4

Shaggy Dog Stories

Question to analyze: Is certain prior knowledge needed in order to understand the joke?

Gee’s Questions: 1&6

1. What social languages were involved?

-“ Some friars wanted to do more for their flock but their vow of poverty, simple lifestyle and lack of gainful employment meant that their supply of available funds was, to say the least, meager” ..A person needs to recognize sarcasm in order to understand the aim of the joke.

-“ran back to his Mercedes’ ..A person needs to be aware that reference means he is wealthy.

6. How does intertexuality work in the text, that is, in what ways does the text quote, allude to, or otherwise borrow words from other oral or written sources?

-In order to completely understand the Shaggy Dog Stories, you need to have knowledge of certain things.  For example, “thereby proving that only Hugh can prevent florist friars,” is a pun that relates back to Smokey the Bear.  If you never heard of Smokey the Bear’s line “Only you can prevent forest fires” then you are not going to understand the pun.

-. "Would you believe a lawyer who told you the Czech was in the male?," is another pun that a person may not understand if they don’t know what at Czech is. 

Theory: If a particular joke refers to an outside source in order to make a joke funny, then the joke may not be fully understood.

3

Practices (Activities) is the building tool that is most relevant to Shaggy Dog Stories because one must have some practice with these types of stories in order to understand their patterns.

After reading Shaggy Dog Stories, the question that we established as a group is: What kinds of knowledge does someone need to understand Shaggy Dog Stories? We think the questions on page 60 that would help analyze this would be: What social languages are involved? What sorts of grammatical patterns are involved? Are different languages mixed? How so?

Additionally, the kinds of categories and codes that would be relevant to answering those questions would include the following. The coding aspect would be understanding/knowledge of Shaggy Dog Stories. For example, the feature would be one will have to understand that the grammar in these stories are not always grammatically correct. Also, the pattern would include the following: always has a pun at the end, has many homonyms, miniature story with a plot, funny, and uses intertextuality to build a punch line. Last, the theory that we would propose to explain these patterns is social language is involved because this type of pattern is accepted with these types of stories.

2

In you own words, define analysis. What is it? How does it work?


To me, analysis is a process you take in order to get further information about something.  For example, you would first figure out what problem you are trying to solve.  Then, with the use of different tools, you would break down the problem into smaller parts to further understand what is going on.  Based off of that information you can now pose a theory and test it to get best results.  I can use this analysis process and Gee's building tasks to further my knowledge on english writing research.  I can break down the questions I would like to solve and use Gee's discourse analysis theory.  I can study a piece of language and then learn from the context of the language.

1

What kind of writing studies research are you interested in working on?

I am interested in finding out how to incorporate fun activities into teaching writing to young children.  I know that there are different teaching techniques that can be incorporated into the curriculum in order to make it more fun and exciting for the children.  I know that I can learn through scholarly journals, asking professional teachers, and doing research on different schools.  I know that there are many different ways to teach writing and I am excited to learn.

Test

Hello! This is my first post!