Post for 2/20

I found Lape’s discussion of negotiated interactions to be very helpful. I was, like many of my classmates I think, wondering what toggling between Higher Order and Lower Order Concerns would look like in practice. I had imagined it like a somewhat messy conversation between distracted people, but when Lape described a negotiated interaction between student and tutor, it began to make sense. I saw how discussion about word choice—creer verses praticiper in her example—could be both a grammar and usage conversation as well as one about the ideas in the text that student and tutor are discussing. It made me think about the moments in my own tutoring sessions when I end up focusing on one word or sentence construction because I have a feeling that it will help me and the student come to an understanding about the paper.


I have not had a clear moment of cross-cultural rhetorics in my tutoring so far, since both of my students are native English speaking undergrads. Although, if you consider academic writing to be a different culture than casual writing, then I suppose we have had some conversations about words that fit better in different contexts. I very much appreciate Brice’s narrative. It was helpful to learn that not everyone feels the same way about thesis statements. In Philip’s mind, thesis statements—because they foreshadow events—could be considered insensitive and clumsy.

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