Response to "Braiding and Rhetorical Power Players: Transforming Academic Writing through Rhetorical Dialectic

"What message are we sending, to students, to ourselves, and to the broader public, when we police linguistic legitimacy? Nobody comes out of her mama's womb hedging claims and citing precedents. It is trained into us. However, there is a pedagogical futility here. When an overly narrow academic discourse is prescribed, we end up creating parrots who excel in replication, not agents who can enter in, own, and alter the discourse at hand, academic and otherwise (69.)"

I think the above quote sums up the article quite nicely. It also captures the rhetorical strategy that Gunter employs to really bring together this idea of "braiding." Indeed, she uses it in her article and that is one of the elements that really was great to experience. I think she is really intent on giving students power and autonomy and that point really is expressed eloquently. I also appreciated the way that she informed me of the rivalry between the two modes of communication espoused by these two seemingly very different scholars. It piqued my curiosity because Gunter was able to draw upon the research that these two scholars made in a concise and succinct manner without dumbing down their arguments.

While reading the article, I was also able to make connections with another book that I had read for a book report: Basic Writing as a Political Act. I think the author of this article shares the same belief that the "personal is damn sure academic as well." The authors of Basic Writing...Act essentially say that students should be validated for expressing themselves on paper and that it should not be viewed as simply a stepping stone for more "serious" and "academic" types of writing hence the emphasis on the scrutiny of a syllabus and the ways in which these syllabi try to balance and maintain equilibrium between the right of expression and self-validation of students and the bureaucracies of the institution. Gunter also takes issue with this when she asks, "Is the value of personal writing only that it facilitates more proficient use of academic writing? Clearly, it is no. A personal paper written by a students should have the same kind of intellectual heft that an objective academic paper has.