Resistance

experienced a political naissance while venturing to rural Mississippi to register black voters.

e sobering finding i s t h a t e v e n i f g l o b a l w a r m i n g i s l i m i t e d t o 2 ° C , h e a t e v e n t s that once occurred twice per century will happen every 3 to 4 years—and will tend to coincide with droughts, com-pounding the impacts

Is it possible to feed, nurture, house, educate, and employ the additional people without degrading the systems of the planet that support life?

es, it’s okay to social distance from certain people, but sometimes those samepeople make our story a redemptive one

In the tweet, Mike says social distancing from certain people hasbeen nice. Everyone can attest that it has been great to be away from people, but that also makesour individual stories very plain and boring. We need those people who we may not like to makeour individual stories interesting

redemptive story

those people

Life isn’t always positive, and if it were, no one would we work hard to make thingsbetter

too

it's hard to be a human being with relationships without having a versionof a life story.

This period of time has forced us to knowourselves because there was nothing else to do

That could be ourteachers, classmates, bosses, or even strangers on the bus

Whether that be script writers, producers, directors, or even the audiencemembers. The pandemic put a pause on his busy life and he was able to reflect on the positivesof the quarantine and the overall pandemic.

each user taking up a genre takes it up just a little bit differently.

the view of genre that simply makes it a collection of features obscures how these features are flexible in any instance or even how the general understanding of the genre can change over time, as people orient to evolving patterns

you bring your wits and your gear and you figure it out by observing and jumping in.

d how genres shape the ways we interact, live, and work with each other

Bawarshi thinks that this genre is like a habitat—a place that sustains the creatures that live in it and really sets the living conditions for those creatures.

Ecology

direct sphere do—like the coders who design, and redesign, the social media platforms you use and participate in, and whose design decisions affect how you participate.

But in social media, your genre system is always partly what you do, and partly what other people who are in your network do.

Each person acting within the system of college is part of a situated and intersecting set of texts, which Bazerman calls a genre system.

The collection of texts you list would be the genre set for you as a student.

hope that by observing and then imitating the genre features, you’ll produce writing that behaves like the genre

writers learn to use genres best within contexts where they use the genres regularly

just as human communication itself is both predictable and unpredictable

the narrative strategy is a way that you might imagine your audience and that audience’s response, aiming for a livelier and more engaged response

might adapt and reshape the genre, which potentially shifts the genre’s stability

The scientist doesn’t have to figure out whether she’ll write a report or if she’d rather write a song lyric. The Supreme Court justice writing for the majority knows that she will not write a haiku.

when you’re at home in a writing situation, the genre is simply part of your accustomed toolset, and you know very well which tool to use

Genres are constructions of groups, over time, usually with the implicit or explicit sanction of organizational or institutional power

he situation chooses those for you

the activities of a classroom are remarkably similar over time

This definition might feel a little knotty, so let’s break it down.

We begin to classify a kind of writing as a genre when it recurs frequently enough and seems to perform the same functions in recurring situations

formal features or markers don’t define the genre, although they are often helpful signal

hen we want to classify things, to note the similarities and differences between kinds of writing

the worlds

Do you repost other people’s articles and memes with your own comments? How about texts or e-mails to friends and acquaintances?

Annotations—

’ll give you as much notice as I can if a shift is necessary, and would ask that you do the same if something changes on your end

intend to use academic work that you complete this semester for educational purposes in this course during this semester. Your registration and continued enrollment constitute your permission.

If you believethat you will not be able to complete an assignment on time, please do your best to contact me BEFORE thedeadline to discuss alternate arrangements.

we can cultivate a culture in which all people feel safe andrespected and all voices are honored

you will be asked to leave class (and will be counted as absent

he premise of a studio course

maintain a writer’s journal,

primary and secondary research,

Writing as Social Practice

Situated Process

how we construct ideas about communities through language.

we are often pressed to clarify our ideas to other people in the workplace, in our personal lives, and in our social and civic relationships.

same regions of the brain are activated when people are asked to remember something and when they’re asked to imagine an event that hasn’t happened yet

patterns will start to emerge

“If our stories are about us as triumphant agents going through life and overcoming, and they underplay the role of other people and the role of institutional support in helping us do those thing

Are there implications for empathy if we see other people as bit players instead of protagonists in their own right?

increased agency actually appeared in stories before people’s mental health improved.

if feeling communion now predicts well-being later

“Wisdom and maturity and cognitive complexity are all things that we value, but they don’t necessarily make you happy

but it doesn’t really give you a positive view of who you are. It may be true in the moment, but it’s not something that propels someone towards growth.”

“But that’s still under the assumption that people have the resources to deal with it.

they also can’t tell it and get acceptance or validation from people

If there wasn't some kind of uplifting, redemptive end to the story (beyond just the fact that they survived), “The listeners did not like that.”

having more redemption

Americans have sought to author their lives as redemptive tales of atonement, emancipation, recovery, self-fulfillment, and upward social mobility,

People can also see the larger arc of their lives as redemptive or contaminated, and redemption in particular is a popular,

Having redemption themes in one’s life story is generally associated with greater well-being, while contamination themes tend to coincide with poorer mental health.

n centuries past, stories of being possessed by demons might not have been out of place

If this approach were a blueprint for an Ikea desk instead of a life, almost everyone trying to follow it would end up with something wobbly and misshapen, with a few leftover bolts you find under the couch, boding ill for the structural integrity of the thing you built

That can be a helpful script in that it gives children a sense of the arc of a life

Once certain stories get embedded into the culture, they become master narratives

your memory for that event may be less flexible and give you less chance for growth

there are consequences to not telling

Things are lost on 8-year-olds that a 40-year-old picks up, and things that an 8-year-old found compelling and interesting will just bore a 40-year-old to tears sometimes

Thus, perhaps, the appeal of cartoon characters who never get older.

they become “agents,” too—still playing their roles and interacting with the world, but making decisions with the hopes of producing desired outcomes

older adults had more thematic coherence, and told more stories about stability, while young adults tended to tell more stories about change.

walking, talking, and object permanenc

then identify with them and borrow from them while fashioning their own self-conceptions

different narratives for different realms of her life

is a way of making sense of the world around us

good stories

order to have relationships, we’ve all had to tell little pieces of our story

produce

This is an almost impossible question to address from a scientific approach

always in a narrative way, with a plot that leads from one point to another

narrative becomes a form of identity, in which the things someone chooses to include in the story

telling the story of how you became who you are

and—crucially—to themselves

narrative arc.