively takes his target audience into account with this move by implementing catchy headlines from a source that many of the students reading his work may already follow.

Dirk continues making moves with the statement, “In other words, knowing what a genre is used for can help people to accomplish goals”. This is reminiscent of the concept of explaining quotations as outline by the They Say, I Say appendix. This move helps Dirk to really get to the point of the preceding quote and tune the reader in to his purpose for its inclusion.

In the next example, Dirk claims that, “Many of you may be familiar with The Onion”, which again follows the ‘Introduction of a standard view’ guideline set out in They Say, I Say. By prefacing his argument with this introduction, Dirk manages to strike a bond with the reader and display the fact that readers may already have some knowledge about the sources he uses in his article.

Throw it Back - Dirk follows up one of his key quotes on page 259 with the suggestion to, “[Take] what Devitt says into account, [and] think back to the previous discussion of the research paper.” This throwback to an earlier portion of the piece is an extremely effective move that helps readers comprehend his point as well as go back and review what they have already learned from the article. Big play Dirk, big play.

Another author who makes use of some seriously slick moves is Janet Boyd, as displayed by the writing piece Murder! (Rhetorically-Speaking):

Author Undercover - Boyd offers the reader a series of detective reports from students writing pieces in order to “present some rhetoric in action” (Boyd 90). This move is meant to engage students with an analysis of some writing that is ‘on their level’ and urges readers to analyze their work in a similar way. Boyd even encourages readers to ‘visualize themselves’ in a new occupation to write about the topic at hand, which is a powerful call to action for students to take part in this activity.

Following up with her calculated use of student writing, Boyd introduces one author by name, explaining “Brett Magura writes…” with a direct quotation by this particular rhetor. This is an example of Signaling Who is Saying What, and gives direct evidence as to the source and medium which she is using to illustrate her point about viewpoints and perspective in the writing process.

Janet Lennon - Boyd visualized the writing process of a student when she remarks, “I imagine that Lynch, like many students, assumed he had to work in all “five facts”…” (Boyd 96). This move helps Boyd convey to her student audience that she really takes their viewpoint into account and attempts to see the writing activity through their eyes.

Boyd later introduces a “standard view” or issue that a student author may face by claiming, “You might find that your closing argument reads so much like Traina’s that they can be considered “generic” closing arguments.” This once again helps Boyd connect her readers to the case studies she presents, with the purpose of encouraging a certain type of introspective critical analysis about one’s writing.

The final author making huge plays in his writing moves is Mike Bunn, who uses two key moves in his article How to Read Like a Writer:

Bunn displays a prime example of Making a Concession While Still Standing his Ground when he declares that, “While it might seem a little weird at first to image how published texts could be written differently…remember that all writing can be improved” (Bunn 78). This concession helps to make it abundantly clear that any piece of writing is subject to criticism and analysis, regardless of the source. This is meant to prompt students to think critically about any type of rhetoric in order to use the same principles in their own writing.

Writer’s Roadmap - Bunn utilizes this critical move multiple times in his piece by explaining to the reader where his writing is headed and how he plans to proceed with his analysis. Bunn takes the reader on a literary journey by inviting the reader to join him in a guided tour of his work by using phrases such as, “Let’s go back to the opening paragraph of this essay and spend some time” and “Let’s begin with those questions I encouraged you to try to answer before you start reading” (Bunn 82). This does a masterful job of guiding the audience towards a productive analysis and allows Bunn to really emphasis his key concepts from within the work.