Works in Progress Reflection

Alex Bowman

Professor Sumner-Winter

English 1010

November 4, 2009



Works in Progress Symposium Reflection


Earlier today, I attended the “Works in Progress Symposium” for both English and my freshman seminar class. At first, I thought that the event was going to be extremely boring but it turned out to be a very interesting experience. Okay I lied, it was not interesting but it did bring forth some good ideas and information. I went to two presentations. The first presentation was by Jessica Volyes and it dealt with the term, prosody. The second presentation was about dialogue and comprehension by John C. Myers. Both Jessica and John are senior psychology majors that plan to move on to graduate school. Ironically, both of their presentations had to do with English.
In the first presentation, Jessica defined prosody as the lexical rhythm of conversation. She stated the prosody helps to keep away from monotonous voice and expresses emotional cues. I thought this was interesting because it made me think about how I would read my paper out loud. No one wants to read something that is monotone. I also have trouble with getting to the point. I always tend to drag on and on, eventually, leading up to the point. Throughout that process, I lose the readers interest. Prosody helps to get to the point and trigger memory during discourse. Even though prosody has to do more with speeches, it can also help me with writing because it requires me to think of my paper as a conversation.
The second presentation was a harder to follow than the first. John C. Myers He was interested in discourse processing, especially reading. John's research involved: reader characteristics, expectations, and goals. He conducted an experiment that had two categories: news and literary. The news readers read at a faster rate and better recalled casual relationships. The literary readers read slower and better recalled surface and text basic information. This suggested that the literary readers were looking deeper into the reading for more detailed information. Dialogue (speech) is easier to understand. John's study stated that expository text is more difficult to comprehend. I could relate to John’s research because dialogue is much easier to understand than monologue and expository text. I completely agreed with the results from his experiment on news and literary topics. When I read the news, I skim to obtain the basic information. However, I do not really know how this presentation would help me with my paper