Literary Kinds 2012

I felt that the idea of plagiarism is presented as a hipocrasy in "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism" by Jonathon Lethem.  Lethem expresses that  it doesn't make sense that artists have come to resent those who plagiarize - those who love the author's work enough to adopt it, maybe change it and bring it into their own work.  His reference to the Velveteen Rabbit makes a good analogy.  The rabbit in the story is told that when a child REALLY loves him, he will become Real.  A horse tells the rabbit, "Generally by the time you become Real, your hair has worn off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.” Then Lethem comments, "Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use" (Lethem 16).  The rabbit is clearly the piece of writing and the toymaker is the author.  The point is that it is the toymaker's job to build toys for enjoyment, right?  What child sits a toy on his shelf to look at for pleasure?  None. The child plays with the toy every day, takes the toy to sleepovers, restaurants, the movies, misplaces it and makes his father turn the house upside down looking for it, cries when his mom wants to wash it, and never wants to give the toy up even long after he has outgrown it.  Isn't that what authors are supposed to want for their piece of writing?

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?" 

As an English major, the college essays that I have thus-far written for my field have all been based on other people's work.  The topic may be as specific as a single poem, or cover several different works of literature, but the point is to make an argument about a specific idea or theme found in the work(s) being written about.  The style is very detached; while I am putting forth my own opinion, I still need to write in an unemotional way, basing my statements on quotations and facts.  The paper is my own interpretation of the work(s) involved, and it is written to be -- if not outright persuasive -- at least a sound argument.  Still, everything is far more clinical than, for example, the Jonathan Lethem essay that we read in class, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism."  Like an academic essay on English literature, Lethem made an argument and supported it with literary examples, but his tone was far warmer and more informal that both anything I have found myself called upon to write and the vast majority of academic essays that I have read -- though it was similar to non-fiction books, which generally have more of their authors' personalities than do essays.

Although writing in a natural or physical science discipline can be easily distinguished from a literary text by the subject topic, different genres of writing branch out of science as well. As a physics major and a student in other science courses, I have had a range of experience in different types of science writing. Presenting my laboratory work for an experimental physics course, an individual research project on the chaos in heart rate for classical mechanics, or a popular science report on human evolution for biology, I must say that each writing experience was unique regardless of the topic in question. The writing assignments are framed in a specific context, either by the professor or the course itself, that allow for a genre of writing. As mentioned by Debbie in class on Thursday, the different genres of writing appear as a result of the context of each sample. A sample from a magazine such as Harper’s or an academic literary essay from the PMLA fall under different genres as each addresses a different audience with different backgrounds on the topic. Other writing samples cannot be understood out of a historical or political context at which they were originally written. Whether a science paper is to be published in Scientific American or the Physical Review Letters does create separate genres in scientific writing as a result of the expected audience and their varying technical and science background.

  For as far as I can remember, academic writing has been driven by extensive research (from the writer and sometimes the readers after reading the essay) and supported evidence. Academic writing may allow writers to present their opinions as long as they do not overshadow the facts. Although academic writing requires additional research, I strongly believe that some disciplines (Science vs. Humanities) are more open to having a writer’s opinion complement research. 

Yeah, since I like to "bend" the rules, I'm posting about something different from academic writing within a particular discipline. :)

As I've mulled over our class discussion and the reading for the week, I've started to notice a trend. There seems to be a binary between that which is citable (so the source material) and the paper, or equivalent, that we are creating that takes from the source material. However, I don't think that this is the case. Rather, I don't think that what we consider to be the source material is completely original. I think that the "source" is not limited to just the one piece of material. Instead, it is infinite and can't trace where the source actually begins. I'm using an image of reflective mirrors (as is seen above) to demonstrate my point.