Behind the Scene "Writer Writes a Writing"

5th Class Review

Behind the Scene

"Writer Writes a Writing"

(By. Mahromul Fadlillah)

This is the second time, we must go to the campus at 07.00 a.m.  Student who forget about new role about the enter time to the class (Writing and Conversation 4 lesson) must make a note, alarm maybe.  Because I, my self almost forget and I must run to chase that class on time.

Writing 4 more challenging, we must go to the campus early, we must read about some recommended books more and more over again.  We also have to be a critic student who read issue text, controversial a well-known person.  Honestly I am tired, but this is a lifewhich is never flat,  I challenged my self to be better and better over time.  Aamiin...

On Friday, March 7^th April 2014.  As usual I and my classmate, surely PBI-D member 4th semester join writing and conversation 4 guided by a great lecturer Mr.Lala Bumela.  I felt Mr.lala has brought us to the other world in every meeting.  He always open our mind and our imagination with his linguistic knowledge.  Those are a marvelous moment.  Furthermore our imagination is turn on, and that’s great like Einstein quote “Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited, but imagination encircles the world.”

Back to the class routineness, after Mr.Lala checked our attedance, he discuss again about our homework “critical review.”  He said that we still have an error on the critical review text.  He reminded us that:  If someone did an error overtime, nothing a change to be better, it means that they:

1.      Have WEAKNESS (the first time we do an error)

2.      Have MISTAKE (The second time after the error is reminded)

3.      Have IGNORANCE (Nothing a change after twice done an error)

4.      Have INSANE (over and over again do same error)

If we still do an error over and over again, never learn from the past, never learn and repair be a better thing.  It means we are insane, maybe.  We must see a psychologist and check our life force.  The most of us did an error about:

1.      Generic Structure of critical review, included:

1.1.Introduction (The title and a brief explanation of the text)

1.2.Summary (The main points and few examples of the text)

1.3.Main Body (Critique, the strength and weakness of the writer on their text)

In critical review twxt, we must focus to the critique discusses about the strengths and weaknesses of the text based on specific criteria and include other sources to support it (with references).

WHY we have to do criticize to the text?  Because Lehtonen said that TEXT IS FABRICATED.  A writer, an author built their text because some reason for example:  For their own favor, so we as quality reader have to reveal the truth.

1.4.Conclusion

Concludes the review with a restatement of the over all opinion of the text.

Generic structure is important to limit the idea, everything has designed and the reader can understand the text if the writer arange their ideas classify.  Aftyer that, we do another error about plagiarism, we do not enter footnote.

2.      Foot Note

In academic writing we must enter footnote like ..........(Lehtonen, 2000: 91), etc.  To prove that we are not plagiarist and respect the other people work product.  Furthermore, in order we can responsible to our opinion.

Mr.Lala commenter to our critical review topic about Columbus history.  He said that “History and literacy is connected, both has a gist.”  Literacy is a social practice from history, we know about Columbus history from literacy about him, literacy from book (hard file) or litaracy from ensiklopedia in Internet (soft file).  Why we do not ask about the first writer in ensiklopedia?  Who is she or he?  What is she or he for or against to Columbus?  Their personal judgement is influenced and influences the reader.

Mr.Lala also commented to Howard Zinn book about A People’s History of United States, Howard Zinn tried to reveal that Columbus is a grand theft, leader of gonecide, racism, murderer, kidnaper, mutilator, and Columbus is not a founding father of United State.

Zinn opened up all about Columbus and America, BUT Why Zinn does not mention the real founding father of United State?  That the weakness of Howard Zinn.  Anyway, Zinn has ideology and he upheld it.  We as moeslim know that Islam people heve been found Amerika before Columbus arrived there.  Zinn will not show to the world who is the real founding  father of America.

Apart from our error in critical review about generic structure and footnote, there are some biggest weakness of our critical review, includes:

¡  Trapped in trivial matters, we usually write so much pages, but the content does not have a gist with the topic.  So, that is useless.  It is not important to criticize.

¡  Not familiar with the key word.

¡  The generic structure isnt well constructed

¡  References pattern is missing.

So many our biggest weakness, but Mr.Lala motivate us with his quote that “THERE ARE MANY ROOMS FOR IMPROVEMENT.”  The assignment critical review is one of writing product that Mr.Lala want us to try it.  Writing is a complex activity, writing is not project act.  We should not write once only have a project.  Writing is continously activity which has a gist and linkage.  Mr.Lala assigned us to explore more in the class review about the key issues which dominate current understanding of writing, there are:

1.      Context,

2.      Literacy,

3.      Culture,

4.      Technology,

5.      Genre, and

6.      Identity.

I think I will skip about six points above because I must understand first about the content on powerpoint which Mr.lala shared.  The content of PPT explains about the issue of intertextuality.

¡  Bakhtin (1986), as cited in Hyland (2002):

             language is dialogic: a conversation between writer and reader in an ongoing activity.

¡  Hyland (2002): Writing reflects traces of its social uses because it is linked and aligned with other texts upon which it builds and which it anticipates.

¡  Bakhtin (1986): ‘Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known and somehow takes them into account’ (ibid.: 91)

¡  Here written genres are regarded as parts of repeated and typified social situations, rather than particular forms, with writers exercising judgement and creativity in responding to similar circumstances (Hyland 2002).

¡  Bakhtin’s notion of intertextuality suggests that discourses are always related to other discourses, both as they change over time and in their similarities at any point in time. This connects text-users into a network of prior texts and so provides a system of options for making meanings which can be recognised by other texts-users. Because they help create the meanings available in a culture, the conventions developed in this way close out certain interpretations and make others more likely, and this helps explain how writers make particular rhetorical choices when composing.

¡  In a social interactive model, meaning is created via ‘a unique configuration and interaction of what both reader and writer bring to the text’ (Nystrand  et al. , 1993: 299)

An influence of the text to writers, how writers compose text is called intertextuality.  Connect text-user to other text-user.  All of these in order writer can explain clearly and can be understood well by their reader.  All of these because a “Meaning” a real meaning.

Fairclough (1992: 117) distinguishes two kinds of intertextuality:

1.      Manifest intertextuality refers to various ways of incorporating or responding to other texts through quotation, paraphrase, irony, and so on. 

2.      Interdiscursivity concerns the writer’s use of sets of conventions drawn from a recognisable text type or genre. Texts here then are associated with some institutional and social meanings.

Furthermore about intertextuality.  Writing has some connection with CONTEXT, LITERACY, CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY, GENRE, AND IDENTITY.

1.      WRITING AND CONTEXT

Based on research, we  recognise that meaning is not something that resides in the

words we write and send to someone else, but is created in the interaction between a writer and reader as they make sense of these words in different ways, each trying to guess the intentions of the other.  It is not the social situation that influences (or is influenced by) discourse, but the way the participants define such a situation. Contexts thus are not some kind of ‘objective’ condition or direct cause, but rather(inter)subjective constructs designed and ongoingly updated in interaction by participants as members of groups and communities. If they were, all people in the same social situation would speak in the same way.  Contexts are participant constructs. (Van Dijk, 2008: viii).

After all, given all the situations in which we can read or write, context might intuitively include everything. Cutting (2002: 3) suggests that there are three main aspects of this interpretive context:

a.              The situational context: what people ‘know about what they can seearound them’;

b.             The background knowledge context: what people ‘know about the world, what they know about aspects of life, and what they know about each other’;

c.              The  co-textual context: what people ‘know about what they have been saying’.

2.      WRITING AND LITERACY

Writing, together with reading, is an act of literacy: how we actually use language in our everyday lives. As Scribner and Cole (1981: 236) put it: ‘literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use.’ It is worth considering the role of literacy as it helps us to understand how people make sense of their lives through their routine practices of writing and reading.  That is the furthermore explanation of Ken Hyland quote that “LITERACY IS SOMETHING WE DO”

Barton and Hamilton (1998: 6) define literacy practicesas ‘the general cultural ways of utilizing written language which people draw on in their lives’.

3.      WRITING AND CULTURE

The idea that writers’ experiences of the literacy practices of different communities will influence their linguistic choices suggests that teachers should consider the part that culture plays in student writing.  Culture is generally understood as an historically transmitted and systematic network of meanings which allow us to understand, develop and communicate our knowledge and beliefs about the world (Lantolf, 1999).

4.      WRITING AND TECHNOLOGY

To be a literate person today means having control over a range of print and electronic media. Many of the latter have had a major impact on the ways we write, the genres we create, the authorial identities we assume, the forms of our finished products, and the ways we engage with readers.

Effects of electronic technologies on writing

• Change creating, editing, proofreading and formatting processes

• Combine written texts with visual and audio media more easily

• Encourage non-linear writing and reading processes through hyper-

text links

• Challenge traditional notions of authorship, authority and intellectual

property

• Allow writers access to more information and to connect that informa-

tion in new ways

• Change the relationships between writers and readers as readers can

often ‘write back’

• Expand the range of genres and opportunities to reach wider

audiences

• Blur traditional oral and written channel distinctions

• Introduce possibilities for constructing and projecting new social

Identities

• Facilitate entry to new on-line discourse communities

• Increase the marginalisation of writers who are isolated from new

writing technologies

• Offer writing teachers new challenges and opportunities for classroom

Practice

5.      WRITING AND GENRE

Genres are recognised types of communicative actions, which means that to participate in any social event, individuals must be familiar with the genres they encounter there. Because of this, genre is now one of the most important concepts in languageeducation today. It is customary, however, to identify three approaches to genre (Hyon, 1996; Johns, 2002):

(a) the Australian work in the tradition of Systemic Functional

Linguistics

(b) the teaching of English for Specific Purposes

(c) the New Rhetoric studies developed in North American composi-

tion contexts

6.      WRITING AND IDENTITY

Identity refers to ‘the ways that people display who they are to each other’ (Benwell and Stokoe, 2006: 6)

Identity therefore needs to be distinguished from the notion of voice in the Expressivist literature. Voice is a complex idea with various meanings and connotations, but essentially refers to the writer’s distinctive signature, the individual stamp that he or she leaves on a text (Elbow, 1994).

Ivanic on writer identity

1. The autobiographical self is the self which writers bring to an act of writing, socially constrained and constructed by the writer’s life history. It includes their ideas, opinions, beliefs and commitments: their stance. An example might be how a writer evaluates the quotes he or she brings into a text, or the topics he or she chooses to address.

2. The discoursal self is the impression writers consciously or unconsciously convey of themselves in a text. This concerns the writers’ voice in the sense of how they portray themselves. An example is the extent to which a writer takes on the practices of the community he or she is writing for, adopting its conventions to claim membership.

3. The authorial self shows itself in the degree of authoritativeness with which a writer writes. This is the extent to which a writer intrudes into a text and claims herself as the source of its content.  This would include the use of personal pronouns and willingness to personally get behind arguments and claims.

(See Ivanic, 1998; Ivanic and Weldon, 1999.)

Writing has a relation with identity of writer.  So we have to find about howard Zinn completely for our critical review las week.  That is a massive job.  In conclusion, I think that the six points have relation with writing.  All of them have influence to intertextuality., furthermore to comprehend the meaning.  As the quality reader, we must selective on whole discourse.  The truth and the falsehood are relative thing, that value based on our (reader) perspective.  Our perspective is built by many discourses.