Thursday, January 15, 2015

My name is Matthew Reinhart and I am from Elkhorn, Nebraska. I am a junior History major and I enjoy working on cars in my free time. I love all kinds of music and the stories behind their lyrics fascinate me. I love college football and I can get lost watching all the games during football season. I have 2 jobs one as an auto parts salesman and another as a maintenance worker. My main focus of study is Europe and the United States in wartime, specifically WWII, the Cold War and the American Revolution and Civil War. I have always had a love for history and just recently decided I wanted to make it my career to learn more and possibly teach my knowledge to other people.
          I am the type of writer who likes to get straight to the point. While being completely honest, is some instances I add “fluff” to my papers, most of the time I just get straight to the point with only the most important details. I write because I tend to talk too much but when I write I am able to  get my point across in a much more “clean” manor. I also enjoy writing because it is a good way of getting to know people. Sometimes it is more difficult to listen to someone speak and to judge them when they can put their true feelings onto paper and give the reader more time to digest the information being given to them.
          A community, depending on each individuals own perspective, is a group of people and or families that work or live together as a whole in more ways than one. A community can be something as simple and basic as a group of college students living on the same dorm floor or it can be a group like our class who will be working together to further each other’s knowledge and skill. I personally like to think of myself as a member of the academic community which most can describe as the people going to school. More specifically our academic community is the University of Nebraska and depending on your degree you may dive even deeper than that. Throughout my life I have been the member of my high school marching band community, the Boy Scout community, even my job can be a select type of community because I have a particular skill many others don’t have.

          Writing can make a large difference in many communities like in our class. Our class will be teaching us how to analyze, read, and write text in a way that will teach us to understand communities even better than we have known before. My high school band had a different form of writing in the fact that musical notes were used instead of words which created a new language of harmonies and chords. Many different factors can be taken into account for a community but in the end each person can decide what they believe a community is.

1 comment:

  1. Matt, I'm really interested in your work in history! History is all about words and story telling and certain discourse communities having power! This might be something to think about for projects for this class. In particular, I can imagine your second project being something really cool well you look at primary historical documents to see how ideas of normalization were created for communities in the past!

    I'm also really curious about your use of the word "fluff." What do you define as fluff? Words added just to fill space? Interestingly, here yo u might be landing on the conventions of particular discourse communities--historians like to think of their work as "to the point" and "unbiased" (thus, without fluff). So your tendency to be straight to the point in writing, may be one reason you've been drawn to the discourse community of historians.

    I love that you consider other kinds of language/discourse, such as music. I think this is deffinately something that draws a community together. This point though, seems to refute your implied notion that community has to be based on place (i.e. schools, boy scouts, etc.--all communities that share a physical space together). Could you be part of a larger community of marching band people across the country--people you've never been in the same space with but who share your marching band discourse?What would Harris say about this?

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