Porter

Chloe Brotherton

English 1510

September 17, 2012

James E. Porter “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community”

 

Summary

James E. Porters “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” article is about the absurdity of how our writings must always be original and any ideas borrowed are plagiarized.  Porter explains the principle of the phrase “intertextuality” meaning not all ideas are plagiarized, but contain traces of other texts. 

Synthesis

“Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” is somewhat like the other pieces we have read this semester in the sense of explaining a concept to the reader.  But it’s also kind of different because instead of telling us how to do something or fix it, he is just explaining his views on the concepts of our culture’s way of writing.

QDJ

4.  Porter’s concept of evaluating writing should be its “acceptability” within the reader’s community is different than I assumed before reading the article because I always had different techniques of writing, some from high school and some I learned this year in English 1510.  For a paper to be “acceptable” it must have expected social science sections, demonstrate contributing knowledge to the field, demonstrate familiarity, use a scientific method of analyzing results, etc.  I wouldn’t necessarily agree with all of this, but Porter does definitely have some good points.

5.  I believe Porter’s work reflects the principles he’s writing about.  He got his point across to me and even made me think about the concept in a different light because I have always kind of thought the same thing about plagiarism and intertextuality.  Even if his article wasn’t “original” he still explained had valid facts/opinions like a good article should. 

AEI

2.  The plagiarism policy for the course I’m in now is unless you copy and paste an article or parts of various articles then that is plagiarism.  But if you take the same idea for that article and put it in your own words than that is not plagiarism.  Also, if you quote the passage from the article you want to use and site the article and the author it is not plagiarism.

Meta Moment

Porter’s study hasn’t necessarily changed the way I imagined writers writing; I haven’t really put thought into writers writing though.  I just see a writer writing on a computer, nothing special.  Adopting his notions would change my ways but I doubt I’ll fully adopt his notions.

After thoughts

This wasn’t the most interesting article, but his concept of textuality was something worth reading about.  I always pondered on the idea of plagiarism; isn’t everything technically plagiarized?  Unless you are the one coming up with a new idea or such, is anything you say/write original?  Porter put this is a different perspective for me.