James E. Porter

Reader Response

In “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community,” Porter wants his readers to use previous writings to build new concepts and ideas. Originality and creativity are two hard ways of writing. One rarely comes up with completely new ideas on their own. He says “the creative writer is the creative borrower,” which means by producing concepts of your own from other writers’ material is that best way.

Porter’s argument is similar to Sarah Allen’s argument in “The Inspirer Writer vs. The Real Writer.” Both writers say that shear originality and creativity are difficult to come by. Even the writers who seem to have had original ideas may have been inspired from other writings, such as Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence. Porter’s writing is also very similar to Kleine’s research findings. Kleine’s subjects “gestured at a concerned community of peers and found starting points within the ongoing discourse of such a community.” This is exactly what Porter describes in his article: being influenced by and writing to a discourse community.

The article took a view that I have never seen before: creativity is not from within. I thought this was interesting because when I think of being creative, I think of ideas that are made up by you. I don’t always think of myself as the most artsy or creative person, so Porter’s argument made me feel better about that.
 

QDJ

#4) Porter's criterion on how writing should be evaluated is not much different than how I see it. When looking at text, there are many elements about it that have to be acceptable to the audience. Example of this would be grammar and tone. Text must follow many sentence rules and have an appropriate tone for the topic to be accepted. However, the arguments and ideas in a writing do not have to be accepted by audience to in order for it to be an acceptable writing. The goal of writing is to create new ideas and support them. It is the audience's choice to accept or refute ideas, but as long as the writing is relevant and appropriate it shouldn't be viewed as "bad." Many times my writing has been evaluated on being right or wrong. It also has been evaluated on length, for example, "essay must be 3-5 pages."

#5) In Porter's writing, he does many things that reflect the ideas he speaks about. One of his points is to use traces other writings to make new ideas. Porter constantly cites previous authors' findings and ideas to support his conclusion that writers should write to a discourse community.When writing to a community, the writer should have knowledgeof what the audience might presuppose. Porter easily connects to the readers by providing examples that the reader should be familiar with, like the Declaration of Independence. He continues by coming up with a conclusion that is new to the reader about that document.

AEI

#2) My new definition of plagarism would be "usage of someone else's work or ideas without the intention of making new ideas or mentioning the source." The course's definition of plagarism is "claiming another's ideas or work as your own or making up or falsifying information." The key difference would be that using another person's work, even without mentioning them, is acceptable as long as you don't completely use in the same way or context and you add your own thoughts to it.

MM

I do not think that having new ideas comes solely based on other writings. Of course, previous works will always have an effect on new works. However, there can be a difference between a big influence on writing and a small influence on writing. Adopting Porter's way of writing would not have a huge effect on my writing because I already write similar to his ways.