Note to Self: Writing Really Is Thinking

Therefore, self, you need to leave yourself a lot more time to do the writing, because if you think you've done all the thinking (brainwise) already, you'll totally be proven wrong once you start writing. Like, I dunno, once you're 5,000 words into an article about American music critics writing about Chinese indie rock which you're going to present at a conference in three days and suddenly it seems that everything you've written is nonsense.

I wish that were hypothetical. On the plus side, I scaled my ambitions down quite a bit on this piece and I'm going to parlay it into a more in-depth study of features about Chindie rock, which might someday be publishable.

加油！

Lack of Communication

Here's an exchange that took place in my Intercultural Communication Class this week.

Student: Will our final exam be the same as the other ICC class?

Me: What other ICC class? I didn't know there was one.

Student: Yeah, they meet next door at this time.

Me: Nobody told me about it. So no, the exam won't be the same. In fact, I doubt the teacher in that class is even using the same textbook.

Student: Actually, he wrote this textbook (holds up the textbook I chose for the class after looking through every ICC textbook I could find).

Me: 不会吧! I can't believe nobody told me about this!

Discussion Questions

What can we learn from this incident?

Different Kinds of Analysis

Linguistic Analysis: "...tends to focus on formal features of a language at phonolgical, lexical, syntatcis, and pragmatic levels." (Xiaoye You, 2008)

Rehetorical Analysis: "An efort to understand how people whinin specific social situations atemtp to influence others through language." (Selzer 2004 quoted in You 2008)

Discourse Analysis: "the analysis of spoken and written language as it is used to enact social and cultural perspectives and identities." (James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis)

It seems like you could and maybe should do them all at the same time.