In Jame's E. Porter's article, "Intertextuality & the Discourse Community,"  he attempts to explain to students and writing teachers that all articles or writings contain traces from other texts.  He discusses that it is harder to decipher if the work is plagiarized or someone's personal work.  He compares to Thomas Jefferson and how as people may believe he is a very skilled writer, he was actually an effective borrower of the traces Porter talks about in his writing.  James Porter believes Thomas Jefferson would have been charged with plagiarism in a college environment if he would have submitted the Declaration of Independence.  He questions the fact of if creative writers were genius or just plagiarizers of their work.  Porter believes all of our writings come from ideas of other things we have read before. 

BEFORE YOU READ
     The difference between an author and a writer in my personal opinion, is that to be a writer you do not have to be a professional.  A writer can be someone who just keeps a simple journal every night before bed.  An author is someone who has published or writes articles on a particular fact or reason, because that is what they are assigned or they want to get their point across for outside opinions.  They are not just keeping the 'journal' of what they are writing to themselves, they are clearly showing it to over people.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
4) The way I thought writing should be evaluated before I read Porter's article was to figure out if the work was plagiarized.  If the work is plagiarized it should not be accepted, because it was not the writer's idea.  I do not so much feel this way not, because I see his point of saying almost everything is technically plagiarized.  Every writer or short story comes from an idea that has been sparked by something before the writing occurred.  My writing has been evaluated in the past on grammar, punctuation, and as I got older it also got checked to make sure the work was not plagiarized. 

APPLYING & EXPLORING IDEAS
1)  Lately, I have seen a few different beer commercials.  I have not noticed until this article the intertextuality.  It seems that no matter which commercial for a drink they are always competing about the most fresh, tasteful, or smooth drink.  I feel like all commercials compete with each other and steal words from one another and try to throw them all into one commercial at once, because they feel like this will make their product more wanted.  The cultural intertext is that most beer commercials, like we said in class have a girl modeling, posing, or drinking the beer, because the commercial is aimed mainly towards men.  I believe this has something to do with the gender area of cultural intertext.

META MOMENT
     Porter's article has changed my way of thinking on writers, but not so much in a negative way.  It just helped me to see that not even writers can make a whole article out of nothing, but their own thoughts.  They need to see or read other people's thought to base their writings off it and to create an argument.  Every writing has to have an argument to get a good point across. 

     This article was interesting to me, because it shows that articles written either by a writer or an author go through the same steps that students to when learning to write.  Their writings get checked on to make sure they are not plagiarized as well.  People even watch to find the mistakes in major author's articles or research papers.  I never realized how even big time writers have to watch their own back and make sure their sources are sited, and their ideas are made their own ideas and not someone else's thoughts.  The only thing I did not agree on was the fact that he believed that students are taught to imitate writings they have seen previously.  In high school if we were told to write a paper, our teacher had always shown us a printing of an author and explained their hard work and effort.  At the end of class thought, she would always tell us she does not want to see the same work, but something new and different brought to the topic we were given.