Foundation of marketing assignment
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FoundationsofMarketingAssignment.docxA Literacy Narrative is a special kind of essay in which the writer describes his or her relationship with reading or writing. A narrative is not a person’s life story; it focuses on a single experience or event in the person’s life and shows how the event shaped the person—what he or she learned from it or how the experience helped him or her grow. For example, your literacy narrative could be about how you learned the value of writing or how the feedback of a teacher taught you to love (or hate) writing.
Part I:
Write a brief (100 words) literacy narrative which explores some aspect of the Four Basics (Exposure, Motivation, Practice, or Feedback) in The Writer’s Way (pp. 7-10), as it applies to your writing experiences. Your narrative should describe one event or experience related to writing and show what you learned from it or how it shaped your writing process or attitude toward writing. In your narrative, identify one or more of the Four Basics and credit (identify) The Writer’s Way as the source for the information on the four basics.
Part II:
It is important to know what resources you have to help you through this class. Browse the following resources, and, in 75 words, describe how you think you will be able to use two or more of these to improve your writing skills.
· Writing and Documenting in APA
Please submit your responses to both prompts in a single document.
THE WRITERS WAY: Page 7-10
The Four Basics: To learn to do anything well, you need at least four things: exposure to models, motivation, practice, and feedback. Take golf, for example. If you want to learn to play well, you need to watch good golfers, you need to want to get better, you need to practice, and you need someone to tell you what’s working and what isn’t and to offer tips and suggestions. Same with language-Vietnamese or formal essay English. You need exposure, motivation, practice, and feedback, and it needs to be the right kind. Exposure, all by itself, will teach you most of what you need to write. Children learn to talk by listening, not by talking. If you went to live in England for a year, you’d come back speaking with a British accent and using British vocabulary without consciously practicing, doing drills, or being corrected. We make language the way we see it made. We have no other choice. That’s why we should expose ourselves to models that are written the way we want to write. And being exposed to one thing doesn’t teach us to do another, so we must expose ourselves to exactly what we want to write. A lifetime of reading cartoons won’t teach us how to write formal essays. If you want to write essays, read essays. Exposure works faster than you’d imagine. It takes only a Western movie or two to catch on to how Western movies“go.”If you read six or seven Dave Barry essays in a row, afterward you should be able to write a Barry-esque essay. Ordinary reading will work, but a special kind of reading works better reading for the craft. If someone loved to watch dance and went to a ballet how much would she learn about dance by watching? A little. But if a practicing dancer went to the ballet, how much would she learn? A lot. The difference is in the way the two people watch. The first watches like an audience. The second watches like an apprentice. To write, you must read the way the dancer watches dance and the director watches movies: for the craft, not merely to experience the effect of the art, but to see how the effect is wrought. The masses see a movie like The Big Lebowski and laugh; the artist sees The Big Lebowski and, while laughing, studies how the director makes us laugh. How do essays end? Most people have seen it done hundreds of times but haven’t noticed how. To learn, as you go on with your reading life, notice with a small part of your mind how each writer you read solves the problem of ending. After a while, you still might not be able to say how endings go, but you’ll know, and when you write, you’ll be more likely to do it like that. You need a second kind of exposure as well: besides exposure to the finished product, you need exposure to the writing process. If you were in ab and wanted to learn how to record an MP3 file, you’d need to do more than just listen to finished songs. You’d have to go into a recording studio and watch an engineer working with the different tracks, adjusting volume levels, and listening closely to playbacks. Writing is the only complex skill we’re asked to master without spending a lot of time seeing someone else do it. This second kind of exposure is hard to get. When was the last time you watched a skilled writer rewrite a draft? For most of us, the answer is “Never.” Where can you go to get such exposure? To a writer’s colony. There’s probably one meeting in your composition classroom. Motivation. To write well, you have to want to write well. How obvious. If someone hates tennis and plays only when he’s forced to play, he probably won’t play well. Yet in our world we usually accept hating to write and try to work around it: of course, you hate to write—doesn’t everyone? But we’ll force you to write with grades or convince you to care by telling you no one will hire you if you can’t write. That doesn’t work. If you can’t find real rea-sons to write, you won’t write well. Period. Luckily, those reasons aren’t hard to find. All humans love writing, the way we love music, dancing, or talking. All children are dying to write, and they scribble long before they can make letters. We even love the supposedly unrewarding parts of writing, like spelling—as you know if you’ve ever done crossword puzzles or jumbles, or played Hangman or Scrabble or any of the many word-game apps such as Words With Friends. We love puns, word games, tongue twisters, the latest slang phrase, rhymes, and secret codes like Pig Latin. Even the people who“ hate English” in school write secret notes to each other in class the minute the teacher’s back is turned and rush off to read the latest X-Men comic book or see a movie or listen to a rap album, all of which are forms of literature and are made out of “English.” And what about jokes? Every time you laugh at a joke, you’re enjoying English. For example, this old chestnut: “Last night I picked up a woman hitchhiking. She told me she was a magician. I didn’t believe her, but she touched my knee and I turned into a motel. ”That’s funny! And it’s funny because of what’s happening in it with the English language. (For the record, and for any language geeks like me out there, what’s happening in the joke is that it’s playing with the spelling—yes the spelling!—of “into. ”If it were two words—“in to”—instead of one, it would mean something very different. But of course the joke is spoken, not written, so “into” is the same whether it’s spelled as one word or two.) But something gets in the way of all that natural love of language, because most people, by the time they’re grown up, say they don’t like to write. And when they try to motivate themselves, things get worse. They try harder and hate writing more. People usually write poorly not because they don’t care enough, but because they care too much. Most people who “hate to write” care so much that they dare not do it—the chance of failure and pain is too high. Example: You’re at a party and find out the person you’re talking to is an English major or, even worse, an English teacher or professor. Suddenly you fear that the way you use English “matters.” Does that make you speak better, or worse? We let fear of criticism and failure kill a lot of things we once loved. We all love to dance and sing as children, but when we grow up, we learn to raise our standards, critique our dancing and singing sternly, and think about how we sound or look to others. As a result, we decide we “don’t like” dancing and singing, and never do it where anyone can watch. But it’s not the dancing and singing we don’t like; it’s the value system we’ve learned to impose on it. So what can you do? First, relax. Write the way you used to paint or play with clay. Pablo Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how tore main an artist once he grows up.” (Of course, you’ll have to polish the writing before you submit it to your instructor or an editor.)Second, use writing to accomplish something you passionately want to do. A former student of mine—a nice guy and a good but not great writer—got in a minor scrape with the law a few years ago and had to write a letter to the judge explaining his actions and what he had learned from the experience—that is, from getting arrested. The letter would determine in part the severity of his punishment. He brought a draft by my office, and you know what? That was the best piece of writing he’d ever done—because it mattered to him. He had purpose, and he had an audience (much more on that later). Practice. Of course, you have to write to learn how to write, and the more you write, the better. But practice is vastly overrated as a teaching device. Children will never learn to speak French, however much they “practice,” if they never hear it spoken, and doing something over and over again won’t make you remember it if you don’t care .Additionally, you need to believe in yourself as you’re practicing. If you’re practicing free throws and you’re standing there at the line saying to yourself, “This one won’t go in, ”guess what? It won’t—or at least it’s not as likely to. On the other hand, tell yourself that “This one’s going in! Nothin ’but net,” and you greatly increase your odds. Same idea if you’re standing in skis or
on a snowboard at the top of a run. Tell yourself you’re going to fall, and you probably will. Tell yourself it’s a piece of cake, and you greatly increase the chances of making it to the bottom not only without falling but in pretty darn good form as well. Oh, and don’t forget how great you can really sing...in the shower or all alone in your car! .When you’re learning, you try something and see what hap-pens. You hit the tennis ball and watch where it lands. Where it lands tells you if the shot worked or not. That’s feedback. Writing has no built-in feed-back system. You write the essay and hand it in, and it’s like playing tennis in the dark: you hit the ball, it flies off into the blackness, and you learn nothing. You need to know where the ball went. You need readers who will tell you: Were they convinced? Was the explanation clear? Did the opening paragraph capture their interest? Did they like the writer’s voice? Were the jokes funny? Feedback can go horribly wrong, however, and maim the user. If you ask someone who “hates to write” where she learned to hate it, she’ll probably say ,“My Xth-grade teacher ripped every paper I wrote to shreds, covered every page in red ink, and I’ve been afraid to write ever since. ”We know the damage it does, yet against all evidence people remain convinced that mechanical error marking is the single most necessary element in a successful writing program. Many students demand that I mark their writing up, like patients who demand that the dentist’s drill hurt so they know they’re getting their money’s worth. Here are four reasons that error marking won’t teach you much about writing. First, it equates good writing with error-free writing, yet we all know that a piece of writing with no “mistakes” is not necessarily effective. In fact, to underscore this point, I’ve assigned students (usually the first assignment of a semester) to write a paper that would get an F but that contains absolutely no mechanics errors (spelling, punctuation, etc.). Second, because error marking works best on minor mechanical features (e.g., spelling, noun-pronoun agreement) and worst on big issues (e.g., thesis, structure, intention, tone, it implies that minor mechanical features are the most important aspects of writing. Third, it overloads the writer: the essay comes back a blur of red, and the writer doesn’t know where to begin. Fourth, it speaks to the “what” and not the “how”: it labels what’s wrong but doesn’t tell you why or how to prevent it. It’s as if a snowboard instructor watched you come down the mountain and said, “You fell, there and there. ”You know that. You want to know what to do to avoid falling. So what kind of feedback helps? Chapter 10 is all about that, and writers will tell you that feedback helps when it is offered as suggestions (instead of orders) given to help accomplish what the writer wants to do (instead of to correct errors or follow rules or do what the instructor wants). Ideally, the writer says to the reader, “I’m trying to do this how could I accomplish that better?” And the reader says, “Maybe if you did a little of that it would work better.
