Intertextuality and the Discourse Community, James Porter

SUMMARY:

In his article ‘Intertextuality and the Discourse Community’ James Porter talks about how our writing must be original, and if a writer borrows ideas without acknowledgement it’s defined as plagiarizing. The principle Porter explores is intertextuality. Intertextuality is the idea that there can be no text that does not draw on some ideas from other texts. It is the idea that all texts contain traces of other texts. He also goes into the two types of intertextuality: iterability and presupposition. He also talks about how the Declaration of Independence was made up of several texts. I don’t think this is really geared towards a specific audience, other than college students, which all of the articles are.

CONVERSATION:

I kind of made a connection with this reading and ‘Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively’. They both talk about text. ‘Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively’ talks about how to better understand text, how to use it,and how to identify it. In ‘Intertextuality and the Discourse Community’ Porter is talking about text and how original writers can be in constructing text. Personally I think there is a connection because they both talk about text.

BEFORE YOU READ: My little sister, Teagan loves to write. She’s always making up stories, poems, or songs. She always writes for people for their birthday or holiday. My sister said that “I see my family contributing to my writing, because all of my poems, songs and writings are about or for them and they really support me when I do it.” Teagan also said “I hope to see writing in my future. When I’m older I might want to work for a newspaper, but I will always write my own and always create different things.”

QD:

4. I didn’t know that writing had to have the expected social science sections. I didn’t even know what the expected social science sections were. It must use the journal’s version of APA documentation, which that I could’ve guessed because it is a main type of formatting. I’m not really sure how I thought writing should be evaluated. My writing has just been evaluated by my peers or my teachers, it’s never really gone through a process.

AE:

1. I recently saw a commercial for Wendy’s. It was about the Baconator. The commercial has intertextuality in it because it is like all of the other fast food commercials. They say the same things about their food to get you to try them. The cultural intertextuality is that it resembles other fast food commercials. They all have the same idea.

MM:

Porter didn’t really change the way I imagine writers and writing. It would probably change the way I write, because I would have to put more time into my writing.

OPINIONS:

I wasn’t really that interested in this piece of writing. It just seemed kind of boring to me. I don’t think it will be that helpful to me. I didn’t really get that much out of it, besides learning what intertextuality means. It doesn’t really compare to my own experiences. However once I learned what intertextuality means, I realized that it’s everywhere. I started thinking about movies, novels and other forms of writing and I realized that everything has part of something else in it. There’s always a correlation that you can make between writings.