Despite being a VERY tricky subject to approach within a research endeavor, I really like Trainor's piece. There were sections, most notably the students interviews, which made me cringe (heavily), but I loved the way she structured her paper.
I constantly find myself at odds with a few of my friends in the class (mainly Amanda and Michelle) who love love love the heavily theorized pieces that tend to go way over my head. The Trainor piece was the first research article that I found myself eager to complete. Maybe it's my literature background that made the content seem more applicable... who knows. I think I can break it down into a couple instances of Trainor's writing that I would like to use in my own prospectus.
First, she was constantly defining her terms (for those of us not heavily versed in Rhet/Comp)
Second, she utilized the narrative structure so seamlessly. I could hardly notice when she changed from theory to the real life examples.
Third, the reflections on her narrative and student contributions really hit home. I think that if I was interviewed at he same age of these students my answers would have been closer to theirs than I would like to think. I did grow up in a radically large white-populated neighborhood. The kids at my school pretty much all had parents with graduate degrees and planned to go to school. I would never in a million years call myself racist (I am half middle-eastern so I think it's impossible...) but I never quite realized how much the area that surrounded me influenced my way of analysis. The sections with ethnographic analysis, therefore, were extremely interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment