User talk:Kewestbrook1/sandbox

Instructor feedback for article draft
Great work on the draft. You chose a challenging theory to work with and your effort is commendable. I think you are making some important additions and contributions to the existing article. These changes would be good to move into the mainspace on the "live" Wiki article. Here are few suggestions as you work on revising for the final version.

I think the revisions of the lead section are good, but feel free to also revise existing content that is inaccurate at worst or slightly misunderstood at best. For example, the first sentence is fine, but it would be more accurate to highlight how the struggle of competing, often contradictory, discourses creates meaning in relationships. I think using the term "tendencies" misconstrues the core element of the theory a bit. I know you didn't write this content, but it's okay to revise it based on what you have learned about RDT, especially after emphasizing RDT 2.0 later in the article. Try to avoid academic sounding words like "endemic" and use language that is more approachable to wide audience. If you use a term that is integral to the theory then try to describe it using simpler language. In general, I think moving away from describing individualized tensions as the driving force of relational communication and centering the idea that contradictory meanings arise through talk with relational partners is a better way to portray the heart of this theory.

Bringing in Bakhtin is good, but I would disagree that Bakhtin promoted the idea that relational partners have opposing desires and needs. Bakhtin was a literary theorist, so he was concerned with how characters established meaning for their lives in concert with others by the way they voiced systems of meaning (i.e., discourses) on a range of monologic to dialogic. For a brief introduction to Bakhtin's ideas about dialogue you can consult this Wikipedia article called Dialogue (Bakhtin)

The new paragraphs in the "concepts" section are a nice contribution. I think you need to put some context to the claim that relationships are not linear. Either describe how scholars described relational development in linear fashion or add a statement about who argues that relationships are not linear and provide a citation. The statement "Relationships are not linear" is not a statement of fact and it is debatable so you need to describe who makes that claim and what it means. I would advise against using a secondary source whenever possible. So citing Turner and West (#44) might not be an accurate reading of RDT (because they use the word "desires"). Try to cite Baxter (2011) or Baxter and Montgomery (1996) anytime you are describing a core aspect of RDT. I like the addition of the discussion of nonlinearity though. Remember that contradiction and opposing differences are not found within individuals in RDT, but rather in the discourses they voice about the relationship.

The paragraph about RDT 2.0 is a great addition to this article. I wouldn't necessary label RDT 2.0 as an update, but rather a clarification and recentering form of theorizing. However, some aspects in RDT 2.0 articulate an evolution of the theory from the 1996 version especially when it comes to extrapolating the utterance chain and outlining a method for analyzing discursive talk: contrapuntal analysis. Also, to be a little nit-pickey, using the phrase "determine the impact that competing discourses have on the individuals involved in them" in the last sentence moves toward implying a post-positivist position to understanding competing discourses, when RDT would reject most of the goals of the post-positivism scientific endeavor.

The paragraphs in the application section are strong summaries of literature that employs RDT. Try to avoid quoting when possible and paraphrase more often.

I agree with your reasoning to delete the sections you indicated.

I think the critique section makes some valid observations, but I think the so what question is answered by the theory. That relational meaning happens through the interplay of competing discourses. In some ways the theory operates at a more meta-theoretical level, which opens the door for criticisms about falsifiability and testability. However, it is likely that those types of critiques would be dismissed because they stem from a post-positivist paradigm that RDT does not subscribe to in the first place. I think a welcomed contribution would be to add citations to the first (existing) paragraph in the critique section.

I think there could be some cleaning up of the references section. Some citations appear in multiple places and others are missing information or are not in proper APA style. Also, Baxter (2011) does not appear in the References section but it is cited in the text.