Tag Archives: Garrett-Petts

First full week

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This was not only my first full week of the semester, but also my first full week here at College of Charleston and it was not as painful as I expected! I’m very excited about this class in particular and after our readings over Monday and Wednesday I’ve been left feeling that this is a subject I’m going to be quite fond of. I’d like to mainly focus on the Garret-Petts reading we were assigned. I greatly enjoyed the examples of sports talk and walking into a crowded room as a way to first engage us. Since he was addressing students, jumping straight into literary talk would’ve contradicted his whole premise of writing the piece in the first place! He had to ease us in with topics or scenarios we could understand, then relate them to how we need to approach literary discourse. His breakdown of the ways in which we (as students) can participate in different kinds of discourse at various levels was also helpful.

My favorite part though, came at the end with the interview of Dr. Harold Kolb, Jr. Particularly in his discussion of the writing process he brought up drafting and how your first draft should be completely separate from your second draft. He stated that, “The Second draft should be a total rewriting of the rough draft, not simply a Band-Aid job. Start with a clean computer screen, with the rough draft pushed down (or printed out) so you can refer to it but not be trapped by it.”  Like many students, I tend to treat my assignments like chores, something to be done as quickly as possible (and often times at the last minute.) My ‘second draft’ is really just a revision. Dr. Kolb, Jr.’s advice to start afresh will greatly improve my finished product; I am certain of this. Hopefully, this new tactic will help promote my writing to being more college-worthy!

The first week….

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This week we talked about the basics of academic theory and more specifically the academic writing style that dominates English as a discipline. The crux of the week, for me at least, was the Dobie and Garrett-Petts readings and their attempts at describing the idiosyncrasies of the literary scholarship. While Dobie was exclusively about English scholarship, Garrett-Petts seems as though it can be applied to academic literature as a whole.

Dobie gives an in depth survey of what has made up literary analysis for the past few hundred years, with the bullet points being Genre analysis, Biographical analysis, and looking at it in the context of a writer’s body of work. This article is helpful in giving the class a point of reference and vocabulary for what many of us more than likely already knew. We can now talk about these types of scholarship in the way that Garrett-Petts suggests we do. Petts’ article focused on what it means to write in an academic setting; seemingly focusing on the idea that one must learn the academic jargon for whatever field you are interested in. In order to be taken seriously in the scholar system, you must be able to understand the conventions. While it might seem at first that these conventions have no purpose other than to box out those who aren’t part of the system, it is-at least according to Garret-Petts- something that allows for a sustainable discourse. Every field has its own lexicon and conventions: from sports analysis, to microeconomics, to the explication of a poem; each draws on the wealth of scholarship done before it, and the technical jargon which provides its members a toolbox of handy shortcut terms, in order to trying and understand.