Rowland 1

Paper 4: Analysis & Transference of Writing Concepts

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of writing concepts learned from

ENC1101 in a non-writing based class. For this paper, I have chosen to use a discussion

assignment from my French class. The assignment itself is to read French articles describing the

leisure time of francophones (those who speak French as their native language) and discuss the

similarities and differences between French and American free-time.

The community that this assignment was situated in is the French department of UCF, or,

more specifically, the educators and students of FRE1120C. The assignment’s intended audience

are those who take FRE1120C; however, most classes were using a different lesson plan, so the

actual audience appears to have just been my specific class. The audience of the report that we

wrote, likewise, was written with the intended audience being fellow students in our FRE1120C

class. After writing our papers, we had to then post them on a discussion board for one another to

see. After reading each other’s reports, we would reply with criticisms and comments. However,

the teacher would also read our reports and our responses for grading, which makes the actual

audience our fellow classmates and our teacher. It could also be suggested that the actual

audience could include any IT specialists or server admins on Webcourses who could have read

our reports by happenstance while analyzing server logs, since actual audience could include

“any people who happen to hear or read a discourse” (Grant-Davie, 1997).

The professor assigned this report to us with the purpose of having us practice our French

comprehension as well as communicate with one another. Most of the class wrote our reports

with the intent of illustrating the differences between Parisian and American culture while also

enhancing our understanding of the French language. However, many of us ended up writing

reports that didn’t just look at the differences between our cultures’ pastimes, but also analyzed
 Rowland 2

why our pastimes were different. Many of us ended up writing with an actual exigence of

analyzing the causes for the differences between cultures, and some took it a step further and

began comparing cultural pastimes from across the world in addition to the originally intended

subjects. Despite us intending to right with the bare-minimum to acquire a good grade for this

assignment, we ended up with an actual exigence that furthered the main goals of our discourse

community: to increase our understanding of the French language and French culture as a whole

(Grant-Davie, 1997).

For the purposes of this assignment, we had to compare and contrast the differences

between French and American pastimes. Comparing and contrasting was the central concept of

this assignment, and was directly stated to be one of the objectives for the report. In my report, I

specifically discussed how the Parisians tend to spend their free time being more active than

Americans. In addition, I noted how they spend more time doing individual pastimes, as opposed

to Americans who do more activities per day, but at a much faster pace. Despite all of these, the

types of leisure activities in both Paris and America are largely similar.

Of course, I did not make these claims unjustifiably. One of the assignments major

requirements was citations for our sources. They were not highly professional sources; in fact,

they were just regular URL links to our articles. Since the community we were writing for were

other students from our classroom, in-depth citations weren’t necessary. We had no use for

publication information. Beyond basic credibility, the only information pertinent to our

community was the year of publish and the nation the news outlet came from. As you can see,

the ethos we had to establish in our papers did not have to be a rock-solid one for the needs of

our discourse community. There was no excessive need to identify ourselves favorably with our

audience since our audience was each other; but we did need to show proof that we built our
 Rowland 3

analyses upon a logical foundation using citations (Downs, 2013). The citations were also used

by the teacher to check our sources and make sure we didn’t mistranslate or misunderstand our

Parisian texts.

Another source that the assignment encouraged us to utilize were personal anecdotes.

This gave a bit of personal flavor to our posts, and in some cases even elevated them. A student

giving an anecdote helps prevent a report from feeling like a wall of text and even be effective at

anchoring a reader to the text by appealing to them emotionally. This appeal to pathos through

anecdotes were very plentiful in the various reports I saw turned in. One girl wrote about how

her Parisian friend would spend most of her days out in cafes and found it odd how Americans

would stay in their houses all day, despite the fact that she was just browsing the internet the

whole time. This anecdote, in particular, was very effective at illustrating how the actual

pastimes of francophones and Americans are very similar but there are smaller cultural

differences in the way we go about enjoying our leisure activities, which was the intended

conclusion that the professor wanted us to come to.

Since all of my sources weren’t in English, I had to summarize what the articles said. The

act of summarizing a foreign document heavily requires interpreting and translating, which will

be discussed later. Summarizing played a huge role in this assignment. Since everyone was

required to comment on and analyze each other’s documents, we didn’t have enough time to

check everyone’s sources to get background information. Summarization allows for the writer to

quickly catch up the reader on what relevant information they need to know without forcing the

reader to have prerequisite reading to do, which perfectly fits the necessities of a report paper

and group discussion assignment. In addition, summarizing a foreign text allows for quick and

easy understanding of any pertinent information in an easily digestible format for someone who
 Rowland 4

doesn’t natively speak the source text’s language. This allowed for the class to be able to focus

on comparing and contrasting rather than obsessing over foreign words and grammar structures.

Though, understanding and being able to synthesize information from these French articles

proved to play a very important role in this assignment.

The most difficult part of the assignment had to be interpreting and translating the

original articles. Many syntax and grammar concepts in French can confuse native English

speakers. One of the more problematic concepts is conjugation. Conjugation for a majority of

verbs are consistent and only change the last few letters, but some verbs drastically change based

on the subject. The best example would be “aller”, which means to go, and can change from

“vais” for first person singular to “allons” for first person plural. And it goes beyond simple

vocabulary obstacles; sentence structure can vary wildly, ranging from sentences similar to

English (subject-verb-object) if the verb is intransitive, to an inversion structure (verb-subject-

object) if it is a question. And the impact of interpreting and translating on this assignment does

not stop there; in addition to all of these grammar concepts, individual words can prove quite the

nuisance. In 2014, Neto wrote about his writing process as a bilingual writer in his paper Tug of

war:The writing process of a bilingual writer and his struggles. At one point, he discusses the

difficulty of interpreting concepts that have no literal translation, but are necessary to faithfully

convey ideas from one language to another. This process is very time-consuming and difficult

(even for those who are fluent in both languages involved), but is a major factor in whether or

not you can deliver information properly to your audience. This need to translate the

untranslatable proved to be a major hurdle for many students who wanted to discuss specific

cultural concepts for this assignment. The reason why I am putting so much emphasis on the

importance of interpreting in relation to this assignment is because when you have to work with a
 Rowland 5

foreign source you have to completely re-interpret the original document to express ideas in a

way that can be understood by your audience, especially if they don’t necessarily speak or

understand your source’s language.

 Rowland 6

Works Cited

Downs, D. (2013). Rhetoric: Making sense of human interaction and meaning-making. In E.

Wardle & D. Downs (Eds.). Writing about writing: A college reader (3rd ed., pp. 457-

483). Boston: Bedford/St. Martins.

Grant-Davie, K. (1997). Rhetorical situations and their constituents. In E. Wardle & D. Downs

(Eds.), Writing about writing: A college reader (3rd ed., pp 484-509). Boston:

Bedford/St. Martins.

Neto, A. (2014). Tug of war: The writing process of a bilingual writer and his struggles. In E.

Wardle & D. Downs (Eds.). Writing about writing: A college reader (3rd ed., pp. 774-85).

Boston: Bedford/St. Martins.