1/23

This morning I took up where I left off with the last entry and began to try to generate work on a new article on Tony and Jennifer. 

It was a struggle. 

But finding a place to begin usually is. 

One of the big questions I think I'm grappling with is to whom I'm writing--I have two potential audiences in mind--AEQ, Adult Education Quarterly, and TETYC, Teaching English in the Two Year College. They are both peer-reviewed, but the page length for TETYC would need to be considerably shorter. 

My concerns: I'm not intimately familiar with either journal, less so with AEQ. The bigger question: am I writing to an audience of people principally concerned with issues related to work with adult students or am I writing to an audience of people principally concerned with issue related to writing? It seems to me that if I'm smart, I'll try to get this work out to both audiences. But these are very different audiences. I feel like before I send something out to AEQ I need to get a bit more acquainted with their journal and perhaps even fire off an email to the editor, inquiring about their interest in a project like mine.

As for the actual writing--I've been mostly looking at Brandt this morning. I seem to want to use her as a jumping off point--to say, essentially, 'look! these people are coming to us from this new workplace environment and literacy is a big part of that environment. We need to know about their professional literacy habits to think about the transition they are making.' So I seem to want to use Brandt to frame my introduction? The way I've left off, I am still very much working on the "reverse commute" idea, just not calling it that. Is there more to it than that? Am I just repeating the earlier article under a different framework? These are some questions that I have at this point. 

Next, I think I'll be moving to Beaufort and talking about professional writing.

What I know is that I want to use this opportunity to return to Jennifer and John and write about them a bit more--in particular, I want to make the connection, with Jennifer, about how writing is wrapped up in activities for her at work and how, when it was connected to an activity in school, things went better. With John, I want to look at the repetition of genres, the way he produces a single genre and how that interacts with the other genres he confronts in his classwork.