Zoning Out

So far, I’ve hated the articles we’ve had to read. I enjoyed reading about the imagined audience and about teacher comments, but the Braddock and Rose article have discouraged me from wanting to read the other remaining articles. The Berlin article, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” fascinated me and made me want to read more on ideology. I believe this was mainly the case because I enjoy reading up on philosophical arguments and the discussions that precede them. In this particular piece, the topics that Berlin addresses are quite interesting. Yet, the notion that individuals should find self-fulfillment through buying commodities shocked me (488). I mean, he’s writing this in a section where he is stating that one should find one’s voice and overcome the rule of the elite, this then makes no sense. Because by feeding into one dimension of society, the individual only finds false fulfillment that helps keep the ruling elite’s position. But aside from this rant on that portion, I think that we as college students and teachers already know that we are in ideology and that everything is ideological. It seems that he’s trying to promote an awareness of the Marxist class system in students, when it isn’t all that necessary. Students become aware of these things on their own ie. why the little girl across the street got the newest Barbie doll and I didn’t. As these children grow up, they are presented with notions of Marx in school and do not need to be pressed with such issues in an English class. The Braddock article, “The Frequency and Placement of Topic Sentences in Expository Prose,” was a difficult read. I found it hard to finish because it was a study that took place and I’m not all that interested in the data, I’m more of a content and analysis type and having to read all of the steps and procedures was quite tedious. I found the findings and the implications for the teachers kind of redundant because I think most of us teachers are aware of these things. When Braddock says that teachers shouldn’t stress that ‘professional writers” have their topic sentences in the beginning of a paragraph, as his only true finding…. Well this to me, seemed kind of dumb . I mean you performed this study only to find out that everyone has a unique writing style and that not everyone follows the rules., this was disheartening to read because I already knew this. As for the Rose article, “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism,” this one was just too long! The analyses of the tests were interesting, but just too tedious as well. I hope that the remaining articles are shorter than this one because I will surely be losing focus as I read and will definitely fall behind on my reading especially with the two last assignments coming up. Rose, I understand, is writing for a journal and the more thorough her analysis is, the more credibility it will be granted. But for a student reading it, I must confess that I zoned-out many times.