Revisions to Literacy Narrative

I decided to revise my literacy narrative because it felt like a more personal paper to me. Also I have not gotten my ethnography back so I feel it would be best to revise a paper I already have the feedback for. The comments I received for my paper were also very detailed and very easy to understand. I feel like that will make the revision process much easier for me to perform. I can now easily see both the grammar errors, and also the parts of my paper that were difficult to understand.

Mirabelli- Learning to Serve: The Language of Food Service Workers

    Mirabelli starts off by facing the issues of stereotypes. In many discourse communities, the outsiders can be turned away do to the stereotypes of the group. Many people may pass on jobs due to the looks of it from the outside when in fact, it can be very beneficial to those on the inside. The insiders may become very educated in both teamwork and people skills that others wouldn't be. Mirabelli spoke specifically about waitresses and waiters at the beginning. He said that the assumptions most people have of waiters are that they are stupid and ignorant when in fact they very understanding and have fairly complex tasks to perform.
    I liked how Mirabelli got straight to the point and didn't necessarily drag it on to tell what he was talking about. I also liked how he directly chose the key points he wished to focus on for his observations. One thing that can be very complex for those in a restaurant scene is the many variations of the menu. He speaks of how it creates many of the main interactions with customers so if one were to be illiterate with the menu it could cause a great problems. Also menus and experiences can vary with different restaurants. He spoke of a 30 year professional from one restaurant becoming inexperience when he was placed into an unfamiliar restaurant. Also the coworkers may have a specific language to translate the menu in a shorter way.

My Discourse Community

For my discourse community I chose the wedding venue job I work at. I chose the job because I have worked there for a year and I am very comfortable with explaining the job. I also have played soccer or gone to church with almost all the staff I work with. This makes it much easier to hold an interview and get good response from the person I choose to interview.
I have several ways to define this job as a discourse community:
-Our common goal as a staff is to ensure the wedding party has a pleasant experience, and to especially ensure the bride and groom had a good, memorable wedding.
-Our talk is predominantly what is necessary for the job. It involves us having a specific social standard with guests and also elegant set ups for tables and chairs and many more activities the job requires.
-Our group can be easily seen by our dress code as to how we all have black vests, shoes, pants, ties,and then a white collard shirt.
-There aren't too many skill levels to the job, but a lot of times we may need to call in friends of ours to work when we are short on staff. These moments I would consider a situation when an outsider is coming in. They tend to be very confused since it is a new job and it requires a good bit of teaching from the insiders.

The Concept of Discourse Community

    The Concept of Discourse Community was definitely a tough analysis to understand. John Swales is definitely a very intellectual man with a vast vocabulary. He writes in a way that he thinks the reader is on the same page as him and that he has no need for deep explanation.
    Swales began to separate speech communities and discourse communities into two different categories. I was a bit confused as to how his first paragraph was separating the two of them but I believe he was saying with discourse communities, members were more likely to communicate in distant places rather than with speech from the past. His second definition for the social and discourse communities was a bit easier for me to understand. It seemed to be expressing that social communities were predominantly focusing on just a social standpoint while the discourse groups were more functional and focused on a set goal or objective. Thirdly, he defines a social group as one that gives the members just a general mold to fit into while the discourse communities give the members a broad taste of ways to learn and also will arrange them in skill levels and levels of teaching.
    As for what I got from his conceptualization of discourse communities, he described it fairly well, even though his vocabulary made it a little more difficult to understand. A discourse community tends to have common goals because the community is all seeking a goal as a unit instead of individuals. Also the group will have a specific acquired language that only they will understand. The group seems very open for feedback from its members and they want their members to be very well informed of the goals they are reaching. I feel like the group wants to also broaden their knowledge to things a little further outside of their specific talents and that the group will contain different skill levels at all times.

Shitty First Drafts

Anne Lamott's essay spoke much to me about getting started with writing. She spoke much about how starting out writing is hard for anyone, even famous author's, English teachers, or whoever they may be. She expressed how there aren't really any writers that just sit down and type their entire story or essay up in a matter of minutes, without flaws or imperfection. A lot of the times people struggle most to just get the general outline typed out on a page.
From her personal standpoint, she believes one should just vent onto the page with anything they can think of, no matter how crazy it could possibly be. What I got out of her essay is that it's good to just get a starting point even if it's all jumbled up and all over the place. I feel this does help me some because I to have trouble just getting started on something, mainly because I get distracted from writing very easily. Although, when ever I begin writing, I tend to act as if it is my final draft and I tend to just correct myself as I go through it. I've never been big on just writing something bad just to have something down on paper finally.
Throughout her essay Lamott expressed how frustrated she would get and that it almost felt as if she'd die if she left her writing to do something else. I like her also get frustrated when you just get into a rut and can't think of anything to put on paper, but I would normally just leave for a bit to give my mind a break. I guess I've just never been so attached to my writing so I always just wanted to write the best first draft I could so I wouldn't have to write out anymore.
Lamott also used many strange metaphors and references in her essay. She uses references to parents in agony to what she's writing or fear of people finding her stories boring like a houseplant. She also spoke up her pen being like locked up snarling dogs that would creep their way out if she stopped writing. I thought it was kind of crazy how into a writing one could be. Although, I did like the general idea of the exercise that her hypnotist gave her. I do feel like I have thousands of words flowing through my mind at times when I'm trying to write, and just to pick them out and close them up to keep them quiet really helped me to think clearer.

If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?

    "If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I?" was a fairly simple story to read. As soon as i started reading i suddenly found myself getting hungrier but I began to realize more and more what the story was about. Throughout the entire story it felt like the author had a constant struggle with how to fit it. She didn't necessarily seem socially handicapped but more so confused and misguided.
    At the start of the story she talked much about how she and her sister wished to grow away from her families food traditions and wished to eat more "American" foods such as: bologna, bacon, hot dogs, and many other meets that Americans seem to eat on a day to day basis. Although, as life went on the "American" foods seemed strange to her, smelled weird, and were frankly unattractive to her tastes anymore. This seemed to make her even more confused and nervous in a way. She began to wonder where she belonged; she didn't necessarily want the ways of her parents, who were Indian, and she didn't seem to fit in with the American ways.
    She eventually at one time heard of the Indian restaurants in America and was pretty fond of them for a short while. After this point the story just seemed like a confusing struggle about food really. She managed to get married to a meat-eating husband who had to make several odd negotiations about when he ate meats or didn't eat them, and she became a little scared of him leaving her for a "meat-eater".
    All together, it was a pretty interesting read. She seemed to have a very real struggle throughout the story over such a simple matter to most people. I realized that foreign things, no matter how simple, can be extremely frustrating and confusing to those who are new to it, even to the point where it's just out of the ordinary.

Brandt’s “Sponsors of Literacy”

Reading Brandt's "Sponsors of Literacy" was definitely a difficult start for me but the more I read on, the more it slowly came to me. To me, Brandt put an emphasis on how literacy can be seen in many aspects such as your surroundings, an institution like school, or maybe one or several people. I know teachers play a big role in literacy in many people's lives. There is much demand for proper literacy in today's society that you almost struggle in a way with how much a certain knowledge is needed. I remember one portion of the reading where Brandt spoke of sponsors being people that show up typically in your memories, so I'd definitely have to say my parents are very responsible for my amount of literacy today. They have always been there if i needed help or had questions and they've been a huge help.