Blog Post #3

In the first blog post of this semester, I defined a remix as “a different version of something that has already been created or has already occurred.” I explained that I believed that writing is “a remix of our wildest thoughts and dreams, a remix of everyday instances that occur in life.” In the article that Johnson-Eiola and Selber wrote, they said that assemblage is “texts build primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context.” This relates to a remix because the way they are using assemblage is that they think students should be allowed to take many different texts from different sources and combine them together to create a point or to solve an issue. Using all these different texts creates a remix of different information to create a new, unique paper. The authors of this essay say that teachers should realize that assemblage is a medium between plagiarism and originality. They believe that these teachers should accept assemblage as valid student work. However, there is a big difference between assemblage and plagiarism. People should not confuse a tactic that the authors refer to as “patchwriting”, a form of plagiarism, to assemblage. Patchwriting is copying a text and merely deleting and adding a few words. There were no specific parts of the article that did confuse me. However, I did think it was not an easy read. There were a plethora of time where there was words and phrases that I did not understand.