Honeycutt

*no awesome picture to go along with my ramblings :-(

This must be the week of my academic career where I learn about genre. Seriously, like 80% of the readings I did for my 3 classes focused in one way or another on genre. I am glad that I read Miller earlier in the week, otherwise I would have struggled with some of the readings for this class. I want to mention a few things about Honeycutt first.

For the first 20 pages of so I have all of these side notes about the transfer from individual writing to collaborative writing to individual ect. And then, poof, there is a whole section on the differences in history and individual and collaborative writing. The article was reading my mind! I was actually just having this conversation earlier in the week. I have taken 2 classes where we had the option to do our final seminar project as a collaborative project. In the first course, of the 9 of us, only two decided to work together to write a paper. Looking back I wish I would’ve done a collaborative project, but instead I did an individual paper. In the second course of 9, there were two groups of 3 and then the rest were individual projects. In this course, I did decided to work in a group for the final project and together we ended up composing a 20min movie; the other group did a web text and majority of the individuals did formal papers with powerpoints. It is interesting just to see who decided to use what mode, medium, genre. I have been thinking a lot about what is valued in the field (especially after last weeks readings). There seems to be encouragement for collaborative work within journals or conferences, but then when applying for jobs or tenure there is still value placed with the ability to do individual work. There is the possibility that I could have argued my way into collaborative projects throughout my MA career, but my MA thesis would have had to be individual. When is the first collaborative dissertation going to be done? If there is value placed with collaborative work, why does it feel like there is a rift between collaborative and individual? And, Honeycutt offered us some examples with regard to technology. New technologies encouraged a shift from collaborative to individual. Where do we think this is going to go? “But even if our composing memories become less individual and more collective, either through technical or social means, certain features of voice-recognition technology might prevent its use from being the collaborative effort that dictation was in past eras.” (318).

The other theme/issue that I was thinking about while reading this article was the thought that these voice recognition programs could become status programs in the sense that you would have to speak a particular standard dialect for the program to accurately record you. “You can, however, achieve fairly high recognition accuracy rates— but only if you make a concerted effort to improve your pronunciation and diction and speak in continuous phrases so that the com- puter can parse your speech correctly.” (315-316). Would/will these programs reinforce the idea that there is a standard dialect and that those who are able to afford access to the program are those that are within the standard? Therefore, leaving others behind and causing another divide within literacy learning?

More to come later on genre and itexts.