"Prior"

Questions on Discussion and Journaling 2, 3, 4, 5, & 7 (WaW 526)

QDJ 2, 3, 4, 5, & 7

2. Adding up the various aspects of the process Prior writes about, make a list of everything involved with tracing the writing process. (Hint: Your list probably should include most of the terms  and ideas Prior uses as headings throughout the part of the chapter called "Methods and Applied Analysis.")

- Collecting and Keeping Track of the Textual inscriptions themselves.
- Analyze how the Text Itself is Related
- Trace Intertextual Relations between Talk and Text
- Relating Text to an Initiating Text
- Relating Text to Source Texts
- Intertextual Analysis

• Participant Accounts
• Concurrent Acounts (Think loud Protocols) - Reading aloud, Vocalizing the Words You Write, Saying Aloud What You Are Thinking About.

- Retrospective Accounts of Writing

• Conventionalization
• Simplification

- Using Naturalistic Accounts

• autobiographical or biographical narratives or in interviews

- Process Logs

- Semi-Structured Interviewing

• Semi-structured interviews move between scripted questions and open-ended conversations

- Stimulated Elicitation Interviewing

• external stimulus
• some object that can trigger and support memory as well as serving as a source for new reflection.
• Text-based interviewing 
• Discourse-based interviewing 
• Ask writers to draw their writing process and contexts
• Using videotaped or audiotaped records of the composing as a basis for interviewing 

- Observation of Writing

• Participation Observation
• Field notes and photography 
• Recording events- videotaped recording of participants writing, settings where people have to collaborate on their writing

- Integrating Data from Multiple Sources

- Conclusion- understand where texts come from (authorship and social contexts), careful tracing of history.

                  

3. Using your own words, explain the difference between composition and inscription. Does  one always or usually seem to come first?

- Writers not only inscribe their writings but they also go back multiple times at different times to revise their paper by reading their notes, rough drafts that they have written or materials from the sources that they have found. There are also times when they do not know what to type or write, so they stop to think and plan what they are going to write next. There is no placing one before the other because they happen at different times during the writing process.

4. Why is it important to distinguish different kinds of authorship as Prior does with animator, author, and principal?

- These roles are divided, not fused. An animator actually writes the words down. The author selects those words that the animator laid out, and the principal is represented by its position in the words that the author chose.

5. What does Prior mean when he argues that to trace process you have to trace the structure of participation in a text? What sorts of participation in creating the text does he include?

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7. Summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the several kinds of writer accounts Prior discusses (concurrent, retrospective, naturalistic, process logs, and semi-structured and stimulated-elicitation interviewing). In reading about them, do you find you have a favorite?

- Concurrents are closed off because you cannot tell what they are thinking, reading, or composing. This is for more writers that want to be alone. They do not think out loud. Retrospective counts deal with a person's memory. Some people cannot recollect moment-to-moment thinking and actions. The naturalistic at times, appears in autobiographical or biographical narratives or in interviews. A process log is a log or journal where a person writes all of their writing processes in which the writer discusses the processes, and how it relates to other writings in the class. Semi-structured interviews are planned out questions in advance of the interview but also leaving the script. Stimulated elicitation interviewing is based on semi-stimulated interviews, but it deals with a trigger that can support the memory instead of completely going off of memory alone.