Assignment Details:
Write replies to three of your classmates (listed below), expand your peers’ ideas and continue thinking about the topics of author, style, and evidence critically.
You may choose to agree or disagree with your peers, but be sure to back your ideas with evidence from the text or from your own research.
Mr. Brain response to Annoying Ways People Use Sources by Kyle D. Stedman.
Kyle Stedman teaches English at the Rockford University English Department. He directs the writing center and has previously served as the secretary and vice-chair at that faculty. He is also a member of the Intellectual Property Caucus at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. His favorite area is the rhetoric od sound and music. His main purpose is pointing out mistakes or annoyances made by some writers. His target audience is really everyone but especially those unaware of the mistakes they are making. Those unaware of how much the reader is annoyed. Stedman clearly has communicative motivations and would like to help others excel at communication in their writing with their reader.
One annoyance Stedman uses is the dating Spider-Man annoyance. This refers to starting or ending paragraphs with quotations. This isn’t very good for our writing because it leaves the reader questioning what they read. They could read the interesting quote then the writer moves on and the reader is never satisfied. He uses specific examples to prove his point and uses his tone to imprint the point on the audience. This is very effective because a good tone can grab a reader’s attention. He uses this style and evidence because most writers probably don’t even realize they are doing this. His tone isn’t too aggressive so it doesn’t scare the readers away but it isn’t so casual that they don’t take him seriously.
Mrs. Presta response to Annoying Ways People Use Sources by Kyle D. Stedman.
Kyle Stedman is a teacher and scholar of rhetoric and writing. Stedman works at Rockford University as the director of the writing center and administers the forum series of guest lectures and performances. Stedman focusses on observing, making and studying models of effective communication and emulating models. The main point of Stedman’s writing is to go over the correct ways to use sources and the mistakes people make while citing work. The intended audience is for anyone using citations and sources to write. Based on his profession it is clear that Stedman just wants to create better writers and better writing habits.
Stedman’s writing style creates a sense of acknowledgement and acceptance for those who may not be great at writing. Stedman compares sloppy writing to slow driving on the highway, stating that “When I’m driving in the fast lane, maintaining the speed limit exactly, and I find myself behind someone who thinks the fast lane is for people who drive ten miles per hour below the speed limit, I get an annoyed feeling in my chest like hot water filling a heavy bucket.” Stedman uses this to compare slow driving to sloppy writing in a way that readers can be just as annoyed trying to read unconventional writing as drivers are stuck behind someone going under the speed limit. Stedman follows this up later by stating the writer might not know the generally accepted practices of using sources. Stedman goes over why he uses different conventions of writing depending on who his intended audience is. The annoyance chosen is “Am I in the Right Movie?” This annoyance goes over the way in which a writing seems to be going as expected and then a quote is put in that does not belong. This annoyance is related to being in a theatre in the way that you may be sitting in a theatre waiting to watch a movie and then a completely different movie starts playing. Stedman’s style is very effective because he gives ways to help without making his audience feel incredibly guilty for their sloppy writing.
Mrs. Kaelyn response to Annoying Ways People Use Sources by Kyle D. Stedman.
The author of our fifth text “Annoying Ways People Use Sources”, is Kyle D. Stedman. Stedman is an associate English professor of English at Rockford University. At the university, Stedman teaches mainly in professional writing, multimodal composition, creative nonfiction, and first-year composition. He is also apart of the Writing Center in which he has had the title of secretary and vice-chair. In his writing of “Annoying Ways People Use Sources”, he starts off with a comparison of slow drivers in the fast lane to driving. Stedman uses this comparison in order to show the audience that not all writers know how to correctly and follow through with sources should be provided and used in writing. As in the comparison, people driving SHOULD know that they should not be in the fast lane if they are going to drive slow. This deals with writers because not all writers know how to correctly use outside sources in their own writing which can make the audience very confused. Throughout Stedman’s writing he focuses on giving advice to writers in general. He also focuses on showing writers how they should include outside sources along with good and bad examples of using sources in writing. An example in which he shows how he would use outside sources would be, “In a blog, I cite source by hyperlinking; in an academic essay, I use a parenthetical citation that refers to to a list of references at the end of the essay”. Stedman uses his advice in order to help other writers because he understands the struggle of using and how he executes his process.
In Stedman’s text one “annoyance” that he mentions is when writers either start or end their paragraphs with a quotation which can sometimes be irrelevant and confusing. The author does an excellent job in his writing with providing evidence and showing his own style of writing when explaining his annoyance with the intended audience. In order to show the annoyance of Stedman, he gives an example of one of his own student’s papers. Stedman does this in order to begin to show the audience his annoyance with the placement of the quotations. Continuing on with the example he provided, he brings up a point in relation to “dating spider-man”. Stedman uses this example to show that a quotation or an idea is brought up at a random time which can make the audience very confused and annoyed. The audience may feel this way because the point of the quotation may not be fully explained and or can be irrelevant to the situation. Stedman’s use of style and language very well helps the audience understand his “annoyance”. This use is used very thoroughly and often throughout his writing in order to improve the quality of writing and excels with it as well.
