Today’s Plan:
- Welcome Emails
- Coding Jobs
- Adding Codes to Google Docs
- Adding Codes to our Collective Spreadsheet
- Homework
- Codes, codes, codes
- Read Miller
Welcome Emails
For those interested in video games, I recommend two related sites:
Asked: My question to the professor is, will we learn how to keep notes or writing for jobs short and concise?
Answered:In the past I haven’t directly addressed note-taking, but I do work quite a bit on concision. A lot of professional writing is learning how to negotiate low word counts. Your draft might be 2000 words, but the grant application has a maximum of 750. We’ll approach this through an attention to sentence syntax and active voice.
Asked: One question I have about this class is will we learn about writing manuals this semester?
Answered: No. UNC has a Technical Writing class (ENG 227) that focuses on “documentation,” the professional term for writing manuals (which also involves procedures for usability testing). I’ll check into whether that course will be offered in the spring.
Asked: One question I have for the professor is how are other classes that we have been taught through the English department going to be used in this course and what stigmas about writing careers are we going to find are false?
Asked: What, in your opinion, is the most challenging aspect of your class?
Answered: Hmm. This is a really tricky one. I think the biggest difference between professional writing and academic writing is the implicit contract you have with a reader. In academic writing, the implicit contract carries an expectation that I, the reader, will diligently read the entire thing you have written. Therefore, your argument can unfold almost like a story. I should say that, even before I started teaching professional writing, I really loathe this kind of writing. Just tell me everything important about your article in the first 500 words. Don’t bury a gem on page 12. No one has time for that bullshit.
In the professional world, absolutely no one has time for that nonsense. The abstract or introduction of a piece HAS to say every important finding. Why? Because we know that most readers will only scan the abstract and the intro. YOU HAVE TO FRONT LOAD EVERYTHING. Also, section headings. Short paragraphs. You have to work to make this thing scannable. Repetition is much more common. These are things we will talk about next week when you turn your job ad analysis research (below) into a report. But, yeah, I’ll end up crushing most of you for generic bullshit “Scooby Doo” intros. I still love you. (*makes crushing motion with hands*)
(Writing is/as epistemic experience vs writing that communicates concisely and rhetorically)
Asked: What are your feelings/expectations for how the state of things lately with the pandemic will affect writing as a job long term?
Oh, man. So, writing is in a better place than a lot of jobs, since you can do it remotely. And more is happening remotely. If I have a concern, it is that many writing jobs won’t ever return to face-to-face offices (which would be bad, because I think it would lead to fewer total jobs via consolidation).
Asked: If we do happen to go fully online, as I semi-expect that we will, will that change the course in any way? I understand that is a tough question to answer as it is hard to predict. AND: My only question about this class is about our plans for the semester should UNC switch to fully online classes: will this class still have an actual meeting time (through Zoom meetings or other synchronous video software), or would the class be fully asynchronous?
So, last semester we went online and worked via Discord (which I greatly prefer to Zoom / Teams). I think we’ll have to handle that when the time comes. The good news is that most professional writers are working remotely right now anyways, and that a writing class can make that transition fairly easily.
The decision regarding whether to go synchronous or asynchronous is one I am willing to have with you. My sense is that we would likely divide into three groups: social media, visual design-marketing, and grant writing, and those three groups would have synchronous meeting times. Those would likely be voice chats via Discord, but could be virtual via Zoom. Here’s what I will say: I won’t make this decision unilaterally. You will have a voice in it, even if, in the end, I make the final call.
Asked: I would like to know what is the most valuable thing that you hope we learn from you this semester Professor Santos, but also what do you prefer that we call you?
Hmm. I guess the most valuable thing you can learn this semester is that there’s a lot of different jobs out there that involve writing; to maximize your options after graduation you should be actively preparing to pursue one of those jobs. Internships, extra-curricular experience, volunteering for non-profit organizations. Don’t believe your degree alone will get you a job. Rather, see the degree as one (important) piece of a larger overall strategy.
There’s another thing I hope you learn about how language works on people and how people *should* relate to language (and each other, and otherness in general), but that will leak out later. Maybe. The “one day a week thing” might impede the more theoretical/rhetorical dimensions of the class.
My question for Dr. Santos is why did you feel that having a professional writing course was integral for UNCO?
So, I teach courses on rhetorical theory and ethics at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Those courses focus on how “ethics” can mean recognizing one’s obligations, responsibilities, relations to networks/others. There’s a lot of complex phenomenology that goes into the proof of that claim. Basically, libertarianism is a bullshit selfish fantasy that ignores the very fabric of our social reality. (don’t @ me today, I don’t have time)
So, as an ethical being, I think we (college faculty) have an obligation to students. We have to consider where you are and where you are going; we have a responsibility to do everything we can to ensure you leave here ready to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. We can’t off-load that responsibility to you or a “career services” office. We can’t repress that responsibility in the name of an intellectual purity.
Brumberger and Lauer
I don’t really have time to talk about this today.
Compiling Research for Project One
Your task outside of class this week is to code 20 jobs in total, and then to collate that data into a spreadsheet. This is a two step process.
As a reminder, here is a link to the coding scheme.
First, you will code your job ads. Last week you generated a list of 10 ads–I will ask that you code those ads, and then identify and code 10 more for a total of 20 jobs. You will use the Insert > Comment feature to ad those codes to the job ad directly (as I did in our previous class and in today’s class). Here is the link to the collection of job ads. You should be able to put comments in any of those documents.
Second, after you have input codes inside the Google Doc, you need to add a link to the Google Doc and the inputted codes to our collective spreadsheet. Allow me to demonstrate.
What do you do if you code an ad that someone else has coded and either a) have a new code they did not or b) did not have a code they include? You select the entire line of the spreadsheet for that job and you change the text color to orange. Let me demonstrate. In this case you would include your initials in the Reviewer column.
This week we are producing the data that we will use in next week’s report.
Homework
If you did not submit your list of 10 jobs to Canvas, you should do so for partial credit.
For next week’s class, you need to develop your own “personal code sheet” and then add those codes to our “collective spreadsheet.” You should code 20 jobs in total. When. you submit your codes to the collective spreadsheet, include your first, middle, and last initial in the submitter column.
Read and post: Carolyn Miller’s “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.”
In your discussion post, address one of these questions (copy/paste it so I know which one you are discussing):
- What is positivism? Why is it a problem for rhetoric and technical writing? What does Miller identify as the most problematic dimension of a non-rhetorical approach to scientific communication?
- Miller identifies 4 problems for technical writing pedagogy that stem from the positivist tradition. How do we avoid them?
- How does Miller–writing in 1979–describe the epistemology that is replacing positivism? What is knowledge/learning in the process of becoming?
- What does it mean to teach technical writing from a “communalist perspective?” Why might some students reject a communalist approach to teaching writing?
