Reading Response No. 8

Getting Ready to Read:
Make a list of all the ways you get "help," of any kind, with your writing. Where do you get ideas, advice, feedback, and assistamce.
I get help with my writing by talking to other people about it, having them read it, or reading something simalar by another author to see how they wrote through the problem I'm having.

Reading Response:
In his article "Intertexuality and the Discourse Community," Porter attempts to educate writers about how plagarism may not be as black and white as we thought it was. He argues that the writing communtiy is full of intertextuality, because every piece of work has pieces of other works in it-that nothing is truly original.

Questions for Discussion and Journaling:
4. Evaluating a writer's work by acceptability is simalar to the way I think writing should be evaluated, but much different than how my writing has been evaluated in the past. In the past, my writing has been evaluated by a cut-and-dry set of rules or criteria that it had to meet. If the work did not meet the criteria, it would either drop the grade or the paper would be failed.

5. Porter's work fails to reflect the principles he writes about because all through his article he talks about how every piece of work is never truly original, but he never talks about his inspiration for this particular article, or if he recieved help from anyone, or if there are traces of other articles in this one.

Applying and Exploring Ideas
2. if i were to write a new definition based upon Porter's standards, it would go a little something like this:
Plagarism: Purposely copying all of someone's work to call one's own.
The original definition of plagarism and the one I just wrote have some simalarities. Both do not condone copying another person's work to pass off as your own, however, the new one specifies that plagarism is copying all of someone's work and not just parts of it.

Meta Moment:
This study does change the way I feel about writers. I feel that now I know why writers borrow things in their work. This will change the way I write when I feel like I'm plagarizing other authors when there is actually no need to worry about this.

Personal Response:
I thought this article made good points about intertextuality and plagarism. It made me rethink the concept of plagarism and some of the things I've read with traces of other works in them.