Writing,
as I have come to discover, is a collaborative effort. Even when there is only one author, there are
other entities involved. Discourse
refers to a community of voices—an invitation for other ideas and opinions to
join the conversation. By posting our
Wikipedia page, our class, as well as the individual students, is joining the
public discourse community and the conversation(s) it holds.
James McDonald’s “I Agree, But…”
was the critical text I personally dissected for this project. As I examined the definition and examples of
public deliberation that McDonald provided, I could see it being put to
practice all around me. The different
groups in class were all invited to join the conversation. Each group had different levels of expertise
and research backgrounds. Even though
the groups were all assigned different sections, the sections had to correlate
with each other in order to form a cohesive Wikipedia article that did not contain
repeated information, misinformation, or holes in the information. The groups were not required to argue for a “right”
answer, but rather use each other’s information to discover new answers and
knowledge.The whole idea of posting to Wikipedia and putting ourselves, as authors, in the position to be seen, critiqued, and edited by the discourse community and wiki editors relates back to Corbett and Eberly’s “Citizen’s Critic”. Once published, our article is up for all to see and do with what they may. The readers and editors outside of our class (as we are the original authors) can and will act as citizen critics as they navigate the article, add missing information, discuss our discoveries, and make their own changes. Additionally, many of the “Diversions of Reasoning” that their essay lists were used as guidelines for us as we composed the article. Something that my group specifically worked hard to avoid was favoring one idea and adding bias to our post. We made sure to use support from our texts to back up our discoveries. “…before we give our assent to a conclusion, we must be satisfied that the claims that led us to that conclusion are true and that the reasoning is valid” Corbett, Eberly 135-136).
Undoubtedly, this assignment relied heavily on intertextuality both as we completed it and now as it stands in its “complete” form. (I use “complete” loosely, as the article’s rhetorical velocity allows for change and movement, thus we never know if/when it will ever be complete.) One can see how this is true just by looking at the “references” at the bottom—so many different sources were combined and dissected in order to come to the discoveries and conclusions made in the page. Further, many sections of the page include direct links to other pages which then themselves have links to even further pages. “The term intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva…defines intertextuality as ‘the transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another’” (60) (D’Angelo 33).
Corbett, Edward P.M., and Rosa A.
Eberly. “Becoming a Citizen Critic: Where Rhetoric Meets the Road.” In The Elements of Reasoning,
2nd Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. 121-36. Print.
D’Angelo, Frank. “The Rhetoric of
Intertextuality.” Rhetoric Review 29.1 (Dec. 2009): 31-47. JSTOR.
McDonald, James. “I Agree, but … :
Finding Alternatives to Controversial Projects through Public Deliberation.” Rhetorical
Citizenship and Public Deliberation. Ed. Christian Kock and Lisa S. Villadsen. University Park:
Pennsylvania State UP, 2012. 119-217. Print.
Zittrain, Jonathan. “The Lessons of
Wikipedia.” The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2008. 127-48.
Print.
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