Looking at repetition and emulation in asynchronous electronic discourse becomes a way to track the individual's individual choices of expression in utterances. Bakhtin explains why the notion of utterance rather than word or sentence is crucial; the appropriation (and reconfiguration) of the words of others he calls

...the process of assimilation -- more or less creative -- of others' words (and not the words of a language). Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works) is filled with others' words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of "our-own-ness," varying degrees of awareness or detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and reaccentuate (Bakhtin 1990: 89).

Students reading and writing in the Sit-Ins conferences found a series of Topics, chronologically arranged in the order of the newspaper stories originally reporting the Sit-Ins. They could respond to those stories, or to the responses written by their peers, or to both. To explain what happened when the students drew from any newspaper text--and by extension, from each others' texts--Todorov's idea that we can understand "what happens when we read" through introspection or through the accounts of others. Yet "...two accounts dealing with the same text will never be identical...these accounts describe not the universe of the book itself but the universe transformed, as it is found in the psyche of each individual" (Todorov 1990, pp. 42-3). The stages of this itinerary may be schematized as follows:

The relationship between 1 and 2, 3 and 4 is of signification, while that between 2 and 3 is that of symbolization. In other words, in reading the text, the student appropriated it, discerned its signification, resymbolized it according to her or his own individual habits, and resignified it, taking it a step further in order to write a reply which in effect presented a new narrative.

As an example of how students in the Sit-Ins conference dealt with the Constructed Authority of a newspaper story, we have chosen Roy Covington's story covering lunch-counter demonstrations because this story attracted the most attention (in the form of student responses) each time the conference was presented.

Covington's single-column, front-page story contained 31 paragraphs, most of which are single-sentence paragraphs. More than one student commented on what seemed to them its uneven rhythm: this may have been because they were not reading the text as a newspaper column, where the long single-sentences actually took up more space and gave a slightly different visual impression of paragraph length: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TABLE 1 GOES HERE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Covington's text began with the traditional journalistic "lead," expanding it with reported ('constructed': Tannen 1989, pp. 110 ff.) details of action and quotations from participants. Examining which feature of the newspaper story students might repeat, quote, emulate, or allude to, we broke his narrative into the Labovian model of Orientation, Narrative(s)/Complication(s) and Coda (Labov and Waletzsky 1967; Labov 1972), as shown in Table 2, below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TABLE 2 GOES HERE -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We analyzed each student reply in the conference, as to which of the four parts of the story, including the byline, their remarks were directed, or from which their remarks were prompted. Criteria were quotation-marks, repetition, or an introductory phrase pointing the reader to a part of the story. Since no reply had more than four references to different parts of the story and its byline, we created a four-slot frame, and noted the order in which students referred to, quoted, paraphrased or summarized the part of the story.

Next, we "weighted" these slots: every time a part of the story or byline was the first focus of the student's reply, we assigned it the weight of four; the second focus was assigned a weight of three, the third a weight of two, and the fourth a weight of one, with these results: Narrative 2, the Epic Catalogue of Stores received 41 mentions, the Orientation received 30, Narrative 1 ("The Plot") received 21, and the final evaluations of the episode, in the Coda, received 5. Covington, usually referred to as "the reporter," received 14. The way students referred to some feature from the Epic Catalogue is illustrated by Lou's response:

The statement in this article which bothered me the most was the one which said that the Belk lunch counter closed only after their regular customers were served. This is an untrue statement. I know full well that no white newcomers to the counter were turned away. Therefore it was not just the regulars who were served. Also, the use of warterms bothered me. They were used only in reference to the blacks but not the whites. Actually the whites' actions were more violent than the actions of the blacks.The blacks only wished to be served. Although they were making a stand for their rights, there was nothing war like in what they did. This reflects the narrow-minded bias often present in journalism.

It was not the last part of Covington's story that typically evoked student response, but rather the details in either Narrative 2 or the Orientation, details the students had not known before reading the series of newspaper stories. In other words, they usually did not "take turns" with the newspaper story in the sense of linking the story's end to the start of their reply. Rather, they focused on that part of the story which had some sort of New information for them.

Their successive replies also show that students often combined their focus on the New with a repetition of the order of the elements or of the wording within a previous student writing. In that sense, students were legitimating for each other-- by means of their personal I-references--the New inside the Given until, through unchallenged repetition, this New became sanctioned as Given, and could be so cited: 'We all know....you remember how....I agree with John, when he said....' This supports Johnstone's claim that 'When you talk certain formulas over and over again, you're reframing them, unconsciously factoring out what they have in common, and constructing a more abstract representation' (Johnstone 1995, vol. 1, p.8).