You should have with you a printout of your english14.doc file. As usual, if you don't have one, please go print it, or if you didn't do the assignment from the last prompt, go do that. You'll learn a lot more doing that than listening to people discussing work you haven't done.

As part of my continuing attempt to help people think more clearly about how readers and writers connect with each other by means of texts (it's not a matter of moving information from one brain to another) I want to invite you to look at how, when writers bring other people's ideas, and words, into their texts, they can let the reader know why they're doing it, and how they expect the reader to respond to the ideas and words.

The english14.doc files should include a passage in which the report quotes or paraphrases from an external source (or where it seems that what's happening is that the report is quoting or paraphrasing, though it may not say so explicitly). One of the important issues writers face, especially when doing serious writing (academic or otherwise), is how to make sure a reader knows when she's hearing the writer's voice, and when it's someone else. This matters, because texts aren't boxes of information; they are always conveying something about whatever information they're using. A writer who doesn't know that writes ineffectively: a reader who doesn't know that misses the point.

Today I want to assemble the inquiry groups again, and get each english14.doc file to the group whose report it's about.  You should begin by reading all the files you have (read them with some care; in my skimming of most of them it looks like a substantial number of them are well worth thinking about), and decide on two that you'd particularly like us all to talk about. If possible, choose one where the writer thought you "did a good job of solving the problem of how to make clear where the source was drawn from" and another where the writer thought you "seem to have run into a problem." At the bottom or on the back of the document, write a sentence or so saying why you think it's worth talking about it. When you've chosen a couple, give me the whole set, with the ones you'd like to talk about clearly marked.

Thinking about the contract between reader and writer

It seems to me, reading over the english13.doc files chosen last time, that there are some important ideas that aren't clear yet. So I want to come back to some of the questions we were discussing. But it's going to take me a bit longer than I've had to set up a way for us to think about them using those files. In the meantime, I want to attend to the Elaine Pagels text Thom is asking you to read. Consider that your English work, too; it might give you a bit more time to spend with Pagels.