Voice and Audience Piece

I chose to include a couple of my paper talk posts to fellow class mates as an example of voice and audience pieces. These pieces highlight the need for clear and respectful communication when working with fellow students and the way in which our class helped and encouraged one another through the writing process. Again, as communication is such an imperative key to family life, I believe that the improvement of my communication skills is by far the greatest gift I have taken away from this course. The selection I have chosen showcase how I learned to use proper voicing for the audience addressed in helping one another with our first papers. It was a stressful time for many in the group and we tried to be as encouraging as possible while still maintaining focus on ways to help one another improve our work. As I had taught high school English this was an area that I was able to be of some help in to my fellow group members early on as they were honing their own writing skills.

Hi Jerry, Lisa, I am just going to throw in some ideas in purple. Just a few thoughts that could help. I really like where you are going with your paper and you made it very clear; however, you do not make it clear enough which writing prompt you are responding to and therefore there is not a clear antithesis. I see that in a sense you are saying, some people dress to impress and some people, like yourself dress for comfort. Try to turn this into a clearer statement toward the writing prompt and state that the people who dress to impress are the individuals that are trying to create impressions about themselves that may or may not be true while and then you can use the group who dresses "naturally, for utility and comfort" as people or really "are what they wear" as they are not trying to present anything other than who they really are. The ideas are there, they just need pulled tighter into the writing prompt, does that make sense? Also, I would get at least one quote from the book like maybe for yours the quote that says "If you're seen to be wearing the right thing, you're in" (73) It would go well in your paper when discussing the people who "Billboard" dress. Good luck Jerry, Lisa

Hi Satarra, So I would assume from your thesis that you have chosen the first writing prompt and are making the point that "we are NOT what we wear", we CHOSE to portray ourselves to others in order to get them to perceive us a certain way. This is a very workable thesis for the prompt. Your obviously antithesis would be to consider the opinion of someone who believes that clothing and identity are inseparable and that "we are what we wear". Than you tie the two up in a conclusion paragraph. Have you thought of an angle to zoom in on. Like Lolly wrote somewhere, at this point, small is good. And we have the 10-1 guideline also, more depth, less breadth. Discuss more about one smaller issue rather than discussing a number of different issues all over the map. I have to go to bed really early tonight as I am sick, but I will check in one more time before I go down for the night. Try to get somemore focus going now. Like on mine I used the economic aspect as my focus. I noticed someone use fashion. With what you are using, it seems their are many quotes in the text that would support your thesis. Have you found some? Especially all over in Michelle Lee's article. The quote, "We dress to communicate our social identity to others." (71) would work good for you. Good luck. Just keep writing! Smile, don't stress too much, its just our first paper. We have enough time in this course to get good at this, but the sooner you start the more time you have to get help. Lisa