Today’s Plan:
- Quick Exercise: What is Professional Writing? What is Technical Writing? What kinds of genres/activities are germane to each? How do we distinguish the two?
- Reading Review: Brumberger and Lauer
- Reading Review: A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing
- Proposal Report
- Job Coding
Brumberger and Lauer responses
Holly writes (and this trips on a number of your posts):
I was intrigued by statements made on page 238 and 239 where the authors explore the idea of technical communication undergoing a transition from document-based production to one which is content-based. The researchers state that they cannot say that technical communication has undergone “a sea change” from one medium to another, rather that there is a statistical trajectory which expresses a trend of content-based production in newer jobs.
I think the job ad analysis shows that, while there’s a bunch of jobs out there that are still basically textual, there’s also a lot of jobs out there that involve multimodal composing. I do think the site that I am using for this project–mediabistro–definitely leans toward the multimodal side.
Taylor and Jason both addressed salaries. Salary can be tricky. It is not unheard of for a company to ask you your salary expectations during an interview. It is useful to know what a median range would look like in those situations. Never go into a job interview without knowing what you should be paid.
Molly wrote:
I definitely started to feel wary about what I have been paying to study at this college as opposed to what the job market I am interested in requires. Brumberger and Lauer touched briefly on how the education system is failing prospective technical writers in their conclusion, but I wish they had included specific examples of this failure throughout their article and touched on more solutions. While I was quite aware that all these literature classes my English major requires were of little use to me, it would have been nice to be presented with some other viable options.
Ouch. I don’t think an English degree is useless. Here’s what I’ll say–a degree in English is quite marketable. But it is on you to know how to market it. Learn to write understandable yet engaging prose and people will notice. My hope in designing this course (and my course in Document Design and Digital Video) is to try and supplement the traditional literature major. But even if you don’t take another professional writing course, recognize that a degree in literature has both attuned you to read and think carefully. Those are valuable skills in an age of skimming, as Maryanne Wolf argues in The Guardian:
Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries because they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in college, or in wills, contracts and the deliberately confusing public referendum questions citizens encounter in the voting booth.
Multiple studies show that digital screen use may be causing a variety of troubling downstream effects on reading comprehension in older high school and college students. In Stavanger, Norway, psychologist Anne Mangen and her colleagues studied how high school students comprehend the same material in different mediums. Mangen’s group asked subjects questions about a short story whose plot had universal student appeal (a lust-filled, love story); half of the students read Jenny, Mon Amour on a Kindle, the other half in paperback. Results indicated that students who read on print were superior in their comprehension to screen-reading peers, particularly in their ability to sequence detail and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.
Reading well is quickly becoming a valuable skill in and off itself.
Carolyn Miller’s “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing”
Erika writes:
What Miller is trying to say as a whole is whether one is going into a technical writing field or not, it is vital that we think of it from a humanities perspective. She requires the reader to think of the subject as a means of better communication between people, as opposed to just a certain way and tone of writing.
This captures a lot of the feedback I was putting into Canvas–that ultimately, in a democracy, the exercise and communication of science is dependent on persuasive writing. People aren’t machines. They aren’t Vulcans. We can–like Plato–condemn people for their lack of pure rationality and wish for an intellectually oligarchy in which the inferior know their place and listen to their superiors. Or we can–and I think this is the better option–recognize that communicating information requires we do so in a way that is engaging and persuasive. That leaves open the possibility of response and debate (rather than closing such things off via a tone of imperative authority).
Philosopher Bruno Latour would argue that the “Earth is round” is a fact. A fact is knowledge gained via empirical experiment or measurement. A fact can be proven right or wrong.
Truth is a bit more slippery. Truth is something we know without empirical evidence, something that cannot be measured or verified. Take, for instance, Plato’s assertion that the material world is the physical instantiation of an Ideal realm. Or the Catholic belief that sinners descend to hell after death. Truths (in this precise sense) transcend our ability to verify them–they often require (from a skeptics perspective) a leap of faith.
Report / Proposal
The first major assignment this semester is a combination report/proposal. You will compose a report based on your analysis of 20 job ads (to review: the 10 that I distributed last class plus 10 of your choice). I do not have a set length for the proposal; we will generate an exact list of section requirements on Thursday using the ABO handbook.
I give you liberty in your choice of ads, though I would suggest not choosing more than 5 of one kind and not more than 3 different kinds of ads (so that you can strike a balance between depth and breadth). You will code these ads using the scheme we use in class. You will then collate your data into meaningful tables (using the Brumberger and Lauer information as a model).
If possible, I will encourage you to “team up” and work collaboratively (on both crafting the report/proposal and learning a skill). Having a partner can both help keep you accountable and provide a soundboard for difficulties, frustrations, and victories.
For the proposal portion of the report, you will identify a job skill that you would like to develop. You will research methods for gaining said skill and layout a 3 week course of study (how many hours per week will you dedicate to the activity, how can you document those hours spent, what tutorials/readings will you do, etc). This portion should include a calendar along with deliverables.
Job Coding
Back to work. Here’s our coding scheme.
Homework
Code five jobs for Thursday’s class. Input your codings into the class Google Doc.
