vspaeth's blog

I feel like my brain may be on overdrive a bit this week.  I'm thinking about Thursday's class and how we're now moving onto graphic novels and honestly I'm a bit confused.  I thought Thursday's class was incredibly interesting.  Mental differences are very real and very important to understand, especially in the context of education.  I think that's why I'm confused.  I've been trying to tie Thursday's class into the whole genre of the academic essay.  I think I've wrapped my brain around the idea that mental differences among people can lead us to create various genres of people.  I also understand from our studies of academic writing so far that catagorizing anything into genres is extremely complicated and difficult.  Is that how I should relate Thursday's class?  We should be aware of differences among people even within a possible "genre" that society may associate them with? 

Maybe I'm over thinking.  Maybe the point was just to read a chapter of a very interesting book and have scholarly discussion about it.  Maybe it's just the rigid confines of most of my schooling that is causing me to look for a bigger picture.

Academic Blogging, a Possible Genre of Digital Humanities?

Tumblr is a blogging website that allows users to post pictures, videos, links, and written pieces to a blog of their own design.  The interface is very user friendly (I can even navigate it), and it offers a variety of layouts, both free and for a price, that can help personalize each individual blog.

Along with ways of personalizing ones blog, Tumblr also has a variety of options that fosters a sense of collaborations.  For example, if you find a blog you like you are able to “follow” it and then posts from that blog appear on your homepage or “dashboard.”   Another method of collaboration is the action of “reblogging.”  If you see a post, picture, or video on a blog that you like you have the option to “reblog” it.  When you “reblog” a post it appears on your own blog with a list of who has posted or “reblogged” it beforehand; when a post is “reblogged” there is also the option to comment on or add to the post.  The comments or additions are separated from the original post which allows it to remain cited. 

I just felt like sharing that after class today I went straight to my Teaching of Writing course and on the board was the following quote:

"We write by the light of every book we've ever read." - Richard Peck

I scribbled it down in my notebook and decided to share just because I felt like it was another way to express the ideas we've been unpacking in class! 

So far I've taken classes in a few different subject areas and have experienced a wide variety to Academic writing.  Although all types of academic writing strive to make an arguement or prove a point the styles of writing are different. College level writing involves a lot of thought.  It's a careful process because you have to manage to tie in the ideas of different authors or researchers without stealing from them.

The hardest thing, for me, about Academic writing is making sure my ideas haven't been used by someone else.  In all honesty I don't understand what the goal of academic writing is.  There have been times in some classes that I've attempted to tie together sources to showcase an idea that I (thought) I created, only to have a professor write "site this!"  I get nervous because I feel like everytime I write a paper I need to do incredible amounts of research to make sure nobody has said the exact same thing that I'm saying without me siting them.  It really reminds me of the Harper's Magazine article in that way.  I completely agree with the idea that every idea I have is technically plagiarized from someone else. 

On a slightly different note I feel like this blurred line of what we can easily site and what is almost impossible to avoid "stealing" is a central problem with a lot of the internet banning bills.  We want to avoid plagiarism yes, but where do we draw the line between "stealing" and "creating?"