WOW-Mike Rose-Reading for 10-31

Before reading our article assigned for Wednesday I went onto the website and looked at other people's responses. Lindsay (I think it was Lindsay) was the only person who had written about the article our syllabus had suggested for reading. Reading her response helped me understand what the article seemed to generally be about and it didn't seem to really relate to my topic. I looked through the cross talk book for articles that seemed to relate more to my topic. Mike Rose's article "The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University" caught my eye and seemed to at least partially relate to my topic, writing centers and other outside sources college students might use when trying to learn to write for the academic discourse community.

Rose does talk about writing centers a little in his article. When he discusses writing as a skill he mentions that we have established writing skill centers. The inclusion of the word "skill" might be a keyword which I could use to get more useful returns on my online searches. To my knowledge when we talk about "The Writing Center" at Elmhurst College we're not dropping the word "skill" from the title. I'm just starting my research but I now question why that particular choice was made. I don't necessarily have the answer and I guess ultimately it may not prove to be that important but my gut tells me there's something worth following up on.

Rose really seems to attack fellow colleagues as well as university "higher ups" for their treatment of writers who struggle at their early attempts to master the conventions of academic discourse. He gives some suggestions for how to solve the issues at the end of his article but I was disappointed he didn't offer more solutions. It did make me feel confident that I wasn't misinterpreting a lot of the articles and assuming that the authors seemed to look down on students who struggled. Of all the articles we've read in this course I think it's possible that the lessons/theme of this article will most likely be carried with me for the longest period of time.

I can't help but relate a quote in this article to an idea that was presented in our discussion about the Lu article. On page 565 Rose talks about the work of Mina Shuaghnessy and says "she told us to interpret errors rather than circle them". I think that Lu was trying to interpret the errors of her students. I am 110% behind this idea and I think we as a class worked to interpret the errors or uniqueness of the 106 student's writing at the end of class and YEAH for us to do that and YEAH that Dr. O'Rourke was willing to do it.