Today’s Plan:
- Writing Up Findings
- Job Report Overview
- Discussion Section
- Miller
Writing Up Findings
By now I’m hoping you have some graphs. Now we need to write a descriptive paragraph of each graph. I’ve got a web page that can help with this.
Job Report Overview
Here is a link to the rubric. The rubric is in many ways the assignment sheet.
Task
I am tasking you with writing up a report that can be distributed to various audiences to promote the WEP major [Writing, Editing, and Publishing] or Writing minor here at UNC. You should pick the program that is most relevant to you (and you can write a report about both). The report should present itself as objective research into the job market more than an attempt to sell our programs. But the primary goal is definitely to sell those programs. With subtly and research-based findings, of course.
Audiences
Our primary audiences are high school seniors and first-year students at UNC. We might also market the Writing minor to sophomores.
Our secondary audiences are primarily parents of those students, especially if they are paying for their students’ education and/or are hesitant of an English (humanities) degree. You might know the type.
Our tertiary audiences include: students who believe that a Writing, Editing, and Publishing degree is too similar to a business writing degree, folks who might oppose the idea of being trained to participate in a capitalist machine (think about how some of Miller’s colleagues were skeptical of professional writing as a humanity). How do we assuage that concern? BE SUBTLE.
For those of you writing about the minor, how might you frame the value of creative writing classes to those audiences–especially people who do not feel that they are creative or that there’s any value in it?
Structure:
As the rubric indicates, we will have an Introduction, Methods, Findings, Discussion, and Conclusion section. We will also have a title page and a table of contents. Make sure you have page numbers and a running head that does not appear on the first page.
Note #1: I am assuming at least a few people have never created a table of contents and don’t know what a running head is. That’s okay. Pretend like you’ve been hired and your job involves figuring that out.
Note #2: if you Google “professional report” you are going to get all kinds of templates that are highly visual and colorful. That isn’t necessary. I don’t want you to wrestle a template. Good old fashioned home cooking is fine.
Note #3: if you Google something like “business formatting” you are going to get an absolutely wild range of information. The rubric contains my preferred “in house style”
Word Limit: the word limit for the first draft is 1600 words. The discussion section has to be 500 words.
Deadline: Saturday at midnight. If you can turn it in early, then great. Ideally I would read 5 on Saturday, 8-10 on Sunday, and 8-10 Monday morning. If I read more than 10 of these in a single day, I get cranky.
Some resources:
- A list of WEP courses might help you
- A list of Writing minor courses might help you
Discussion Section Revisited
When I went to check this at 12:45 today, I only had five responses. Let’s wait until Wednesday to address this. If you need it, then here is a link to the form.
Miller
What is positivism? Why is it a problem for technical writing? What does Miller identify as the most problematic dimension of a non-rhetorical approach to scientific communication?
Adrien:
Positivism is a view in which human knowledge is a matter of getting closer to the material things of reality and farther away from the confusing and untrustworthy imperfections of words and minds. Science is a model of this. Within this model of thinking, technical and scientific rhetoric becomes the skill of subduing language so that it most accurately and directly transmits reality; it aims at being an efficient way of coercing minds to submit to reality. Miller identifies the most harmful effect of this view on technical and scientific rhetoric to be the vision of technical writing as a coercive endeavor, which continues to push the idea that rhetoric is not humanistic, and is in fact a way to coerce the mind.
Ren:
I think that the qoute that best summarizes this idea is “positivism is the conviction that sensory data are the only permissible basis for knowledge; consequently, the only meaningful statements are those which can be empirically verified” (Miller 612). Miller argues that passivist theory was applied to technical writing it would be just a lot of data with no conclusion, because science isn’t independent of rhetoric due to nothing in our universe being completely independent
Shannon:
Those who believe in positivism are attempting to separate what cannot (and I would argue should not) be separated. No human being can be completely objective, especially in pursuit of an objective truth. Every single human is different in a million ways, and therefore, has various views on what “truth” is and is not. Because traditional humanities courses tend towards a more subjective view, the opinion (which is subjective in and of itself) of positivists seems to be looking down its nose at us as humanities major.
Me: There was a time, not too long ago, when the humanities also sought objective, universal truth. Literature taught us what it means to be human. Literary works had one meaning that we could discover through close and careful reading (etc). Rhetorical theory could help us communicate truth to folks who most need to hear it.
Why does positivism/scientistic thinking lead us to devalue a traditional humanities course?
Sara:
I believe that it’s important to define science, and the ways that society has come to recognize its authority and significance. Historically, science has always been a practice: we are continually learning and revising and discovering more in the scientific realm and we are unlikely to run out of things we need to understand better. Science is a field of learning, which means that we don’t have all the answers and that most of our basis of knowledge is ripe for revision and deeper understanding. I consider it vital for an aspiring scientist to be able to say “I don’t know” frequently, and with the utmost confidence.
Now, however, we view science as an authority that should know, and if they say they don’t then we are distrustful and label it as “fake science” or a plot. Miller details how positivism in science insists that there should be no discourse about the findings of scientists, that their goal is simply to be as objective as possible. But science is done by human beings, and what we study and why we study it is all subjective and motivated by human biases. The process is contaminated by the “disease” of humanity from the start. I say disease because people often see human opinion and feeling and emotion as the enemy; many would eradicate human subjectivity out of a desire for comfortability and simplification. But science isn’t about either of those things. Science challenges our humanity and reveals our ignorance with every peeled back layer, every layer peeled by our human curiosity and desire to understand the world.
My response:
There’s a difference between the sciences and Science. The former names a collection of practices, coalitions of people who do science (a series of tests, experiments, analysis, guess work, confirmation, etc). The latter names an almost transcendent ontological entity that commands human knowledge and regulates Truth. A marker of unquestionable authority. Now, I would argue, most scientists don’t believe in Science with a capital S. (And I am stealing the small s vs capital S from a philosopher/rhetorician of science named Bruno Latour). But captial “S” science dominates the way most people tend to think about scientific work: certain, objective, authoritative, final. I’m thinking about a comment Wyatt made–that while college tends to be more communalist in its approach, high schools are much more likely to be positivistic. Is that true?
How can we describe the humanistic value of a technical writing course?
Miller identifies 4 problems for technical writing pedagogy that stem from the positivist tradition. How do we avoid them?
Molly:
For example, “be objective, be unemotional, be impersonal.” In addition, from what I understand, is that positivist epistemology orders humans to understand subjects in specific ways. Miller also introduces the fact that scientists adopted “conventions… for staying out of the way of the subject matter.” This included using passive voice and the third person.
Wyatt:
Teaching people that the inclusion of human emotion is inherently less factual creates a belief that those who can disconnect themselves the most from their humanity, would thus be able to provide a claim that is of a higher level of insight, intelligence, and credibility.
Adrien:
Emphasis on style and organization seems to coerce a writer into falling into scientific ways of thinking, essentially destroying the idea of invention. If, in this way of thinking, science is meant to discover facts which are already in existence, technical writing becomes a way to teach recipes for description of mechanism, process, classification, and interpretation of data. All this does for technical writers is teach them how to use cookie-cutter modes of thinking and writing brought about by this institution of thinking, effectively distancing them from the entire purpose of writing: communicating clearly, effectively, and with the understanding that it will be read. By simplifying the words used, technical writers lose the comprehension and legibility so desperately needed in scientific fields, and make way for an inhuman, unemotional reading experience.
How does Miller–writing in 1979–describe the epistemology that is replacing positivism?
What does it mean to teach technical writing from a communalist perspective? Why might some students reject a communalist approach to teaching writing?
Adrien:
Some students may reject a communalist approach to teaching writing simply due to the fact that it requires rethinking their entire framework for not only science, but technical writing as well. It may be perceived as their entire system of beliefs being tossed out a window, for lack of a better term, and being forcefully replaced with someone else’s beliefs. That said, I believe the methods used by the teacher of this belief system makes all the difference.
Carly:
A humanistic perspective, as described by Miller, is the view that “knowledge is not discovered but constructed through communal agreement and shared understanding.” This approach shifts away from the positivist idea that facts are objective, self-evident, and exist independently of human interaction. Instead, it emphasizes that truths, especially in scientific or technical contexts, are shaped through the negotiation, discussion, and consensus of a community.
I assert that Miller’s grounds for labeling technical writing as a Humanity lies in what she identifies as a consensualist relation to audience. Why do I think this? What does this mean?
