Andrew Garcia
October 22, 2013
WRT 105
Workshop Letter
Augie,
Upon reading your paper, I found you made a strong argument that international students are not a discourse community. You used Swales 6 rules to disprove the theory that you first had of international students being a discourse community. You separated the rules and compared the theory of international students as being a discourse community to each individual rule. You make the claim that at first glance, international students seem as if they are a discourse community, but under close examination you realize they are really not. You make the claim that the idea international students being thought of as a discourse community is created by them not being like the rest of us. You prove that just because they are all not from here, does not make them from a different discourse community.
You use your interview as the basis of your argument and the idea that sparked this argument, so I feel your paper would be more effective if you used quotes or a partial transcript to describe to the reader what your are arguing from. A lot of the important information that comes from interviews is held within the dialect and circumstances of the interview. I feel a partial transcript would open the reader up to some of the information lost in translation.
Throughout your paper you put strong emphasis on Swales 6 rules. The use of Swales is successful, but if you were to add other sources from class and maybe even a few more specific to your topic outside sources, your argument would gain a new dimension. In an argument you cannot use “I” so you are forced to rely on other sources to prove your argument. Your breakdown of Swales is makes a great argument for your claim, but using even one other source to prove that Swales is knows what he is talking about would solidify your argument.
I am unsure if we were allowed to use “I” in the impersonal form, but if we were not allowed to, you used I in your introduction. If you remove the “I” and just say what you you want to say, your argument would seem less bias and would be more successful as an argument.
The topic you chose had many aspects to it, and I feel you did a good job not trying to cover them all in a paper as short as this. While 6-8 pages seems long, many people will struggle most by deciding what is important and what is not. I think your paper was effective in this regard as you did not try to do too much with this paper, but at the same time you kept the “fluff” to a minimum. Your argument was set up in a list-like format and you only used the necessary information required to prove your argument based on each step.
While your step by step elimination method benefited your article by filtering out what was important and what was not for this argument, the step by step approach made your paper read in a choppy manner. I feel if you took the information from your current paper and put it in a smoother format, your paper would be very good. This paper is well written and you stuck to your argument well. With a little fine tuning and a bit of rewriting your argument has the potential to be very compelling.
Sincerely,
Andrew Garcia
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