Porter

In the article,  “Intertexuality and the Discourse Community”, James Porter, the author, expresses his views on plagiarism by supporting his findings with the idea of intertexuality.  He states that all texts have “traces” of other texts within them. This isn’t such a bad thing because people tend to comprehend the concepts and ideas better after being exposed to it before in other texts. This also is an advantage for the authors because they are given concrete ideas in which they are later able to build a stable sharper thought.  Porter takes a step farther and enlightens the readers about the use of intertextuality.  He describes that there is iterability, which is what is described above as having pieces of old texts in a new text, and presuppotion form od intertextuality, which is an assumption made by the text about its reader.  Porter also explains the idea of a discourse community. A discourse community is simply a group of people who share the same values and assumptions and are able to communicate it. Porter believes that it is important for students to write for discourse communities because then they will be able to change the way the community thinks rather than always turning to intertexuality. Intertexuality sometimes   makes it hard to have original ideas that is why it is important to build upon them while trying to tweak the way society thinks.

In Porters article he briefly describes the inspired writer. He states how it is believed that writers are able to sit down and write a piece that changes the audience’s ideas immediately. This of course is never the case because writers build off of each other as we learned this from the term intertexuality. Allen went into more depth on the topic of the inspired writer in her article titled “ The Inspired Writer vs. The Real Writer”. Allen remarks on how it takes numerous trial and errors for a writer to get that perfect text. This makes sense because they are constantly doing research and trying to form new ideas from old texts to create something new. It is hard for the audiences thoughts to be changed because we are exposed to many versions of the truth in various texts, that is somewhat of a gradual change as Porter explains.

LIBRARY QUESTIONS: 

Brainstorming Topics

1.    Write down all writing constructs that you may be interested in researching:

-       papers cant be in 1^st person  using I, We, Us, You

-       have to site everything if used from another source or else its plagiarism

-       in order to have well written paper you must follow the grammar rules

2.    Using these research topics, brainstorm a list of searchterms that you will use to search for books and articles.

-        1^st person in papers

-       plagiarism

-       grammar rules

Using the Databases

Directions: In order to practice using these databases, pick one (or multiple) constructs to practice researching and collecting materials over and complete the rest of this worksheet.

JOSTR

1.     Search terms used:  Plagiarism

a.     Select a journal article relating to your research topic and record its citation information (title, author, journal, etc.):

Verity J. Brown and Mark E. Howell

b.     Source annotation: Write a brief (approx. 3 sentences) synopsis of the article and how it relates to your research topic.

The purpse of the study was to see how much an influence the regulations of plagiarism has on a student

Article Plus

2.     Search terms used:

I needed a password for this website and didn’t know where to find it

a.     Select a journal article relating to your research topic and record its citation information (title, author, journal, etc.):

b.     Source annotation: Write a brief (approx. 3 sentences) synopsis of the article and how it relates to your research topic.

Rebecca Howard's Writing Matters Bibliographies

I had trouble with this database and article plus I think I am visiting the wrong websites. I wasn’t here the day we went over this so I am still a little iffy on the research aspect part of this project.