Response to WAW#3

SUMMARY
In the article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community", James Porter argues that all text contain "traces" of other texts. He quotes from Vincent Leitch "The text is not an autonomous or unified object, but a set of relations with other texts. SOme of the examples Porter offer is the Declaration of Independence, Pepsi commercial, and a news article about the Kent State shooting. Porter also discusses the subject of "discourse community" which he claims is a group of people who share a common interest.
GRR
The places where I get help for my writing is usually sources, because almost of of my writing is research based. Being a pre-med major medical journals are very helpful tools to help guide my writing. I also ask my mother who is an english major on various grammatical questions.
QD
2. I do not agree with Porter that intertext makes individual writing less important because every piece of writing has something unique about. Every writer has a specific opinion on how to write and what their main focus is, so to me there is always something different about different pieces of writing.
3. Porter calls the idea of an autonomous writer romantic because they are unique and develop their own ideas and styles.
4. It differs from how I used to assume writing because I always assumed that determining whether the writing was acceptable was not because of the readers community but because of the reader itself. In the past my writing has been evaluated on the individuality of it, not if it fit in the parameters of a certain group.
5. His writing fails to reflect what he writes about because to me his work wasn't completely original.
6. The problem that it cause is that there is no such thing as individual writing. There are always gonna be similarities in peoples writing.
MM
Yes Porter's article has changed the way I view writers and writing, because it is evident now that writers who are in a particular  group are all intertwined in their writing. I think adopting his notion would change the way I write because I always tried to write something in and individual way.
RESPONSE
I think the article this week was very helpful mainly because it gave me great guidance on how I can write better. Also with writing a lot of research type papers its good to have opinions of others to help strengthen your point. However, there were parts of the reading that I have to admit took me a while to realize what Porter was trying to say.