G.D.+Learning+Synth

__Garrett Derrah’s Learning Synthesis __ Considering that within the course this year I have learned almost everything on the list in prompt #27, I’ll break it down into sections that I found to be most important.  __A reader can be affected by organization and transition: __  I found this mostly in reading the articles written by McPhee. As the class discussions brought about the realization of this phenomenon of McPhee we began to understand just why a literary journalist like McPhee would write in such a manner. We arrived at the conclusion that McPhee writes in such a way to may sure that the reader stay interested with the story that may or may not have any link to the reader, which works. The reader is affected by this through the subconscious will to know exactly how everything that is being discussed in the article is going to come together in the end, how puppies and volcanoes wind up in the same article for example. This may have been a technique long before McPhee employed it, however this was my first encounter with this style of writing and as such I really learned that organization is one of the key things that a reader looks for in an article of their choosing, and by mixing that up McPhee successfully forces us to continue reading when the story takes a dramatic turn. __A reader can be swayed into reading other sources: __  I found that this was very characteristic of McPhee’s articles involving geology, he would talk as casually as he could at the beginning of the article but as the article progresses there is more and more technical jargon added in. I found this when writing a description of one of his articles, “The Control of Nature: Cooling the Lava II”. In this article particularly I found that McPhee disguised his articles in a camouflage-esque way that you seen it and read it but didn’t really understand what it meant. In this way McPhee, if he has successfully captured your interest, knows that you will look that particular word up later on to better understand what exactly was being said in that section of the article. This was one the points I believe that I brought up in class for discussion and the rest of the class agreed that this was something they had noticed as well, and agreed that the reader is very easily persuaded in this sense. This is obviously something else that McPhee recognised as a writer and took advantage of, this reminds me of John Milton and his epic poem //Paradise Lost// that was full of references to other texts that, if one was intrigued enough, would influence the reader to read these other works to better understand the poem. It seems as though both McPhee and Milton are, in a sense, trying to educate the reader in this style of writing. __A reader can be invited to make a judgment the writer hasn't expressed: __  This was a characteristic of McPhee’s that the class took a little bit longer to realise, around the time we started reflecting on McPhee’s ecological articles. I first understood this style when I was reading a written response about an article written by McPhee. This was one of McPhee’s articles regarding an environmental problem, but only until we started reading his articles as environmental did we realise that McPhee was giving the reader points and facts in his article and leading us to make an educated decision about where we stood regarding the problem. I found this in the environmental articles I read as well, but it was more prevalent in “The Control of Nature: Cooling the Lava II” because I had read it before we were assigned to read environmental articles. It was because I read it without thinking in an environmental context did I realise the technique that was being utilized. After I thought about the article in an environmental context it was clear to me that McPhee was writing the article as a way of leading me to my own conclusion. This was not the first I learned that writers do this, but this was definitely the first time I had encountered it in such a subtle fashion. It is because of his subtle way of doing this that I believe McPhee is such a talented writer. Every reader is looking for a conclusion in a piece, McPhee, as a writer, is able to guide them and give them information for formulating their conclusion without the reader knowing. __A reader is engaged due to the mixture of chronology in McPhee’s articles: __  In my experience McPhee’s articles are rarely chronological. Within class discussions it was agreed upon that McPhee does this to actively keep the reader engaged. Majority of the articles read at the beginning of class were un-chronological throughout the article, but we surmised that this is yet another of McPhee’s trademark techniques of writing. This one goes along with the technique McPhee uses of organization, because chronology being skewed also forces our subconscious to keep intensely engaged to understand what has taken place, and to look at the bigger picture the article is trying to paint, so that by the end we may be able to understand exactly has taken place, and when. I discovered this shortly after understanding his uses of organization in his articles, which was through class discussion. With other authors and writers my experience is that there is never very much work involved for the reader tying everything together in the correct time, except of course the odd mystery novel. As such, some of McPhee’s articles threw me for a loop. __A reader's pre-existing ideas and values can shape his/her reading: __  This was shown widely every day there was a discussion in class, there were so many different opinions regarding articles by McPhee it was easy to see that the reader’s pre-existing ideas and values bleed through to their understanding of the article. This was shown the most in the article arrangement of “pieces of the frame”, when everyone was asked to arrange the article in the order they believed it was published in. This instance displayed this very vividly, almost everyone in the class arranged it in a different order and omitted some pieces and gave their reasons, and nearly everyone’s was different whether slightly or incredibly. I learned this just by watching how this phenomenon played out during our class discussion, and saw that this is true in most cases, the diversity of the understanding of the article showed how most people read articles, and why they thought that theirs was the correct order.   In general, I found the class discussions invaluable. I learned the value of corrective collective criticism. I think that not only were the discussions held in class valuable in learning what an individual’s strong points in writing were, but these discussions seemed to bring the classroom together. On occasion, early on in the semester, I would find that I would bump into random people from the class outside of school and instead of just a “hello” we wound up holding a legitimate conversation. I think this was brought on through the cohesion of the classroom from the collective discussions.  Within this semester this course has taught me some of the ins and outs of writing technique. I feel as though in other literature classes we would have just read some of McPhee’s greater works and analysed them instead of going deeper and looking at his writing techniques. I think that alone has helped me understand the world of literary journalism, and that there are many techniques that can make any random piece incredibly interesting, even when it seems out of context. That being said, I learned that as a writer creates his audience, his audience becomes a collective with understanding. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Thanks for the inspiring course. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Garrett Derrah