1.

Haas is saying that at the college level, all academic writing is complex and must be read using careful analysis. She is saying that high school students entering college must not only be able to read, but be able to read academic articles and able to comprehend and understand the complex language and themes used in academic writing. Haas says that its, “suggested that beginning college students approach academic tasks as if they believe that texts are autonomous and context-free (Haas 46)”. She is pointing out in this quote that high school students are not reading academic articles correctly when they enter college, because they don’t approach them correctly.

 

2.

Haas on page 45 discusses a “myth”  of autonomous texts. The myth that she is referring to is that, “the educational task of helping students recognize the human nature of scientific activity and rhetorical nature of scientific texts may be part of a larger problem in academic literacy for students (Haas 45)”. What Haas is saying in this article is that it is thought that students are not being educated in determining the rhetorical nature of scientific texts. Instead she goes on to say that students are, “[approaching] academic tasks as if they believe that texts are autonomous and context free (Haas 46)”. Haas is saying that students are not being educated in regards to academic readings incorrectly, they are instead approaching these academic articles incorrectly. I agree with Haas’s claim, I think young college students are not approaching academic articles incorrectly. But I do think high school education, or lack of it, and lack of experience are also reasons these young students struggle.

 

3.

Haas uses this girl, Eliza, as an example of the lack of comprehensive analysis of academic writing of students throughout their college years. She says that Eliza, “may have tacitly subscribed to the doctrine of autonomous texts early in her college career, by the time she left college she had come to a greater awareness of the rhetorical, contingent, nature of both the activities and discourses she participated in within her chosen field, (Haas 46)”. What Haas is saying in this quote that Eliza is a perfect example of how she thinks college students grow in college. They start out with little knowledge on how to obtain knowledge from complex academic writing but throughout college she grows stronger in this field until she graduates and is then very capable.

 

4.

In the article, Haas presents her theory of a rhetorical frame. She defines a rhetorical frame as a tool used to, “account for the motives underlying textual acts and their outcomes…they presumably have some knowledge or representation of the participants (Haas 48)”. What Haas is saying is that when young readers first encounter academic writing that is complex, they don’t know how to obtain the knowledge proposed. So what they do to account for their misunderstanding is to count of the knowledge they already know on the topic and use this knowledge to fill in the blanks. This makes  a lot of sense to me and I think Haas is correct. I believe I’ve been guilty of using these rhetorical frames as well.

 

5.

Gee and Hass’s ideas are very similar to one another. Both have a common theme that when trying to join a discourse, one’s will have to pretend to know what they are doing by falling back on past knowledge on the discourse. Gee goes more in depth on being a “pretender (Gee 10)” while Haas doesn’t state if faking it is okay or not, I don’t expect her to do so her article doesn’t appear to be opinion based with right and wrong. Haas focuses more on how some people are different when it comes to approaching this new discourse and that, “some readers seemed to rely overly on [rhetorical reading] (Haas 50)”. Both Gee and Haas agree that people interact defiantly in discourse and Haas seems to be okay with it while Gee is okay with it as long as you don’t make a mistake.

 

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