Robert Mahoney Professor Wolcott ENC 1101 (11:30am-12:20pm) 15 October 2012 Porter, James.

"Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Writing about Writing: A College Reader. By Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 86-100. Print. Summary Porter starts off his article without a story very relatable to his topic of discussion and then attempts to define intertextuality, the word that this whole article is about. After he breaks down the article into three separate sections, he goes on to show us where intertext is present in our life and in history. His most compelling observation is the one of the Declaration of Independence, where he explains that the ideas of the document were hardly Thomas Jeffersons, rather a collection of ideas he heard over time. After The Presence of Intertext he goes onto The Power of Discourse Community. He explains what a discourse community is and how writing is shaped by different discourses. Lastly, he ends his article with The Pedagogy of Intertextuality or, the teaching of intertextuality. He basically explains how intertextuality could be used to make a piece of writing better in a specific discourse. Porter teaches us how intertext can shape our writing towards our audience to make it more meaningful and easier to comprehend. Analysis In his article, Porter bluntly states that intertextuality is the principle that all writing and speechindeed, all signsarise from a single network (Porter, 88.) Porter thinks that every piece of writing is somehow connected to other pieces of writing, making plagiarism difficult to define. As Im writing this analysis I begin to feel the same way, as I came to this conclusion from referring to his article. He says that no piece of text can get away from intertext and that we can only understand a text as much as we understand its precursors. I think that Porter believes writers are mostly just part of a team now or, a discourse community. If Porter fully supports what he says in this article I think that he would laugh at the UCF plagiarism policy, as it stresses that plagiarism includes using other peoples ideas without giving credit. He thinks that others ideas are in everyones writing and it would be impossible to define plagiarism under those terms. Personally, I believe that the plagiarism is situational. Sometimes it is blatantly obvious if someone stole work or not and sometimes people plagiarize without even knowing it. I think that the UCF rules should act as guidelines rather than strict laws.