Week 7

Winsor

Winsor’s article made a lot of sense to me. I have worked with engineers for years and have been surprised in the past that they think the writing they do is separate from design work, and that it is a linear process. In reality they were always taking notes, revising those notes, re-writing requirements based on something learned in research, etc. In some cases they even had to revise a design based on information that was going to go in the user manual that brought design problems to light. The writing and the design process were quite codependent in most cases.
It was interesting to me how the subjects of this study worked so cohesively together on their ideas. I wonder if this is true of most engineering students, i.e. they are taught to do this, or if these particular students enjoyed a special rapport.

Reynolds

What I found most interesting about the Reynolds article was not the article itself, but rather the information about bell hooks. Somehow I managed to read several paragraphs about her before I noticed that her name was not capitalized. At first I thought it was a typo, but then I decided, given the subject matter, it had to be a personal statement on being either a woman or a minority, or both. I had to look this up, and was actually surprised to see that it was to distinguish her name from her grandmother’s, and to emphasize that what she wrote was important, not who she was. I have to wonder though, if there is some background rhetoric at work here – a minority feminist author could certainly pack a lot of meaning into choosing to avoid capitalization in her name!

Haswell

This was an interesting piece that brought up a lot of good points. The task of finding an ideal way to grade student writing seems overwhelming to me, but Haswell seems to have a good start and explains a lot of methods very well. The one thing that bothered me was that although he seems to admit that his method of minimal marking is flawed because it may not actually reduce work if students do not find the correct errors, he then goes on to defend it by saying that if teachers do not recorrect the paper, they are lazy and perhaps cruel (p. 1281). This seems a bit unfair – if he’s trying to make a time-saving method, then it must actually be more efficient, and calling the teachers lazy does not really make it a better idea.