Today’s Plan:
- Any Coding Questions?
- B&L Post Reactions
- Williams and Bizup on Characters and Actions
Any Coding Questions?
Is there?
B&L Post Reactions
Someone wrote:
I generally don’t feel very prepared to apply for the jobs they listed, part of me believing I still need a lot more experience to qualify for what they want. I still don’t feel adult enough. These jobs feel so overwhelming and big, causing me to wonder if I could really handle those positions.
So, imposter syndrome can be a big problem in the humanities and writing profession. Women are often affected by this more than men. Instead of worrying about what you can’t do, it helps to focus on what you can do. And, I guarantee, by the time you graduate you will be able to do a lot of things.
I advise that you try and participate in some kind of extracurricular writing club (like the Crucible or the Mirror). Having some experience can help. So can getting an internship, or even volunteering for a non-profit organization. You can look for one of these positions in our final project!
Someone wrote:
Seeing all the different positions that fall under the overall umbrella of technical/professional writer was surprising as well. There are several that I was familiar with, several that were new to me, and several that I wouldn’t have expected to fall under this heading.
I like teaching this project because it exposes you to the crazy range of job titles you can pursue. This is like accounting or engineering or nursing. You can’t go to InDeed and type in “English” or even “writer” and expect to see even a fraction of the jobs for which you qualify. Learning all the possible titles is something else we will talk about as we move into our final project.
Two posts:
What concerns me the most after reading this article is my extent of knowledge in using software. I do know how to use MS Office, which was stated as being the most universal demanded software. However, I do not know how to use Adobe, and do not have any skill with HTML/CSS/Javascript etc. When reading about professional competencies I felt more reassured about the jobs listed.
And
What I noted constantly in my annotations was the emphasis that technology is a tool that is constantly evolving. Just from reading that the year of the Rainey, Turner and Dayton study was done in 2009 immediately dates the results without having to even read what they discovered.
I should say that not every writing job requires a wide array of skills. But taking even one course like ENG 328 Doc Design or ENG 229 Video Production can help. Learning one technology can make you feel more confident about learning others. And I think the second post here is why that confidence is important. What matters isn’t necessarily that you know how to use InDesign (I mean, that’s not a bad thing), rather, it is that you can learn how to use whatever technology comes along next.
I find it interesting that there was no universal technological push, that there wasn’t an excessive reliance on any one tool or technology. Perhaps that’s because tech shifts as often as fashion, so what works one day will not the next. I think that any pre-job education will have to focus on learning how to learn, in order to compete in this particular market
Someone wrote (and we talked about this a bit Friday, but I wanted to touch on it again:
Something I found really surprising in the article was that “almost a third of the postings (32%) did not specify a minimum education level,” (Brumberger and Lauer 231). This tells me that perhaps the modern world is increasingly prioritizing the idea of people having experience or certifications rather than only looking for people who have a degree. This emphasizes to me a point brought up in class: that we should look into certifications, experience, internships, etc. to help develop our resumes and make us more competitive in the job market along with working towards our degrees
I think of it this way–a degree alone isn’t necessarily a path to a career. It is a great start, and I think there is tremendous value in a humanities degree in regards to your future happiness and quality of life. The humanities train us in how to live a good life and how to handle life’s traumas; They are, as Kenneth Burke argues, equipment for living. But not necessarily equipment for the job market.
Williams and Bizup
I’ve published a few articles that emphasize that writing cannot be taught, only learned. That is, there are few, if any, rules that I can teach you that will make you a better writer. And I can’t teach you them, so much as ask you to learn (understand as abstract concept, translate into repeatable practice) them. I consider Williams and Bizup’s guide to sentence syntax an exception to this claim.
Put simply, W&B ask us to check all of the subjects and verbs in our sentences to make sure that the subjects are characters and the verbs are actions. Those of you who have worked in theater will understand this: I need to be able to block your sentences: that is, I need to be able to imagine your sentences on a stage. Who is standing where? What action are they doing? To do this, the subject of a sentence can’t be some abstraction, some concept, some thing–it has to be a person or animal.
Take the following sentence:
For the rest of the semester, courses are on Discord.
Grammatically, this is a perfectly fine sentence. But it isn’t really engaging. In W&B’s estimation, it is a bad sentence. Why? Because no one is doing anything. If you think back to my “cat came through the window” bit, this is asking your reader/listener to imagine a lot. Likewise, what can get lost in a sentence like this is the agent responsible for the action–who decided courses would be on Discord? We can’t know. This can be a nefarious way to hide responsibility for unpopular (or reprehensible) actions.
Try this:
Dr Santos determined that courses will be scheduled on Discord.
OR
Dr Santos scheduled courses on Discord.
OR
The University’s administration determined that courses will be scheduled on Discord.
The first sentence has a generic noun as its subject–“courses.” But courses are not a character. They cannot act. Choosing an abstract noun as your sentence subject pretty much ensures a boring sentence. As you can see, when I change the subject of the sentence from “courses” to a character or characters, I not only make a more active sentence (that awful “are” verb is gone), but also I have to clarify *who* made a decision.
And, this can get even worse when you craft an abstraction as a subject. For instance:
During the self-isolation period, there were lots of people who did not want to follow the suggestions and so it was decided that no one could leave their homes unless essential services were their goal.
I bet there’s a bunch of you who couldn’t identify the subject of that sentence! (It is “there”). When you use an abstraction like this, you are making your reader do A LOT OF WORK, since they have to unpack the thought of the sentence to determine who is doing the action. Let me revise the sentence:
During the self-isolation period, Governor Polis implemented a stay-at-home order, meaning citizens could not leave their homes unless they needed essential services, because too many people failed to follow the CDC’s initial suggestions.
Notice how this revision inverts the order of material from the previous sentence. THIS WILL HAPPEN OFTEN, BECAUSE WHEN WE DRAFT WE DEVELOP AN IDEA CHRONOLOGICALLY AND WHEN WE ARGUE WELL WE DEVELOP IDEAS LOGICALLY (CONSEQUENTIALLY). This is why good writing requires revision. We have to dramatize a thought to make it easier to block/play on the recipient’s mental stage.
A few other points:
- Notice how I use “because” in the second sentence. When developing characters as subjects and actions as verbs, you might need to develop “If… Then” or “X because Y” syntax. Do not be afraid to use these causal transitions; they help a reader
- Often you will have to identify or invent a character. While this sometimes comes from another word in the sentence, other times it requires complete invention (so “Misery was filling the room” becomes “Tyler’s misery filled the room”)
- Try to cut out unnecessary prepositions. Prepositions make readers work hard.
My overarching goal here is to use the character/action syntax to make it easier on a reader to visualize and comprehend our prose. Or:
When we use the character/action syntax, readers find it easier to visualize and comprehend our prose.
Let’s try a few examples from W&B’s book Style to see if we can get the hang of this.
For Next Class
Remember that you need to have completed coding 20 job ads for Wednesday’s class.
