Today’s Plan:
- Calendar
- Miller Follow Up
- Setting Up Our Collaborative Research Project
- Practice Coding
Calendar
All me to map out our coming weeks.
Friday, Jan 15: I will share particulars for the first writing project. We will work on coding more jobs in class. Homework: Code your jobs by Wednesday, January 23rd.
Wednesday, Jan 23rd: We will develop more precise expectations for the first major project. What is a Gantt chart? Homework: Begin drafting project.
Friday, January 25th: We will discuss the Herrick reading and consider “what is rhetoric?” Homework: continue drafting project one (peer review Wednesday).
Monday, January 28th: Williams and Bizup on active voice. Homework: Complete Project One draft
Wednesday, January 30th: Peer review project one. Homework: revise project one. Read Katz, “The Ethic of Expediency.”
Friday, February 1st: Discuss Katz. Homework: Due Saturday at 11:59pm, Project One.
Monday, February 4th: Williams and Bizup on characters.
Miller Follow Up
I quickly went through the Miller responses today. I awarded everyone who completed the assignment 5 points, but I must admit that I found many of the responses underwhelming. There was much “drive-by quotage.” Responses felt rushed. Please make sure you are investing at least 15-20 minutes into your write ups. Use direct quotations–but make sure your explication is longer than the quote. Make sure you transition into quotations and provide some context.
I read this response:
Miller’s article “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing” goes over why she feels that rhetoric and opinionated writing has no place in the technical writing profession. She mentions positivism and how a subject that cannot come to a clean and tidy “truth” than it is of lesser value to the technical writing world. Lots of writing styles use positivism and wish to see an easy explanation for the question. She feels that rhetorical writing has no place in technical writing due to this concept of positivism.
So, I’m not here to embarrass anyone, but this is obviously wrong. Here is my response:
So, after Monday, I hope you see that you’ve misread the text. Miller actually *does* believe that all writing is rhetorical–that the meaning it creates is caught up in the interpretive act of a reader/audience. And information cannot simply “be presented,” facts do not speak for themselves. If we are to translate scientific fact into public action, then we–as professional writers and technical communicators–must be persuasive, rhetorical. By this, I mean that we must think of what different audiences already believe [ethos], what their emotional attitudes toward a subject are [pathos], in addition to whether they will understand the process and findings of scientific study [logos]. This, to me, is what Miller means when she writes that “Science understood as argument asks for assent, for an act of will on the part of the audience. Good technical writing becomes, rather than the revelation of absolute reality, a persuasive version of experience” (p. 616). Miller goes onto to define her approach to “persuasion” in communal terms when she describes writing as a kind of enculturation, that any act of persuasion involves–consciously or unconsciously–an interface, exchange, conflict(?)–of the writer and audience’s “concept, values, traditions”(p.617) their preconceptions, beliefs, expectations, self-perceptions, prejudices, motivations, desires, repressions, fears.
I wrote on another post: “Nice effort here. And I like your last sentence in the first paragraph–there’s a difference between approaching intellectual work as describing an [objective] reality and as inventing and attempting to persuade someone to accept and share a possible [subjective] understanding of that reality.”
But let’s think about that second question that I asked you: about whether words have one meaning. If I am a poststructuralist and a rhetorician, and firmly believe that the meaning of signification is a complex, unpredictable act that occurs in the minds of readers and listeners (what I will refer to as audiences), then how can I so assuredly condemn anyone opinion as “wrong”?
Dr. Stanley Sultan anecdote.
Someone else wrote that they are batshit confused. I responded:
It is ok to be confused! This isn’t easy material, and I imagine that–as a second semester freshman–this might be your first “major” course.
The ideas we are dealing with here are advanced. At this point it is enough for me if you understand that there’s two approaches to truth: one that absolute Truth exists out in the world, or beyond the world, and we use science to discover these absolute truths. The other is that truth is something we cobble together, and we can never know anything with certainty, only with greater or lesser degrees of confidence or doubt.How you frame truth generally impact how you communicate with other people. If you believe that you have certainty, then you tend to speak to them. Order them. Deliver your truth. If you are more hesitant, then you tend to work with them. Encourage them. Offer a suggestion.
Setting Up Our Collaborative Research Document
Here is a link to the document. You will populate this document with your ten sample jobs.
- Jobs should be included alphabetically. To include a new job, right-click and add a new row above/below as necessary. Do NOT include multiple copies of the same job.
- If another person includes a job you are coding, then you should go in and check their codes. IF you find a code that they didn’t, change the color of that code in the Google Sheet to yellow. If you disagree with a code they made, change the color of that code to red.
- Create a link to the job advertisement. Make sure that the link is set to “Anyone with the link can edit.”
- Identify the Job Category. I want to use a modified version of the categories. Examine, in the top of the job ad, the Function and Specialties. Then choose one of the following:
- Social Media or Web Specialist
- Editor
- Designer
- Writer
- Sales or Marketing
- Coding Process:
- We have a two part coding process. First, go through the job advertisement and insert any codes as a comment.
- Second, input all codes for an advertisement in the Google Spreadsheet
- Note on working in Google Sheets: double-click on a box to update codes
Homework
Begin coding your jobs in the Spreadsheet. Here is a link to the coding scheme. All jobs need to be coded by Wednesday, January 23rd.
On Friday, I want you to have one question for the class as to how to code a line in a specific job ad. You won’t tell us how to code it, you will ask us how we would code it. Just be ready to tell me what job and what line we should all examine. (It is ok to have more than one).
