"The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The video “The Danger of a Single Story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a description of the concept of a single story that is many times seen through literature and media. The author is interested in knowing more about this concept and how it impacts people, culture, and standards. Through this idea, the author shows the audience that judgmental and biased problems arise when a person encounters a single story about another person, culture, or country, other than their own, and how these single stories are incomplete and do not define reality.

The author created her study through analyze of literature from various authors such as the western John Locke, Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, and American writer Alice Walker. Her study reflects her own experiences such as her trip to Guadalajara, Mexico where she realized that she had engaged as a single story thinker about Mexico. Another experience she used was when the author moved from Nigeria to the United States to enter university. The author experienced the concept of single story when her roommate had an established idea of the author as poor and uneducated (knowing the author was from Nigeria) before meeting each other. The limitations of the study are in the examples the author gives. The author quotes some literature writers and shows proof through her experiences but these sources come from ideals and not from physical data or facts. On the other hand, the nature of the video does not necessarily require hard facts to prove the author’s point.

The video finishes with a thought: “When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.” (Adichie, 2009) The author learns that no single story is detailed enough to tell the truth about a place. Single stories do not give the full experience of a place, but in contraire, they cover beauty and reality.

I agree with the author’s point of view about single stories because stereotyping is a problem everyone is faced with everyday. It is a problem that makes people be something they are not. As we come to our next assignment, one should approach the topic unbiased, not thinking about the overall idea society has on that issue, but one should dig deeper to discover unseen ideas and get new perspectives on the issue.

Bibliography

Adichie, C. N. (2009, October). Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story. Retrieved September 22, 2012, from TED Ideas worth spreading: http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

"Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers" by Nancy Sommers

The author’s intent in the article “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” by Nancy Sommers is to show the reader the difference between revision approaches in student and experience writers and how these different approaches shape writing revision.

Nancy Sommers conducted a series of studies over three years in which she studied revision processes of student and experienced writers to see their methods of revision during their writing process (Sommers, 1980). The study included twenty freshmen from Boston University and the University of Oklahoma with SAT verbal scores from 450-600. Also included twenty experienced writers, including editors and journalists. The examination consisted of writing three essays each (twice) with a total of nine essays. These essays were analyzed and categorized identifying different revision operations.

Four revision operations were identified: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering. Also four levels of changes were identified: word, phrase, sentence, and theme. These methods were the most common among the writers as processes for revision. In “conceptual repetition” (Sommers, 1980), the idea of a sentence or paragraph is repeated even if the student is aware of word repetition. Substituting words or phrases might fix a superficial issue, but it does not fix a repetitive concept or idea.

On the other hand, experienced writers described their revision process as cyclical steps. Their process involves many revision drafts where their focus is to find the main idea and elaborate after a series of addition and deletion of ideas, whether it might be a sentence or a whole paragraph.

Along the course of the author’s work, the definition of revision is redefined “as a sequence of changes in a composition – changes which are initiated by cues and occur continually throughout the writing of a work.” (Sommers, 1980) Revision is not supposed to be a set of vocabulary equivalence or substitution but it should be an exploration of ideas that define the main point of a work while rewriting drafts.

The understanding of revision allows writers to focus on the idea of the work, elaborate those ideas, and find a position for their work. The author expresses common errors in student’s revision and presumes that these suggestions will improve their writing. These suggestions apply to current class work to help define your peer’s ideas not to grammatically dissect the work.

Bibliography

Sommers, N. (1980). Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers. College Composition and Communication , 31 (4), 378-388.

"Responding to Student Writing" by Nancy Sommers

In the academic article “Responding to Student Writing”, the author Nancy Sommers emphasizes on the methods teachers approach when revising student’s writing. Her main concern in this article is the techniques commonly used by teachers in revising student’s writing and whether or not these techniques are helpful to the student.

The author used various revised essays to address the issue in hand. With the help of her colleagues, Lil Brannon and Cyril Knoblach, Nancy Sommers studied for a year many comments from teachers on these revised papers. They focused on noting approaches of thirty-five teachers from the universities of New York and Oklahoma. All of the teachers had to critique the same set of student essays. They interviewed students and teacher of different universities in their approach to revision. Nancy and her colleagues also used software called “Writer’s Workbench” through which the program would analyze and suggest any grammar errors and sentence type, among other characteristics. The results were measured in two categories: the styles of commenting, and the practicality of these styles.

As the author explains, revision is mostly seen as a structural, rule following pattern to teachers and students. It is extremely important that revision (commenting) becomes an approach of untangling ideas and guiding students to shape (not change) the main idea that is being expressed. Commenting on any genre of writing helps the writer know if the intended idea was communicated effectively to the reader. This helps the writer evaluate and develop new techniques that will assist in the next writing.

In one of the methods, the author points out that teachers tend to appropriate text when commenting on student’s essays. This appropriation of text denotes an isolation of a single problem in the student’s essays instead of approaching the essay as an entire discourse. Nonspecific comments and grammatical correction in early drafts diverts the student from the main idea of the essay, to only concentrating on grammatical errors. This gives the student the false final draft idea needing minimal correction only.

This study showed the author that there is a problem in the process and product of revision. The reader should respond to this article as an insight to improving essay revision. These approaches to commenting can be used to proofread writing with a set objective. Commenting and revision should help clarify the purpose of an essay instead of spotting grammar errors. 

"Inventing the University" by David Bartholomae - Summary

The interest of the paper “Inventing the University” by David Bartholomae, is in the errors of basic writers and how their lack of knowledge of a discourse community prevents them from effectively becoming a part of that academic community and succeeding in their academic interests. Bartholomae is explaining the struggles of basic writers, the way expert writers write, and the difference between these two types of writers.

Bartholomae shows these differences through various examples of former student essays. The author used two essays: one full essay and a conclusion. He also quoted “The Discourse on Language” by Foucault and he used ideas from Linda Flower to state his points. Although his points are supported, this study has limitations in the sample area. The author has limited observations using only one full essay and a conclusion of another. Also, the limitation exists in the origin of the student’s essay, meaning, which high school did the students attend and what are the academic ratings of those high schools.

In the paper, the author states that a student has to “invent the university” (pg. 456). The meaning of this phrase comes from the idea that every freshman college student faces a new community in which the student has to adapt to new ideas, language, and ways of doing. With this new adaption comes a challenge of a new discourse academic community in which the student has to develop and formulate a new way of speaking and writing to be a part of and understood in a certain academic community.

The “commonplaces” establishes a setting for writing. The commonplaces are the points given to which a writer could follow up or focus his or her writing on. These commonplaces are self-sufficient or self-explanatory, and they are helpful in keeping focus of the writer’s point.

A major difference between an expert writer and a beginning writer is the detection of the audience. Most of the time, a beginning writer does not take into account the type of audience and writes unaware of the reader’s ideas or understanding. An expert writer does not only take into account the audience but understands their position, knowledge, and strive to write for the reader and not for the writer.

The author is suggesting that a reason why basic writers fail to convey a message or write effectively within a certain academic community is because of their lack of knowledge of that community. And this lack of knowledge occurs because many teachers do not to create involvement of the students in the community and do not create ways that the student can interact in a discourse effectively.

After reading this paper, I agree with the ideas and points of the author because I do not feel a part of my biology community yet. I struggle to communicate effectively and to understand theories and ideas within the community. A way to use the author’s ideas so I can become a more effective writer would be to look for ways to get involve in the biological community or to find peers who understand the discourse of biology. The ideas of Bartholomae relate to our current class subject in the way the in order to write effectively, a person has to have at least basic knowledge of the community he or she is in.