Case Study 1: Trying to Change Jacks Disposition toward Writing Reading Guide

Summary
This case study focuses on a man named Jack, a nontraditional student who believes he is
a bad writer due to his past experiences with writing throughout his educational career.
Throughout his journey in English 2020, Jack learned key writing principles: audience,
revision, context, purpose, rhetorical situation, discourse community, genre, and research.
This case study shows the importance of reading and writing about writing. It was the
courses focus on how writing works and its constant drive to help students understand
writing that helped Jack learn these key principles of writing (290).
At the end of the class, Jack, even though he began with a negative view towards writing
and who was not confident in his own writing ability, changed the way he thought of
himself as a writer and the act of writing itself.
Key Words
Purpose: Purpose in a writing situation is the reason why someone is writing in the first
place. Ask yourself why am I writing this document? Am I achieving what I want to
achieve?
Rhetorical Situation: The rhetorical situation includes the purpose, audience, exigence,
and contextual elements of a writing situation. Writing can be used to create or address
certain rhetorical situations.
Audience: The audience is a person or group of people you are writing to. It is very
important to consider your audience when writing. For example, it is important to take
into consideration the amount of knowledge the audience has on a certain topic and then
adjust the writing situation for the audiences needs.
Context: The author and the audience may bring certain constraints to the writing
situation. For example, where one grows up influences what someone may believe. Those
beliefs may influence the writing situation.
Discourse Community: A community that wants to achieve the same goals and has a
distinct way of communicating.
Genre: Types of writing classified by purpose and context. Genre is commonly used
among movies and music, but it involves any communicative act. A resume is a genre
that has a distinct purpose and is involved in a certain rhetorical situation used by a
discourse community.
Research: Research is discovering information based off of inquiry. Jacks research
question dealt with police reports.
Revision: Revision is a major part of the writing process. No piece is ever perfect and it is
important to revise because in that process the author may find, for example, that they did
not address their audience correctly.
Key Quotations
I feel as though I come into this class with a handicap. I am a student returning to school
after 10 years on the job market. I spent everyday writing papers for my last job but never
really took the time to think about what I was writingI have never put much thought
into the papers that I have written (Thought Piece 3, 288).

Other writers, too, have extreme doubts about the quality of rightness of their work
helped Jack accept that not exactly right is okay when it comes to writing. He had to
learn that writing is a series of attempts toward an ideal that is probably never reached
(289).
In the most astute section of the paper [final research project], Jack compares his report
of an incident with another officers report of the same incident, working through
differences in style, account, perspectives, and tone to demonstrate how those differences
could be read as emotive (290).
It was the courses focus on how writing works and its constant drive to help students
understand writing that helped Jack learn these key principles of writing (290).

Discussion
Discuss the meaning and implications of the key quotations.
Discuss the limitations of Jacks standing as a nontraditional student. How do these
limitations affect Jacks writing and his attitude towards writing? Do these limitations
affect only nontraditional students? Why?
What does the case study reveal to be the best pedagogical (teaching) method? Do you
agree with the studys assertions?
How did Jacks research help him develop as a writer? What did he learn from his
research about the writing process and rhetorical situation?
What discourse communities are evident within this case study?
What genres are evident within this case study?