Porter Responses

Summary
In his article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community", James E. Porter attempts to explain to the reader that just because a piece of writing has elements of other works does not necessarily make it plagiarism. He argues that such writings are the product of a "discourse community", a process in which many writer's works may have some of the same ideas and arguments.

Pre-Reading
In my mind, an author is a writer whose work is published and a writer is anyone who writes, published or not. I would choose the first term to describe the writer of any work that has been officially published, such as a book or an article. I would use the second term to describe the writer of an unpublished work, such as a paper written for class or a letter to a friend.

Synthesis
This article is hard to put with others because it wasn't dealing with constructs or arguments but instead the topic of plagiarism, which is different from the other topics that we have talked about. The only way that I can see that it has matched up with other readings is that it provides useful information about writing techniques.

QD
4. This is different from the way that I had assumed writing should be evaluated prior to reading this article because I never saw writing as something that had to always be accepted. It is different from the way that my writing has been evaluated in the past because my writing has only had to be accepted by the teachers that read it, not really by a "community".

5. His own work reflects the principles that he is writing about because he uses examples such as the Declaration of Independence and how Jefferson was not the only one who wrote it. By doing this, he is taking a concept from another work and applying it to his own, so therefore, intertexuality is taking place in this piece.

AE
2. Porter's version of the rule would say that if a group of students in a "discourse community" worked together on a paper, or if sources of other people's works are cited, then using the work of others would not be counted as plagiarism. The version for our class states that  if any work at all that is not original is used, then it is automatically plagiarism.

MM
This study really hasn't changed the way that I think about writers too much because I know that some writers do work together and bounce their ideas off of each other when they write. It wouldn't change the way that I write too much because I personally like to be alone when I write, especially when it is the creative writing that I do in my spare time. However, when it is any other kind of writing, working with others to get some ideas would be helpful sometimes.

My Thoughts
I thought this reading was pretty good. However, from what Porter says in this article it makes the lines between what is plagiarism and what is not even more confusing than it was to me before.