Where'd I Go? Where We Goin'?

It's been ages, ages I tell you, since I've written. Yes, folks, the semester hit full stride a while back and I've neglected our little space in the blogosphere. The worst part of not writing is that I didn't post a summary of our last meeting. Last time, way back in early March, I believe, we read "Composition Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis: A Study of Presidential Discourse and Campus Discord," by Pegeen Reichert Powell.

The worst part about allowing so much time to elapse is that the details of our last meeting are not as sharp, the tenor of our conversation not as vivid, and the joy of intellectual community mediated by the end of the semester duties of paper grading. But alas, I will take a moment to recall some of what I remember and leave it up to the group to collectively rebuild our memories.

One of the things that we all seemed quite intrigued by was Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and its use in the composition classroom. Similar to our discussion of Micciche's "Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar," many of those present seemed very interested in how CDA allowed a different approach to the analysis of language and student texts. What seemed to stand out in our discussion, was also the ways in which Reichert Powell's text provided some language for looking closely at some of the rhetorical/discursive features of texts and connected those features to broader social, political, and ideological functions of the text. All in all...CDA seems to be a direction that many of us are interested in exploring further next year.

Anyway, I'll keep this post short...CRG will meet one more time before the semester is out. We will be reading John Trimbur's, "Composition and the Circulation of Writing." The article will be available in the CRG binder in the mailroom for copying. Keep your eyes on this space for the specific date and time!