Haas Reading Questions 1
- Christina Haas uses, “At the college level, to become literate is in many ways to learn the patterns of knowing about, and behaving toward, texts within a disciplinary field”, to open with the fact that she wants to break down the thought process behind the writing habits in college. She broke down the structure each year of college by their writing habits and she really shows the difference between freshman and senior year of college. She states, ” Entering college students may hold an arhetorical or asitualional theory of written discourse, a representation or model of discourse that precludes seeing text as motivated activity and authors as purposeful agents…”, and “…by the time she left college she had come to a greater awareness of the rhetorical, contingent nature of both the activities and discourses she participated in within her chosen field, biology.” , which demonstrates her thesis throughout the paper. She wants to point out the major differences between the start and end of college.
- An autonomous text is as Haas states,” … the belief in autonomous texts views written academic texts as discrete, highly explicit, even “timeless” entities functioning without contextual support from author, reader, or culture.”, or other words how you perceive things without knowing anything else whether its from the author, reader, or culture. She calls it a myth because she believes this always occurs in the college atmosphere and it is said that it happens to everyone which could be considered a myth. I agree with her because she has studied this and it makes sense to me because this is just how humans learn and grow. You have to focus on the things you want to know versus what is rhetorical in the text. We don’t know enough sometimes to flush out the stuf we don’t need but when we do get to that point we realize the importance of what we want to know and how it connects back to the authors larger picture.
- Haas’ study of Eliza can help us understand what might happen to college students’ understanding of texts as they progress in their major because she states “…by the time she left college she had come to a greater awareness of the rhetorical, contingent nature of both the activities and discourses she participated in within her chosen field, biology.”, which shows the break down of the study of how Eliza functioned and made it through college as a Biology major. I think that because she wasn’t an English or History major is was interesting to see how she progressed as a student considering her field isn’t all about reading and writing.
- Rhetorical frame is a “…model or representation of discourse situations..”, which to me is what the meaning behind the text is. To me this is what the meaning behind the text is trying to show or describe. Its describing what its about and who wrote it. It also can be a indicator to whether or not there is a bias based of the reading. The sublayers of context is more than just the actual content within the article. It is more about the overall picture and what is trying to be said. You have to understand the context with a more clear understanding and your purposes may change when it comes down to a clearer picture.
- In terms of relating Haas’ piece to Gees’ piece it is clear to me that they both have a definition of what a discourse is. Gee states “Its not just what you say, but how you say it.” and Haas states ” A great number of studies of science have focused on discourse- conversations and lab notes as well as conference presentations and formal articles…”, which to me showed that they both have a definition of discourse that they are following throughout their papers and to me they seem sort of similar. They both are thinking that these discourses are what we learn in life whether it is socially or in school.
ENG110I