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While reading Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics by James Paul Gee my initial though was that his tone was very scholarly more on the level of professor or someone with an extensive English background. I don’t think it was very effective a lot of it left me confused and I never really felt like I understood the main topic of the reading. What I took out of the paper is that as we grow up we learn different discourses for different scenarios in our life. I understand that we all have a different way of speaking depending on the location and the person.
Then gee goes on to talk about dominant, primary, and secondary discourse, he really lost me there and after reading the page multiple times I still don’t really understand what he was trying to explain. I feel like if he used more relatable examples it may have been easier to understand. He also used a lot of term that I feel most people would not understand and his explanations did nothing to really help me understand what he was saying. Personally I feel like I did not have the background knowledge to understand what he was alluding to the majority of the time. While reading this text I felt as though my brain was turning trying to understand what Gee was saying but I eventually gave up after asking a few of my friends if they understood what he was talking about which they did not.
Gee also kept repeating words like literacy and discourse while trying to explain what they were which was somewhat annoying because using the word in the definition does not help me get a better understanding of what he’s saying. The whole time he’s going on about the different style’s literacy and discourse when they’re meaning are still unclear. An example of this is when Gee said “ I believe any socially useful definition of “literacy” must be coached in terms of the notion of Discourse. Thus, I define “ literacy” as the mastery of a fluent control over a secondary Discourse”. I’m not really sure who would be capable of understanding Gee’s definition of literacy because I certainly do not. I’m aware that the main purpose of this paper was to discuss literacy, discourse and linguistics as stated in the title and many times in the text but I don’t feel as though this reading expanded my knowledge of those terms at all.
Also the reading just at first glance is not appealing as a reader, the small close together font and on going pages of text without anything to break it up makes it difficult to stay focused on the reading. When I see informative pieces like this and its just continuous text I have a hard time keeping focus on the actual reading and I just start looking at words but I do not actually comprehend anything. I experienced that a lot while reading this and had to constantly bring myself back and reread pages. Often times I get “intimidated” by a reading especially when they are formatted similar to this one because I look at all the pages and without even reading a single sentence I dread reading the passage.
Over all I’m still not really sure the purpose of this passage is and I’m not really sure if I’m just lacking the knowledge to do so or if the reading just didn’t “work” for me. I feel like everything Gee was talking about went over my head. I’m struggling to agree or disagree with an argument because I’m not really sure what his arguments was so I cant really have an standing point on either end. I’m curious to hear what everyone else’s opinion on this reading because once again I’m not sure if it’s just me that is confused or if everyone else is confused as well.
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When I started reading this, I became lost very quickly. I agree with you that this is more scholarly. It took me a while to learn what he meant about discourses. I finally understood with the few examples in the beginning. For example, when he used the two women interview, and how they used their language. Also, when he used the bar example. It also helped when he named off the different categories like factory worker, an administrator etc. However, I still had a troublesome time trying to understand everything else he is saying.
I agree with you, Alex, of how if he used more relatable examples it would be much easier to understand. As much as I re-read a lot of the paragraphs, my brain could not wrap around his sayings. To me, everything just blended together, into a giant ball of confusion. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about how ” literacy must be couched in terms of the notion of Discourse” (Gee). I also don’t really know where the story of the 5 and 7 year old came in. Overall, I was quite confused.
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I agree with both of you that this reading was a bit confusing to understand. Just by the small text it made me lose interest a little bit however I did go back and re-read the text to get a better understanding of what Gee was trying to say. The repetition of the word “discourse” was another thing that made me confused at first because I never knew what the word meant. Towards the end I gained a little bit of understanding of the word. The only thing that bothered me about this reading was that I couldn’t relate to anything because the author didn’t use examples that readers could relate to. I believe I would’ve enjoyed this reading a lot more if her had done so, to make it more appealing to readers and not bore them. Overall my experience with this reading was confusing.
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The second I clicked on the reading, I could tell this was not going to be one of my favorite pieces. I tried my best like you Alex to understand what Gee was saying but I was very confused for the most part. In one of the first sections called “Getting ready to read” it said to look up the term, mushfake and see what comes up. This led me to a website about Gee’s article that goes over the terms. This was a lot more helpful and helped me make sense to what Gee was saying. Though this helped me understand some key terms, I do not know how to apply them to my writing. I understand this is obviously a very educated, scholarly writer, but if he truly wants to help his readers to accomplish something, it has to make sense to his audience. If his audience is college students, he has failed for the most part seeing as the majority of us do not understand it. Maybe if his writing was more intriguing, more relevant examples, and even a bigger font, I would have been able to focus more. With it being single spaced, small text, overall a boring read, it was very hard to concentrate on what he was trying to say.
The only thing I really liked about this reading was the idea of discourse: ways of being in the world. The only issue is that I don’t know how I can now use this new knowledge of discourse and use it in the way I write. I feel like this could have been a great article if it was targeted more to a college student audience.Here is the website with the key terms for anyone who is interested: https://queerstrokes.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/gee-literacy-discourse-linguistics/
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