ENG 301 15.M: Cover Letters

Posted on November 27, 2023 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Cover Letters Intro
  • Drafting Cover Letters
  • Examining Sample Cover Letters
  • Optional: Building a Linkedin Profile
  • Following-Up on a Job Application or Interview

Cover Letters

The ABO entry for “Application Cover Letters” [pp. 36-41] identifies 3-4 purposes for your cover letter:

  • Introduce you as a candidate with the skills that can contribute to the particular organization
  • Explain what particular job interests you (or why you are interested in the advertised position
  • Illustrate via specific examples qualifications in your resume that match the position
  • Signify your desire/availability for an interview (this is a phatic closing gesture)

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing things in that order. But you might. It is tricky–you are playing a kind of meta-game with a reader (since the rhetorical purpose of your document is super obvious: GIVE ME A JOB). The game concerns how skillfully/subtly you can perform within this charged situation. You want to consider tone–how do you come off as someone who is hard-working and professional while also not sounding too formal and/or stiff? Unless the job advertisement and your online research suggests that they are a formal environment. Essentially, how good are you at reading the room?

Here’s what the cover letter shouldn’t do: it shouldn’t just summarize your resume. It should select one or two skills from the resume and flush them out, providing context and details. Bottom line: TURN A GREAT ACCOMPLISHMENT INTO A STORY. Don’t tell me you have experience researching grants, tell me how you partnered with the ARC of Weld County to identify and research, using both the State of Colorado and the Foundation Center databases, 13 specific grants for non-profit organizations focused on children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Or how you worked with a team of designers to produce flyers for both print and digital distribution for 8 upcoming events. Mock ups of these flyers are available on your website. Whatever. Aristotle reminds us that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end–a problem, your solution, and a measurement/assessment of the results.

The cover letter is your opportunity to tell a story about the best work you’ve done. Caveat: the best work that is relative to the position. It is an opportunity to show a few awesome things (the resume is your opportunity to tell them about all the things).

A few other resources:

How I Conceptualize Cover Letters

As we discussed last week (and I imagine we will discuss further tonight), a big challenge with resumes concerns constructing a document that can beat a machine and at the same time engage a human. It is a balancing act.

At least that is one hurdle with which we don’t need to deal with cover letters. The challenge of the cover letter is to convey, in a few short paragraphs, the value (explicitly?) and energy (implicitly?) you will add to an organization. In addition to being a high stakes writing sample, it is also an elevator pitch, an introduction, a first date, a sales proposal, an intellectual and professional biography. A lot has to happen quickly.

I’ll offer the following outline for cover letters:

  • First paragraph. First sentence: position for which you are applying. “Thesis statement” as to why you are a good fit and/or interested in the position [pay attention to the specifics in your add, look for tests/prompts/possibilities].
  • Second paragraph. Storytime. Chances are your thesis involves something you can do. Tell a story about the time you did the thing. Are you applying for a marketing job? Tell a story about how you developed content for a social media channel. Applying for a grant writing position? Tell a story about the time your under/graduate class partnered with a local non-profit and you researched/developed stuff and/or liaised with folks to do things. Ideally, your story should have a what I did–what effect that had narrative structure, but it doesn’t have to. The point here is to take one thing you discuss in the resume, the best thing, and turn it into a paragraph of meaningful prose.
  • Third paragraph. Do you have a second awesome story? Cool. Tell that too! If not, then think about how you can translate your academic success and abilities into language that shows you are a strong fit for the position. If the ad stresses personality, then can you use something like the psychometric test to sell yourself? Is there something that the ad indicates as a requirement that you can indicate you are familiar with (or something similar, that given your familiarity with Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, you are confident that you will be able to learn InDesign quickly and/or given your interest in expanding into digital marketing, you are currently enrolled in a HubSpot social media marketing certification course?)
  • Concluding paragraph. Open with a reiteration of your interest in the position. Close with the standard stuff–you look forward to an interview to further discuss your qualifications / the position (is it about them? Or about you?)

What does a story look like? Here’s one from Hannah Hehn:

In the past semester I earned the title Creative Director of The Crucible Literary Magazine. In this post I’ve overseen the production of our Fall 2021 issue, working with the editors, editor-in-chief, and social media directors on the content, layout, themes, and promotional materials for the edition. This semester we worked with a document design class here to design the cover and internal visuals as part of a contest. This entailed consulting with the design class as well as The Crucible’s President and Vice President extensively to make final decisions. Working individually played a large role as well, both in creating a possible internal design for the edition, and in editing the final products for printing within our tight deadlines.

And here’s one by Carl McDonald:

During my education, I took part in a team tasked with assisting a local nonprofit, Santa Cops of Weld County, to find and apply for grants. This project included locating grants through various grant databases, including the CRC America and the Foundation Directory Online, familiarizing ourselves with the grant application process, and writing the proposal itself. I focused my efforts on a Build-A-Bear Charitable Giving grant, which procured 120 stuffed bears for at-risk kids the following Christmas.

I also assisted Impact Locally, a nonprofit in Denver, in the same capacity as an intern this summer. I worked remotely, giving weekly updates about my research and progress. At the end of my internship, we were selected by Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger for a substantial grant to continue food distribution to the homeless through the Covid19 crisis.

Sample Cover Letters

I’ve got a few to examine. Maybe one more.

Building a Linkedin Profile

Let’s just say that this video by Professor Heather Austin provides perspective.

  • Basics: Get a Headshot
  • Slogan: Max of 300 words
  • About: Split into Summary (Who you are, who you help, how you help them) and the Expertise (block of resume-style skills). Keep paragraphs short.
  • Skills: Pick the “big” three. Then a handful more.
  • Experience: Be descriptive

Resources:

Let’s talk follow-up (FlexJobs). But first, a scene.

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ENG 225 13.F: Draft Workshop

Posted on November 17, 2023 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plans:

  • Quick Sicart Notes
  • Introductions and Conclusions
  • Paper Rubric Passes

Sicart and “Neutral” Problems

Lori asked a question about where in his writing Sicart emphasizes the need for “neutral” choices. I have a few quotes that can speak to that. First, from the “Moral Dilemmas” article:

Game designer Sid Meier once defined games as “a series of interesting choices.” Meier argued that for players to be engaged in the game, they have to be presented with choices to which they feel emotionally attached, and these choices must not be equally good. The player also should have enough information to make an informed choice, and no single choice should be best. (“Moral Decisions,” 33).

From this quote, we can see that while not all choices are equally good, no one choice should be the correct answer. From this, I would argue that games need to present choices in such a way that we, as players, should not be able to easily identify which choice the designers consider the best. We should not suspect that they want us to pick a particular choice. The easier to identify the “right” answer, the less we are engaging what Sicart in that article calls “ludic phronesis.” The less we are ethically engaged. [Who sighted the “You want to be good” essay?]

Sicart heuristic.

Introductions and Conclusions

Introduction: Articulates the problem that generated the research question(s). Lays out some context: why discuss this now? why is this research valuable? Poses the research questions clearly (can lay out hypotheses). Lays out the thesis: which is the answers to the research questions. ANSWERS. No Scooby-Doo mystery meat. Do not tell me what the paper “will do” but report specifically what the paper has done. You write this last so that you can preview what the paper *actually* proves instead of laying out what it hopes/aims to do. BE AS DETAILED AND SPECIFIC AS POSSIBLE.

See crafting a thesis paragraph (down the page).

Introductions and road-maps.

Conclusion: I think conclusions are quite hard to write; they have to summarize the entire paper (which, REMEMBER, the introduction should do) and either end emphasizing a change (if you did not do this in the discussion), a hope, a direction for future studies (say, what you would do next or what you would have done differently if you could start over or had more time).

Paper Rubric

Here’s a link to the rubric.

Passes

Passes are reads through the whole paper with specific foci. Here’s my “suggested” list of reads before you submit the draft on Monday.

  • First sentence of every paragraph: Does it offer a claim that sets up the paragraph’s purpose?
  • Concision: Read your paper out loud until you hit a sentence that makes you stumble or irks you. First, can you revise it to have a clear character and action? Second, can/should it be cut into two sentences? Third, can you make it more concise (cut unnecessary words, adjectives, prepositions)?
  • MLA / APA / Chicago: The drafts I saw in conferences were pretty horrendous on this front.
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ENG 301 13.F: Resumes

Posted on November 17, 2023 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Rhetorically Constructing Resumes
  • A List of Critical Decisions
  • Resume Revisions

Rhetorically Constructing Resumes

When I teach resumes at the undergraduate level, I emphasize the importance of an rhetorical approach. Rhetoric here means two things to me:

  • First, it means that I attempt to read what the other person wants, thinks, values, and prioritizes
  • Second, it means that I approach the situation without an expectation of control or mastery, that I understand that the situation calls for a calculation of risk

I contrast this rhetorical approach to the more “philosophical” approach that tends to drive the advice one would get from career services or from many resume books and websites. Philosophical approaches try to teach hard and fast rules for developing materials. Do this! Don’t do that! They are often more concerned with their own preferences; and thus overwrite the wide chaos one finds in ads with a more simple and controlled framework. They also tend to be more conservative when it comes to voice, tone, and content. I am skeptical of this kind of “cookie cutter” approach.

Rather, I think you should approach your job materials less in terms of a baking recipe and more in terms of playing a poker game. When you play poker, the cards you hold are important. But equally important is your ability to read your opponents, and to make sure that you adjust your play based on theirs. You cannot plan out a poker strategy before you play the game–you can have ideas, certainly–but those ideas have to be re-calibrated once the game starts and you begin familiarizing yourself with the players.

In terms of a job search and the construction your materials, it is useful to have drafted in advance a resume and a cover letter. But the resume and cover letter you send to a potential employer should always be transformed based on the position for which you apply. As I talked about in the smaller groups on Wednesday: in an era in which we are fighting algorithms to make sure our materials make initial cuts or receive high compatability scores, you want to make sure as much language from an add shows up in your materials as possible. Manipulate headings and terms to match the language you find in ads.

But these transformations shouldn’t be merely cosmetic–you should create content that you think speaks to that particular organizations needs. I’ve been on the job market twice in the past 15 years, and both times I started with a default letter and CV. This doesn’t mean I recommend writing a completely different letter for every job. I don’t, no one has time for that. [job letters-unc (teaching new media and tech writing), msu (digital rhetoric research), tamu (classical)]. But I do recommend spending time reading an ad carefully, thinking about how you arrange material, and making sure that the language you use in a letter matches up with the language you find not only on an ad, but also on an organization’s website (mission statement, about us, projects). Your resume and cover letter should show organizations how you can use research and rhetoric to craft more compelling prose.

Rhetoric is the art of adapting a message to a particular audience, of recognizing the affordances and advantages of a particular situation. It always involves elements of risk and chance. I believe job searches are particularly arbitrary–there is no system or pattern to what employers look for because every employer, every human resource director, is different, and brings to the process her own preferences, methods, and attitudes. The best we can do is to learn to analyze, listen, and think through possibilities–to be aware of the potential choices we have and to make precise calculations for every position to which we apply. While we can’t be certain, we can do our best to know our audience(s), and to tailor ourselves to their preferences.

Some Practical Advice that May Even Be Useful, in Some Situations, Some of the Time

Okay, with those rhetorical reservations in place, let me tentatively offer some advice. First, we need to make sure we are designing resumes that are ATS (applicant tracking system) compliant. This is probably the biggest change I have had to deal with in the 15 or so years that I have taught resumes–the increasing difficulty and prioritization of designing a document that 1) can “beat” the machine and 2) is still persuasive, compelling, and/or readable to a human being. The advice 10 years ago focused on the importance of keywords (previous link). So does the advice today . I think our Project 1 Coding Sheet is a great generic resource for identifying keywords–but be sure to code any advertisement to which you plan on applying to see if you can identify idiosyncratic language. Also, preparing resumes for ATS has implications for style and design. (Note: see tool at the bottom, see Common mistakes, short video).

In the 2010’s the fad was to use fancy templates. To create highly graphic resumes. Visual resumes are still a thing. I still think these have a place, especially if you are applying for visual-design jobs. But I am skeptical of a lot of Canva, Microsoft, and even InDesign templates for job materials. Many of those templates are designed for a very precise amount of content. And that means that when you use that template, you end up having weird gaps, spaces, or crams. They look weird instead of showing design skill and attention to detail.

So let’s assume that we’ve beaten the machine. Now our resume is in the hands (or more likely on the screen) of a human resource director or a manager who needs to wean a stack of 20-25 candidates down to a stack of 5 for interviews. Now we might have to beat the dreaded six second scan.. But beware keyword stuffing!

Let’s close this section with a review of some generic but staple resume advice–a few Squawkfox articles.

Plain-Text Resumes

Beyond ATS preparation, there’s a movement towards plain-text resumes. There are documents with no formatting–bold, italics, bullets, etc. Such documents take ATS formatting to the extreme.

Sample Resumes.

Wright, Dol, and Collins (2011). See sample resume description [could this go in a resume or a cover letter? Top of the resume for a person? Or bottom of a resume? Where to position this?]. See Wonderlic.

Another resource to help identify strengths/compatibility: Big Five personality test.

Here is my heuristic/template for starting a resume

So, this is a mess of notes. Let me try to sum this up into a list of questions to guide your resume.

If you are submitting to a human, then I would likely suggest you have a non-plain-text resume-either a designed resume or a simple, clean text resume (like, for instance, the boring template I provide above). If you are submitting to an algorithm, then I recommend a plain-text resume. These days, you should have both prepared.

I would only use a template if you feel confident in your ability to edit said template. It is better to play it safe than to use a template poorly.

You should organize the material in your resume to put your most impressive content first. That might be your education. But it might not be. Do not feel compelled to put your GPA on your resume (and I would only list it if you are a 3.5+). Do not feel compelled to put every job on your resume.

Old rules dictated that a resume never extend beyond one page. I don’t think that rule works in a digital, algorithmic age. BUT, prioritize what goes where.

An objective statement allows you to repeat the job title. They are not necessary. Some people love them, others see them as a waste of space.

There’s no need to list references. But, if you have empty space, then they do not hurt. I’d rather see a list of skills.

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ENG 229: Paper Outline / Lit Review

Posted on November 6, 2023 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • The Time of the Drafting Has Arrived
  • Revisiting the Paper Outline
  • Writing a Lit Review
  • Working with Sources in the Text

The Time of the Drafting Has Arrived

An annual tradition, Toothpaste for Dinner. While I have seen drafts of the methodology and progress in your worklogs, it is likely time for a little panic. Conferences are next week, which means paper drafts are due Saturday or Monday night. This week, we write.

The Paper Outline (and Some Specs)

Specs:

  • Generally speaking, I do not like giving length requirements for these papers. They are as long as they need to be to do all the things. If it comforts you, then I would say that papers are generally 10-16 double-spaced pages in length. While some will be longer than that, it is *very* difficult to complete the assignment in fewer than 8 pages. Some of your methodologies will be 4 pages long!
  • Papers need to be in MLA, APA, or Chicago Style format. The University (and the State of Colorado) require that I grade papers for this. We’ll be working on paper format a bit Wednesday.
  • Rather than impose a source minimum, I’ll say that papers need to supply evidence for claims and contain a thorough lit review or build a comprehensive lens.
  • The paper has to use sub-headings. See below.
  • Papers should have a title that does not suck. We will review this Friday the 17th.

Questions?

Revisiting the Paper Outline

This semester I have emphasized the typical research paper outline:

  • Introduction
  • Literature Review
  • Methodology
  • Findings
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion

That outline won’t work for every project. But understanding what those subheadings do can be helpful for organizing your material. I also want to talk about other potential subheadings.

Okay, let me start with those headings above:

  • Introduction: Articulates the problem that generated the research question(s). Lays out some context: why discuss this now? why is this research valuable. Poses the research questions clearly. Lays out the thesis: which is the answers to the research questions. You write this last so that you can preview what the paper *actually* proves instead of laying out what it hopes/aims to do.
  • Literature Review: This reviews previous research on your topic. As I’ll show below, there’s a lot of ways to “group” this research; you should organize this section around ideas, not around individual articles.
  • Methodology: This section generally needs to do 3-4 things (in our case, most of you will only do two of them). I will go over these below.
  • Data / Findings / Discussion: Sometimes you will see these sections separated–especially in the hard sciences where your data can be presented as numbers, graphs, and tables. I don’t think that any of you are working on these kinds of projects, except for those who are extending our race and gender projects. In these papers, you will see one section for Data (or Findings) and another section for Discussion, in which you compare your findings to previous studies in the literature review (noting what agrees and what disagrees with previous findings), you highlight and explain unexpected findings, and you suggest the impact of these findings (what they mean for the field, or what changes they suggest are necessary to our world–note that sometimes this happens in the conclusion).
  • Conclusion: I think conclusions are quite hard to write; they have to summarize the entire paper (which, REMEMBER, the introduction should do) and either end emphasizing a change (if you did not do this in the discussion), a hope, a direction for future studies (say, what you would do next or what you would have done differently if you could start over or had more time).

Before I go on to talk about writing up a literature review, let me discuss how this might change for a more interpretive, humanities-based paper (like, say, a Sicart paper).

  • Introduction
  • Lit Review / Background Info On a Game [if, say, this is too long for the introduction; this might be a lit review of previous scholarship on the game and/or some background information about the game–its characters etc. Whether you describe the game in the introduction or in a separate section is up to you. I tend to prefer a separate section, but it really depends on the game’s complexity]
  • Building a Critical Lens
  • Lens Element #1
  • Lens Element #2
  • Lens Element #3
  • Conclusion

Or

  • Introduction
  • Background Info On a Game [if, say, this is too long for the introduction; this might be a lit review of previous scholarship on the game and/or some background information about the game–its characters etc. Whether you describe the game in the introduction or in a separate section is up to you. I tend to prefer a separate section, but it really depends on the game’s complexity]
  • Building a Critical Lens
  • Scene #1
  • Scene #2
  • Scene #3
  • Conclusion

Like a massive 5 paragraph essay, both versions above assume that your critical lens has 3 elements (like, say, player complicity, wicked problems, and forced reflection). Please note–while I use “5 paragraphs” as a reference here, each of these ideas will likely require several paragraphs. Note that it doesn’t have to be 3 elements either. It could be one. It could be two. It could be six.

Note, too, that, like a 5 paragraph essay, my second version above assumes you will analyze 3 different scenes or decisions. It could be two scenes. It could be five.

What is important here is that you determine how to structure your analysis. Do you want to move through one “critical lens” concept at a time, discussing how it appears in several different scenes in a game? Do you want to, for instance, talk about player complicity all at once?

Or do you want to organize your material by specific scene, discussing how each of the three elements does (or does not) operate?

Writing a Literature Review

In short, a literature review is summary of previous research and findings on your topic. This is pretty clear gut for the female protagonist sexuality / body image folks, because you are building your work off of previous studies, and there’s a bunch of other similar studies that you can summarize.

This will likely be tricky for the other folks. If you are writing about Undertale, then, cool! There’s a bunch of other studies about Undertale, but I don’t think they are necessarily doing what either group in here is trying to do. You still have to summarize them. You have to acknowledge that you have done the work and surveyed previous scholarship. One reason this is important: in your discussion section, you can put your work in conversation with that previous scholarship. So flushing out a literature review helps you write a smarter discussion section (no matter what kind of paper you are writing).

I would focus my literature review on the game you have selected. Save any research on Sicart or ethical decision-making (the Ryan et al) for the lens section. Make sense?

Writing a Literature Review

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time I co-wrote a research article on multimodal artist Maira Kalman. The article reported on a multimodal project I developed for a Digital Video course on how Kalman’s approach to art echoed “radical” rhetorical theorists on the unpredictable nature of creative invention–on how we cannot teach creativity, but we can teach habits, practices, approaches, that might allow something creative to happen.

The original outline of that paper looked like this:

  • Introduction
  • Surveying Theories of Choric Invention
    • Gregory Ulmer
    • Thomas Rickert
    • Byron Hawk
    • Jeff Rice
    • Sarah Arroyo
    • Colin Brooke
  • Explicating Kalman’s Aesthetic

Our reviewer feedback was tough, but fair:

On a similar note, the theoretical chops of this article come forward as relatively unconnected blocks. In the ULMER section, we get a block on Ulmer, interspersed with several others, but then it becomes a set of legos: a green block (Rickert [and Rickert and Kristeva]), then a red block (Hawk), then yellow (Brooke [and Brooke and Barthes]), then blue (Arroyo [and Arroyo and Deleuze and Guattari]), then purple (Rice [and Rice and De Certeau]). Each of these feels strangely disconnected and underdeveloped, particularly given the potential connections between Kalman’s work and each of these authors (as well as the theorists they are working in relation to).

Essentially, we had walked through our literature, or research, one source at a time (even if each of those sections often involved multiple sources). What we didn’t do is cut across all those sources to identify the most important ideas they have in common. We didn’t synthesize our sources.

Our second outline looks like this:

  • Introduction
  • Synthesizing Theories of Choric Invention
    • Prioritizing Space
    • Juxtaposing Subjective (Affective) Experience Alongside Objective History
    • Resisting Synthesis
    • Resisting Codification
  • Explicating Kalman’s Aesthetic

The difference here is essential: moving from talking about one source at a time to explicating an idea. The Prioritizing Space section has references to Rickert, Ulmer, and Hawk. The Juxtaposing Subjective.. section also has references to Rickert, Ulmer, and Hawk. The Resisting Synthesis section has references to Brook and Arroyo. The Resisting Codification section has references to all of them, and brings in Rice and Shipka. I put this section last because it was the one idea that runs through all of the stuff I read.

Now I had a clear structure in place (four elements of choric invention) to read Maira Kalman’s work (and then to ask my students to consider in creating video remediations of their experiences in historic/affective spaces).

The point of the long story is this: whether you are writing a social/scientific research paper or a humanities scholarly analysis, you need to organize your lit review around ideas, not around names or articles (and researchers and scholars have names. Don’t write “this article” in an annotation or research paper).

Working with Sources in the Text

First, some review. I shared this way back in the beginning of class, but, as you prepare to draft your papers, it is likely time to revisit it.

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ENG 301 11.M: Community Engagement Projects

Posted on October 30, 2023 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Extra Credit Opportunity
  • Community Engagement Projects

Below I lay out 4 different project options. We will be working on these projects for the next three weeks. That gives us this week to do preliminary research, next week to draft and develop content, and a third week to revise and polish materials before delivery.

Extra Credit Opportunities

I’ve got three upcoming extra credit events:

  • Wednesday, November 1st: Abbo on Wolves
  • Thursday, November 2nd: Dia De Los Muertos
  • Thursday, November 9th: Nope at Lindou Auditorium (basement of Michener Library)

Option #1: Go West Grant Writing Project

The first project option this semester is to research funding targets for the Go West Film festival. We will use the libraries CRC database to put together a preliminary list of targets (Proficiency Deliverable #3). I have the start of a list from fall of 2022.

Once we have a list together, then you will want to use the Foundation Directory Database to investigate our potential targets. This will provide us with a much more detailed understanding of their typical gOnerant award and funding priorities. Unfortunately, I do not believe that the Foundation Directory offers a free trial anymore (these used to be available for 24 hours but I see no mention of them anywhere on the current website). This means we’ll need a group to travel a bit.

That trip should produce a slideshow of screenshots, something like this (that slideshow was for the Poudre River Trail Corridor Inc).

NOTE: Depending on the level of access the public libraries offer, you may have access to even more information, including a grantmaker’s 990-PF forms (these are tax forms for non-profits). Our research becomes stronger if we are able to mine additional information on the giving histories of our best targets.

If we spend this week and weekend gathering research, then we can spend next week actually drafting the report. That link goes to a Hanover Research report, which can serve as a structural/organizational model for our own work.

Option #2: Go West UX/UI Report

The second project centers around the Go West Film Festival website. I believe the site could use some love, and this group will put together a list of potential changes–both in terms of content and user interface. My goal is to pass on that report to whoever interns with the organization next fall (I’ll be looking to recruit an intern for the organization for Fall 2024 in ENG 328 this spring).

There is an obvious catch to this: the design team hasn’t worked on UI so far this semester. But, with a bit of reading, I think we should be able to conduct a basic Usability Test. We might dedicate a day of class next week to run a “card sorting” test of the web site (a pretty common, user-driven exercise to explore top-level navigation).

First, we’ll need a catalogue of content currently on the site. What do they have? This practice is commonly called a content map, and building one helps us to understand what assets they have and how that material is currently organized. So that would be this group’s first priority: to build a content map. [The previous hub spot link has a template; alternatively, students have done this in Google Docs]

Second, once we have that map, then we will want to put together a report on the site that discusses a reorganization and lays out technical issues.

Option #3: Go West Social Media Content Calendar

This project develops from the third proficiency project, in which I asked you to develop a content strategy document (how do Campbell’s 6 different content strategies map on to Go West?) I haven’t seen the third proficiency project, so I am unsure how much progress you’ve made here. The research stage of this project, then, is to finish up that project, data mine the peer organizations you identified earlier for content types and suggestions, and have a catalogue of the kinds of content you think Go West could produce and distribute.

The second stage of that project would be to develop a social media content calendar that maps out content for September, October, and November of 2024 (assuming the film festival is the second week of November, the 4th through the 8th). This includes creating photo assets, drafting copy, and mapping out times of the week for an intern to respond to comments.

Option #4: Publishing Research

Finally, I have a one or two person project. I want to try and build out our internship program, and to do that I need a sense of where in Colorado I might place students. I found a website that lists 74 different publishing houses in Colorado. I need some folks to go through that list, contact organizations to see if they would be interested in developing a potential internship relationship, identifying if interns would be expected to be on site or could work remotely, and other stuff that I cannot even think of yet. Put simply, I do not have time to even go through this list to check how many of these places are still operating (I have no idea how old that website is) and how many of these places are geographically viable (though I know UNC students sometimes commute from pretty far away) and/or how many of these places have contacts for potential interns.

Homework

  • Grant Writing: Synthesize existing Go West funding possibilities into the spreadsheet I’ve linked above
  • Go West Web Site: Read Riley Kerr and Rae Friedensen’s Lifestories Usability report. Make a copy of it to use as a template (keeping headings but removing previous content).
  • Social Media: Revise Deliverable #3 and send me a copy so that I can read it before Wednesday’s class
  • Publishing Research: Let’s Talk.
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ENG 225 10.M: Paraphrasing and Working with Secondary Sources

Posted on October 23, 2023 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Purdue University Guide to Paraphrasing
  • Paraphrasing Secondary Material
  • Introducing and Contextualizing Sources

I want to spend time today on working with sources. First, we’re going to think about how to condense longer direct quotes into short, efficient paraphrases. Essentially, a paraphrase is simply putting someone else’s work into your own words. Paraphrases condense and clarify sources.

When I draft a paper, I tend to use a lot of direct quotes. As I revise, and especially as I do the work to contextualize and summarize quotations in my paper, I find I can take a lot of them out. We’ll start with the Purdue OWL’s six-step system for paraphrasing. I’ll say upfront that I agree with their claim that working through these steps often helps me better understand the source material I am working with. That is, learning to paraphrase doesn’t just help you communicate better, but also think better too.

(Modified) Purdue University Guide to Paraphrasing

Here’s a link to the original 6 step Purdue Guide. Here’s my slight modification:

  1. Reread the original passage sentence by sentence until you have a grasp of 1) what it is arguing [the claim] and 2) what it is offering as evidence
  2. Write out a list of key terms or phrases that you would need to explain to someone who hasn’t read the original work. What specific-tricky-key language does the original contain
  3. Take a swing at paraphrasing the material
  4. Afterwards, check to see if you’ve included all of the terms from step #2. Check your rendition with the original to make sure that your version accurately expresses all the essential information in a new form.
  5. Use quotation marks to identify any unique term or phraseology you have borrowed exactly from the source. For instance, if I were writing about Sicart, I would quote “player complicity” or “instrumental gaming” the first time those phrases appeared, since they are so specific to his work.
  6. Craft a quality signal to proceed the paraphrase

Paraphrasing Secondary Material

I have two examples for today’s class:

Introducing and Contextualizing Sources

Finally, I want to swing back to a lecture from earlier in the course.

Homework

For Wednesday, if possible, bring a pair of headphones to plug into the lab computers in Ross 1240.

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ENG 229 9.W: Maira Kalman and Electracy

Posted on October 18, 2023 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • A little history: Technoadherents and Technoskeptics
  • A little ontology: Orality, Literacy, and Electracy
  • Maira Kalman
  • What Is/n’t The Kalman Project

A Little History: Technoadherent and Technoskeptics

“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

  1. . Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
  2. . Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
  3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

    4. Douglas Adams

I’m starting a little bit in left field, I know. What does Kalman’s work have to do with the history of the philosophy of technology? Something, I promise. Bear with me a bit.

Working quick and dirty (in academic terms in sweeping generalizations), I want to sketch two historic attitudes toward technology. Here, “technology” simply refers to any invention that changes or augments our ability to do things in the world. Chances are good that you’ve heard me talk about Walter Ong and writing as a technology. If you haven’t, then you will pretty soon. But, for now, let’s just think about technology in general–technology as a tool that alters how we perceive or navigate our world.

So, two attitudes. I don’t want to call them technophile and technophobe. This isn’t about love or repulsion. Let me rather call them technofaithful and technoskeptic. Faithful and skeptical of what? Of whether technology will act as a force of liberation or domination. Does technology make us better, more capable, more efficient, or does it make us more artificial, pulling us away from a natural purity, simplicity, or organicism?

On the one had, there are those that see technology as tied to progression, both in a general “wow life is good” and a Marxist “wow, we can redistribute labor and wealth” sense. Not all technofaithfuls have to believe in both senses. But generally, these folks see technology as freeing humans from some forms of labor, opening time and space for different kinds of work/investments. Furthermore, these folks also see technology as allowing increasing communication, connection, and exposure, allowing us to be more democratic, productive, and ethical, i.e., the more we are exposed to difference (cultural, racial, etc), the better we come at handling the disequilibrium difference causes. Technology allows more free access to information. Technology allows more opportunities for invention, ingenuity, and development.

One the other hand, we’ve got folks like Heidegger who frame technology within a desire for efficiency (two reminders: Heidegger is a fucking Nazi; one cannot talk about 20th century philosophy without him. His meditations on how we experience time, and how our relation to time shapes the phenomenological state in which we encounter the world, is perhaps the greatest philosophical development of the 20th century.) Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” argues that increasing technological advances develop in us an unconscious dedication to see everything in the world as “standing reserve,” such that everything, every being (even and especially human being), comes to be “yet to be processed.” Nothing gets to be, to exist, to develop, to flourish, outside of this pressure to be useful, efficient. Technology, for Heidegger and the techno-skeptics that follow his critical tradition, is always already tied to ever increasing forms of homogeny and domination. In simplest language, technology means only efficiency, efficiency as a divine value over everything else (Robocop, ED-209, parts on back order for the next twenty years, who cares if it works). Rather than opening a more inclusive, public, democratic spaces, technology carves out more exclusionary, private, demogogic spaces (for purposes of this sentence, democratic are places where we encounter and negotiate difference, demagogic are places where we celebrate the same and/as we castigate difference). Rather than distributing wealth and capital, technology allows capital to be more centralized in the hands of the few.

So, two attitudes toward technology. I’ve dedicated more time to teh second only because I think it is the more complicated notion, not necessarily because I think it is the more correct one. What if parts of both are true? What if our existence with technology is always inhabited, permeated by faith and skepticism? What if our experience with technology is caught up between these two pole positions? A tension wire?

If you are wondering what this has to do with our class: video is a technology. What if technology both increases our access to our world and each other *and* demands ruthless efficiency?

What can we do? Can Kalman help us do something?

A Little Ontology: Orality, Literacy, and Electracy

Before I (probably don’t) explain what any of this has to do with Kalman we need to take another intellectual detour, to a body of scholarship often referred to as “media affordance theory” or “technology affordance theory” or just plain old “affordance theory.” A few names here: Walter Ong studied how the development in writing in ancient Greece transformed not only *how* the Greeks communicated, but also what they thought reality was (and their corresponding understanding of metaphysics–what/how exists in this world and world(s) beyond the pale of reality’s horizons), what they thought knowledge was, what they thought a human was, how they thought we should govern, and how they thought we should treat each other. The written word, then, influenced not only communication, but ontology, epistemology, subjectivity, politics, morality, and ethics.

Apparatus theory is the name Gregory Ulmer gave to the study of how different technologies (re)shape us. Much of this work traces back to Walter Ong. I teach Ong in a lot of my other classes and have a stock lecture on him. Ong argues that “writing is a technology that restructures thought.” That’s the name of the very useful essay he wrote near the end of his career that attempts to sum up decades of reading and theorizing. It is a useful essay. Let’s examine it quickly.

In the essay, Ong traces out a few dozen effects that literacy has on human consciousness. Most of these things can be summarized as a few criteria:

Literacy emphasizes the abstract. Words are divorced from reality. Words target elements of a holistically experienced reality and parcel them.
Literacy individualizes. When I speak to you as a class, you are a group. When I ask you to read something on the screen, you become individuals. Writing is, most often, a solitary activity. Reading, after, say, 2nd grade, is almost entirely an individual activity (note that I increasingly think this is wrong and college classes should read challenging texts together because something viral and kinetic and awesome happens when you do. And you should totally read books out loud to the people you love). Side notes. Writing and reading are far more individualistic than speech.
Literacy emphasizes logos. [Sigh, I hate talking about rhetoric as ethos, pathos, and logos, but here goes]

When I was writing my dissertation a decade ago, I was one of many scholars prompted by Ong’s work to think about how the Internet might change metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, etc. I was thinking particularly of Wikipedia, and argued that we would move away from singularity, autonomy, permanence, and certainty and toward plurality, interactivity, transience, and risk/ambiguity. I like Marshal McLuhan and Gregory Ulmer and Elizabeth Eisenstein and others, was interested in how technology was reshaping the way we are–all those things I list above. If I was a techno-optimist, it was because I believe that, as humans, we have to learn to dwell with difference. By nature, we are animals interested only in our self-defense. By “society” or “technology” we learn to repress this natural allergy to difference. I hoped that new media technologies, which can so radically connect us, could aid in this process.

My operating hypothesis is that video amplifies pathos (I’m stealing this from Marshall McLuhan, that video is more immediate than print; Ulmer has a whole thing on “flash reason,” putting the enthymeme in meme). And, in rhetorical theory, “pathos” *can* open us to hospitality (it can also open us to rage and violence). In general use, the terms affect, emotion, and mood tend to be interchangeable. But in psychology–and by extension across the humanities–affect is different from emotion. Emotion is something that I know I feel. I can articulate it. I am consciously aware of it. For instance, I am sad.

Affect is different, however. It points to how “I” feel before I know how I feel. It is the feeling emanating through my body and influencing my consciousness. Affect affects how I exist in the world at a given time. This notion of affect I am developing resonates with Heidegger’s phenomenology–that our experience of our own being occurs within the bounds of a particular, but often inarticulable, mood. Here’s Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy: that mood, something that flows across and through all being (existence) undecideably shifts how we perceive reality. There is no getting outside of ourselves to a realm of pure knowledge, we always know from within a feeling. To dismiss feeling (pathos) in favor of logos (knowledge, truth)–the entire Western intellectual project from Plato to Kant to the atomic bomb–was a fool’s errand.

In Rhetoric, studies of affect explore how places and spaces can subtly influence our moods. Thomas Rickert refers to this as attending to ambience: how space influences affect/feelings and thus structures or influences our experiences. One might be familiar with the derive of Situationalist International from the 1950’s and 1960’s. This semester I am interested in you exploring the subjective, affective experience of a place. The nature of this exploration can vary greatly depending on the place you explore. For instance, a few years ago I visited the African American museum in Atlanta, and it was clear that the place was designed to provoke an incredible affective and pathetic (unconscious and conscious) emotional experience. Other places might provoke a strong affective experience even thought they were not consciously designed to do so.

Stunning Lack of Transition

Suffice to say, the methods we use to think and communicate shape everything we think and communicate. If you think communication is a signifier reaching the ear of another person, then you are likely to think the world in terms of what is immediately present, to see/appreciate the totality of a moment, to judge things in real time. If you think communication as a lone reader deciphering a signifier on a page, then you are likely to think the world (as signifier) in relation to a “distant” (transcendent) signified–whether that signified is a Platonic Ideal, or a Christian God, or an Enlightenment Reason.

Affordance theory came to the fore in the mid-20th century, as theorists from a wide variety of disciplines began to understand that our technological means of communication were changing, growing, incredibly fast. At first, folks thought of radio, telephones, even television as a continuation of literacy. But then, of course we understood them otherwise (Marshall McLuhan’s work is central here). By the time I wrote my dissertation in the early aughts, theorists were speculating about the internet–if, as Ong had demonstrated–writing so radically transformed human experience and culture, what would this new technology do to us, to thought? Gregory Ulmer was one of the most comprehensive writers on the subject.

All of this technological change also occurred within the massive intellectual, political, and aesthetic shift that we call postmodernism. I don’t have time to really explicate postmodernism or poststructuralism here, but I do want to highlight three larger ontological/epistemological/subjective changes it produced.

  • Postmodern theories recognized that human experience and institutions were often underwritten by “metanarratives”–supposedly universal beliefs/expectations/ideologies for how the world works. Postmodernism believed metanarratives were bullshit and harmful to human experience
  • Postmodern theories argued that the desire for universality and objectivity often ended up negating the lives and experiences of people who were not part of the dominant group (white/males). Objectivity wasn’t necessarily something to strive after.
  • Postmodern theories argued that the Platonic/modern/Enlightenment emphasis on Reason and logic repressed pathos and emotion. This was also bullshit and harmful to human experience, since emotion is a natural response that is often rejected by literate/modern/enlightenment philosophy etc

Maira Kalman and What Is/N’t the Kalman Project

Now, if you are smart, you have some sense of why we are reading Kalman in a class on video.

Kalman’s work is not necessarily postmodern. Kalman’s work is certainly not technological in our (or Douglas Adams’) everyday sense of the world. But I think it is electrate.

For the next six weeks, you have a terribly simple but horribly complicated assignment. You have to make me a Kalman that is not a Kalman. That’s it. That’s the assignment. To help with this assignment, I have a very bear bones prospectus for you to complete (by next Monday). There will (of course) be more parameters and expectations–and I will have you develop those on Friday. Eventually we will use my criteria and yours to create a rubric for the assignment. You will write me a final reflection paper (generally 3-5 pages) that explains how you respond to this challenge and evaluates your own work based on the rubric we collaboratively construct.

I want to watch something.

(Note: for those of you who like cheat codes, I have published on this project here and here).

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ENG 225 9.M: Work Logs, Paragraph Structure

Posted on October 16, 2023 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Work Logs
  • Let’s Talk Writing: Paragraph Structure

Work Logs

Starting this week, you’ll see a Work Log assignment in Canvas. These will be due on Friday.

A work log is a 3-4 sentence description of the labor you invested in your project that week. It details how many hours you spent, and what you did during that time. These do not need to be extensive, especially if I can see the work in your workspace. For instance, you might say “this week I spent and hour and a half writing an annotation and another 1/2 hour developing the survey questions.” Clear cut. I’ll pop in your workspace, take a look, (hopefully) leave some feedback. We’re done.

You might also write something like: “I also spend a half hour searching for more relevant articles on Google Scholar. I skimmed a few of the articles and decided to read one. Finally, I spent a half an hour writing up my methodology section. Cool, I’ll look for some writing in the workspace and check the methodology section. We’re done.

You might write something like: “I spent an hour editing sentences, using the Williams and Bizup stuff that we practiced in class. Then I spent an hour working on topic sentences.” Cool. Assuming you link to a Google Doc draft of your paper, I’ll pop in, check the version history, and provide some sentence-level feedback on your revision/editing process.

You might write something like: “I met with my partner/team and we had an hour-long conversation about [something]. I then spent an hour working on my analysis of [something].”

You might, for the next two weeks, write something like: “I spent two hours playing my game and wrote up some notes here.” Cool. Games take time to play and that is work. Some of you will be doing that for awhile. But I also want writing beyond note-taking. Starting in early November (two weeks from now), I’ll want a balance between playing/note-taking and paper drafting. Given our use of the social/science paper structure (more on that in a minute), you can write some parts of the paper even before you complete your analysis (lit review, methodology, drafting discussion material).

As you can see from these examples, I expect you to invest two hours a week into our writing projects outside of class. I use work logs here because everyone writes in different ways. I cannot rigidly demand that you do X amount of research or draft Y amount of pages. I can tell you that around November 7th I will ask you to have completed your primary research project (whether gameplay or visual analysis or focus groups or whatever) and that you’ll be expected to have a full draft of your paper the Monday before Thanksgiving. Rewarding the incremental progress you make via Work Logs should help keep you productively on track, however you chose to approach those goals.

Let’s Talk Writing: Paragraph Structure

I want to revisit a lecture from earlier in the course and discuss paragraph structure. Here’s what I presented in that previous class:

  • Does each paragraph open with a topic sentence that lays out the claim of that paragraph?
  • Does it transition into and contextualize evidence?
  • Does it supply evidence (quote, reason, anecdote, etc).
  • Does it summarize and then analyze evidence? [Note summarize and analyze are two different things!]
  • Does the closing sentence of the paragraph “end” the thought by referring the specific claim of the paragraph back to the overall argument of the paper?

And in that class I focused on how to incorporate evidence:

  • How well do you transition into a quote?
  • Do you know how to contextualize a quote [that is, briefly tell the reader where the quote falls in view of the original author’s argument].
  • After a quote, how deftly can you summarize the quote–putting it into your own words in a way that “opens” it up for the reader without sounding too repetitive. This is a skill, a real hard one.
  • AND then, how well do you add something to that quote/evidence that does something with it?

Today I want to focus on the first principle of a paragraph: its topic sentence. Academic writing calls for the topic sentence to be the first sentence more than just about any other genre. That’s because academic writing is structured argumentative writing: the purpose of an academic paper is to make a claim and support it with evidence. In this class I really emphasize the “scientific” structure of a social or hard science paper (introduction, lit review, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion) because I believe using such a “global” structure makes it easier on developing writers: every section of the paper has a clear goal and, as a reader, I have a clear expectation of how each section advances the argument.

Topic sentences are such an ingrained part of academic writing for the same reason: they make it easier on a reader to follow an argument. The first sentence of the paragraph makes clear how that paragraph furthers the argument. It makes clear what that paragraph offers.

I expect writers to struggle with topic sentences in early drafts, because (again) we often don’t know what we think when we are writing our first draft. Thought is emergent. It happens as we write. So I don’t introduce topic sentences today with the hopes that you will be able to write them as you draft your paper. Rather, I want you to incorporate today’s lesson into your revision process–so that you give a paper a read and identify what every paragraph is, could, or should be doing. This might lead you to recognize that a paragraph has more than one claim/purpose and think about how to revise it. Or you might realize that you have a paragraph that’s a series of claims with no evidence. This is pretty standard in drafts! We start writing, and a bunch of ideas come out. And that is awesome! It is also a mess that we have to fix! Praise be to shitty first drafts.

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ENG 229 7.M: Sharing Proposal Ideas

Posted on October 2, 2023 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Think and Freewrite
  • Share
  • Share Again

Proposal Project

On Friday I introduced the Proposal Project and shared a link to the template. We’ll spend today’s class working on ideas for the proposal. I’ve got a short proposal pre-writing assignment for you to submit to Canvas before Wednesday’s class. We’ll be in the computer lab on Wednesday–my hope is to have targeted writing goals for each group and team based on the pre-writing activity. Ethical question folks: I will give you time to work on a heuristic for analyzing games on Wednesday. Representation folks: I am hoping to help you think about methodology for collecting objects to analyze Wednesday.

Think / Share / Share Again

  • Think and Free Write [5 minutes]: I’ll ask you to free write for ten minutes. Please identify: What you want to analyze (one game, a few games, game covers, user reviews) and–if possible–what you want to focus on
  • Share: [15 minutes]: Get into groups of 3-5 (Ethical folks will need to form at least 2 groups). Quickly share your ideas. Make sure everyone has a chance to speak.
  • Share Again: [25 minutes]: I’ll ask you to share your idea with the whole class. My reason for doing this is to see if we can locate potential partnerships, ways to combine efforts in data collection or even analysis. Everyone will write their own papers, but I think projects really benefit from pooling labor.

Homework

Two things:

  • Complete the Pre-Writing “Quiz” in Canvas (two questions)
  • I’ll have extended office hours tomorrow (Tuesday) from 12:00 until 1:00 and then again from 2:00 until 3:30
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ENG 301 6.F: Social Media Crash Course

Posted on September 29, 2023 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Reading Response Update
  • Elements of a Social Media
  • Concise Writing
  • Social Media Contest

Elements of Social Media Management

Tweet composition exercise:
We’ve been hired by Composition Studies to craft a tweet celebrating the 40 year anniversary of Jim Corder’s “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love.” Our tweet:

  • has to include the name of the journal
  • has to include a mention of Jim Corder (@jimmycorder)
  • has a twist
  • Since it is a tweet, we have 280 total characters with which to work

Here’s a place to post your tweet!

UNCO English and Halloween

I’m saving the last 20 minutes of class to discuss this project.

NOTE: Make sure you are designing a contest that you would actually participate in! Because, um, y’all will (and so will all your classmates). Here is a link to the Google Drive folder for media assets.

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