Blog #10

This research paper may prove to be somewhat of a difficult task to do. One discourse community that I have an interest in writing about and researching is the financial advisory community. I have always been interested in the financial advisory community and its place in society especially since being that I am an international business major. I like the idea that advisors help people plan for their futures and become a large impact on many people's lives and futures. I recently attended a information session for Bank of America Merril Lynch. The current employees gave myself and the other interested college students their spiel about what it was like to be a financial advisor. After going to the meeting, I have a pretty good understanding of financial advising. In this research paper, I will research what it means to be a financial advisor and the steps they take when dealing with clients. I will interview a family friend who is a financial advisor at Edward Jones. I will ask him various questions about the job and as well as the most important aspect that is what is his fiduciary duty to the clients. I will ask him how he communicates with the clients and by which medians of communication he uses to contact his clients. Upon researching this discourse community I will learn the values they hold as well as the communication within the group that makes this a specific group. This may prove to be difficult because some of my questions may go unanswered in the interview making may have to research various journal articles about financial advising. Hopefully when I finish this paper it will prove to be a valid insight into the discourse community and in turn it will be something that my professor will give me a decent grade on.

Blog #9

Wardle writes about identity and conforming to social norms within a certain group and in this particular work, the focus is on the workplace. It is a normal idea that one must act and use certain genres within a workplace because it is expected.

Having worked four different jobs, I have a pretty good idea about how one's identity and behavior changes due to what is expected. As I am getting closer to graduating, which is terrifying, I will need to obtain an internship and learn the ways of how things are in the business workplace I enter, It will be crucial that I learn while in my internship how to communicate and the areas of improvement that I will need to focus on. I may lose part of my identity as I will constantly want to have a good and professional impression when I meet new people. This will be a positive and a negative thing as I will constantly have a filter and try to carry off a "persona", but possibly in the late future when I am in a more senior position, I will be able to show more personality Early on in my career, I will have little to no authority which will not bother me... as I would like to think it will not.

Being that I am an international business major, I would like to do business with a concentration in business between countries or a multinational corporation. I have yet to narrow it down to what I want to do specifically, but I can see myself somewhere along the lines of doing international finance or wealth management/financial advising but I would carry with me a global perspective of the markets and focus on non-U.S. markets. Yes, this sounds very boring to most people. The fact that I will have a global perspective means that I will need to travel to various countries and learn the customs there and become acquainted with markets aboard and trends in order for investors in the U.S. to jump on money trains that might not be seen on mainstream Bloomberg.  

Entering the workforce will no doubt be about change within a person. A new person in a workplace will have to learn the lexis as well as understanding of how things work within the discourse community.

Blog #8

Serving is something that can be looked at very differently depending on the place that a server is serving food... servingly. For example a server that works at a at a three Michelin stars rated restaurant could be looked upon differently compared that to your average diner server. I do not think of a server as anything negative regardless of the restaurant where I am currently eating because I feel many of these servers we encounter are just ordinary people trying to make money.

Mirabelli introduces the idea that waiting tables is simple not just a repetitive skill that requires little school education, He infers that it is a practice that takes years to master. Marabelli talks about how a fellow waiter, John Harvey explained that it took him 10 years working at the restaurant before he thought of himself as a master waiter.

I myself have been in the hospitality business for 2 summers and have found that my line of work is as unappreciated as waiting tables is. Yes, the jobs that I preformed at my hotels were repetitive and sometimes little school knowledge was needed in order to do said jobs. I, however realized that what I did on a day-to-day operation system was actually a very confusing task. I was tasked with multiple things to do around the hotel and do many different things in order for the hotel to function smoothly with minimal slip ups. I had to know what to do every day, if I was unable to preform certain required tasks I had to solve the problems at hand. Only on a few occasions was my intelligence insulted, mostly by angry guests looking to just cause problems. One instance that particularly annoyed me (and there were quite a few) was a time when I was working in the lobby of my hotel reading the entrance for check-ins. I had to assemble a water dispenser and put accenting fruits in it as well as put out little finger foods for arriving guests to sample. I also was one of the first workers that interacted with the guests so I had to not only be knowledgeable about every plausible and implausible question by the guests, but I also had to have a deep knowledge of the greater San Diego area and the prices and times of attractions as well as places to eat, things to do and general questions.

One day a women came and started talking to me as I was setting the lobby for check-ins. We began to talk about the hotel and she asked if I did anything else. I responded by saying that I attend San Diego State and am pursing international business. She then by my surprise raised her eyebrow and scoffed and said that I was really putting that degree to use sarcastically Instantly I was agitated with this heinous... person but remained calm and reiterated that I was ATTENDING SDSU and had not graduated yet... (with a smile on my face of course)

A real art form that servers as well as jobs similar to mine is that you have to learn to deal with people and have patience, which is a very difficult task. Mirabelli furthered my understanding that just because a certain job does not require a mass amount of formal education does not mean that it is a cakewalk of a job. Serving tables is an integral part to society as they are the middle man between chef and customer.      

Your Fellow Blogger,

Kina Bramlette

Blog #7

  I liked this blog assignment as it was just the question of reflecting upon a prior experience which I will attempt to do in the following words. A time in my life where I found myself drastically changing my identity kit was when I changed schools sophomore year of high school. I was absolutely petrified at the thought of attending a new school and not knowing a single person and not knowing the "right" way to do things. When I started at my new school I completely changed my behavior. Before, I was rather obnoxious in classes and seen as a class clown figure and outgoing and all that other extrovertism jazz in my old school, and now at my new school I was quiet and reserved and walked through the hallways trying to be undetected. I noticed this that I was not acting like my true self due to the lack of complacent belonging in the new environment. I was trying to keep a low profile in an effort not to give people the wrong idea about me or have a negative opinion of me. I went along with this "mushfaking" for a portion of the first semester until I found the right fit and the correct behavior that my peers would deem acceptable. I slowly but surely maneuvered back into my old self, but this new persona was an altered version of the original. This new version still had the same personality and tenancies, but now I was more mature and not so obnoxious. One's identity kit is a very important thing as it is the persona of the person. Mushfaking can be a good or bad thing depending on how the person is altering their behavior. In my personal experience, this mushfaking proved to be a positive choice to make as I learned how to adapt to my new environment before just jumping into the picture and not changing anything at all.  

Your Fellow Blogger,

Kina Bramlette

Blog #5 Discourse Community

This academic writing has a rather long winded clarification piece as in introduction. Unfortunately Swales fails to give me a definition in bold font so I had to peruse this paper and come up with a rough definition.
 

Discourse Community- A select group of individuals that have a certain  parlance that is exclusive to said group and they use this to meet specific goals... As Swales makes it out to be.

The upside to the paper is that Swales did not put the six characteristics incognito as they are numbered  and displayed below.

1, A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goal
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among
its members.
3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to
provide information and feedback.
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres
in the communicative furtherance of its aims.
5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some
specific lexis.
6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable
degree of relevant content and "discoursal" expertise.

This seems to be a sort of rough checklist to make a certain group qualify for the esteemed title of "Discourse Community".


There are many discourse communities that come to mind when one thinks of the topic. One that stands out to me is the current Blacks Live Matter community. The goal of this organization has been made clear through all the forms of media that they want to raise awareness against police brutality against Africa Americas. The BLM group uses various means of intercommunication and mechanisms  such as posting on social media, having peaceful and violent protests and raising awareness to events that occur. The community utilizes many genres to appeal to ethos, but mostly pathos as a way to communicate. BLM has also developed a specific lexis in the phrases they shout at protests. BLM is a discourse community that has a main goal as Swales spells it out to be. There are a large number of other discourse communities that can be easily identified in today's society.

Blog #4 Editorial

Hello Fellow Bloggers,

This fourth blog assignment involved reading editorials that attempted to shed light on a certain subject and present it in a way that would make the reader think along the lines that the writer intends them to. For this assignment I looked at various JSTOR daily articles as well as the "news" articles that were provided.

I rather enjoyed reading the JSTOR editorials because these editorials were very well written in that they appeared with tremendous ethos. The writers of these JSTORs wrote these editorials like a traditional one, yet they were composed in a way that presented the material in a professional manner that leaves their opinion in the depths of the article. The information was presented in a way that was not outright biased which also help evoke more ethos from the work.

The one editorial that stood out to me was the townhall.com editorial about liberals. One could simply read the title and know it was going to be a right winged piece denouncing liberal thought which to me, throws all credibility out the window all together. The newspaper articles focused more on the entertainment rather than the drier black and white get to the point structure of the JSTORs.

Editorials are an interesting genre of writing. They are meant to entertain, yet provide an opinion and attempt to persuade the reader to think likewise or make the reader question the argument at hand. There is a common occurrence of persuasive writing. The authors in all the editorials attempt to appeal to the readers sense of ethos and pathos depending on the subject of the article.


Your Fellow Blogger,

Kina Bramlette

Blog #2 Devitt

Writing genres is something that I personally have not given much thought to as I am always assigned a specific genre when writing. Devitt delves deep into the idea of different genres and how they are used. In school and at work, I am often tasked with writing in a particular format over and over again as Devitt points out in the second paragraph, "that writing instruction can encourage accommodation and assimilation" (Devitt, 2004). There I am automatically putting in an in-text citation. Devitt makes a point that teachers present certain genres as the only means of writing, greatly reducing room for creativity. The majority of the papers I write for school are format as that is the standard due to the fact that it is professional and gets straight to the point of the paper and is black and white.

Devitt pleads that having genre awareness is quintessential in your writing abilities. Genre awareness aids students to think critically and choosing a certain genre to present material can greatly affect the overall tone of the paper being presented. Genre awareness and rhetorical analysis would help me in that presenting my material in the appropriate format as well as exploring genres I do not use frequently to adapt to a different style of writing that will in turn improve upon my overall writing skills.

When Devitt makes her claim that when a writer takes up a genre, they take up that genre's ideology, Devitt is eluding to the fact that each genre has certain specific characteristics that make them be identified as a certain genre. The reader is able to critically understand the paper more due to the characteristics and ideas that are evoked when a genre is introduced. The genre ideology is able to have its own ideology because there is a plethora of different genres which in turn create a large quantity of vastly different ideas.

Devitt mentions existing power structures and dynamics as she again eludes to what I had succumbed to in the beginning of this blog. She fears that if students are not educated on the various genres, they will assimilate to the same essay genre as I had started this blog with. Devitts' thoughts that genres are a source of power in a paper stem from the fact that the genre you choose to write your paper in could be vastly different and have different tone and possibly appear as a different paper all together depending on the genre you choose to write in.

After reading Devitt's chapter, I will now be more aware of the literature and papers I read as well as reflect upon my own writing style and attempt to explore the various genres that are at my disposal

Fellow Blogger,

Kina Bramlette