Today’s Plan:
- Week 3 Write Ups
- Discuss Week 2 Write Ups and Week 3 Readings
- In-class writing exercise: Let’s Play Tom
- Share Journal Analysis Ideas
- For Next Session
A Quick Review of Last Weeks Write Ups
I’ve returned last week’s write ups with comments, so let me know if you can’t find yours. I wanted to highlight/revisit a few points.
Rhetorically reaching out to an audience
I commented on a few papers (Cole, Erika, and Emily’s for sure) about how a goal of rhetorical theory–particular rhetorical theory in the public sector, advocacy for nonprofits–has to conceptualize information not as something to be delivered, but something that has to be received, understood. We need to care if other people hear us. We need to do whatever work we can to help them become willing to hear us.
As someone invested in postmodern ethics, I try to treat everyone as, in Levinas’ terms, “absolutely other,” resisting the urge to categorize them, “know” them, identify with them. Instead, the goal is to open a space in which they can feel comfortable being themselves. They might then call to me, to identify—but the act of identification should come from the other.
When we write—there’s a difference between reaching out to grasp and reaching out to welcome.
Resisting the Temptation to kNOw Too Much
Jacob wrote this about the Fadde and Sullivan case study: The case study leaves plenty of room open for the opportunity for making rhetorical moves that could illuminate understanding between the Bangalore and North Carolina teams. Reducing and clarifying lines of communication and so forth. But this like the patient-therapist relationship assumes an alliance of goals in so far as bringing the conceptual engineering to life.
Amy wrote: Knowing one’s audience can prove to be fruitful in any situation.
I liked Jacob’s callback to Corder, and the warning that we should not be too confident in our “diagnosing” of the cross-cultural situation. Chances are, we do know a lot about how other people think and feel, and there are times where we might even know more about what is impacting their thought than they do. But getting the most fruit out of knowing one’s audience requires some hesitancy, some sophistication (if for no other reason than people would find such knowledge incredibly arrogant–but there’s better, more ethical reasons). We should resist the temptation to think we are the doctors (even when we have PhDs and *are* the doctors) who can fix others. We’re more experts (hopefully) at developing conditions in which we can work together to fix our collective problems, aware of how our various selves might interrupt that work.
Finally, while responding to another paper, I took a shot at defining the humanities:
The Humanities (originally Philosophy, Rhetoric, Grammar, and slightly later Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music, later still including History and Poetry, now including Women and Gender Studies, Multicultural Studies, and others that I probably can’t think of right now) teach us how to deal with the struggles of being—being mortal, being frail, being scared, being uncertain. Humans aren’t good at facing those things on their own. They need professionals who can help them explore life’s most difficult and trying questions, to deal with the affect/discomfort/disequilibrium those questions engender. Tech Writing can do those things, but we need to be precise and explicit that the value of the Humanities lies in those essential dimension. Clear communication is just a nice byproduct.
My wife joked “that’s what therapists are for.”
Week 3 Reading Notes / Materials
Before we start discussing the readings, I whipped up a quick (if somewhat confusing) survey.
We might play around with this.
Let’s Play Tom
Consider this a quickfire challenge, inspired by what Lauer and Brumberger call “sprint assignments.”
Tom’s job:
For instance, Tom, the social media strategist, often posted visual and verbal content that was sent to him by others in the company and by the PR firm with which the company contracted. On one of the days we observed, a company rep sent Tom a photo and description of a trade show she was attending; Tom’s job was to edit the photo (crop it and clean it up) and adapt the descriptive text so that the tone, length, and style were suitable for posting it to the multiple social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) the company used to communicate with its customers. In one instance, the rep realized after the fact that she had forgotten to include a hashtag for the tweet; to address the oversight, Tom had to delete the tweet and rework it with fewer characters, so that he had room to include the hashtag. Tom posted about the trade show to several of the company’s social media and web channels; for each platform, he edited the post to emphasize different elements that would better fit audience expectations, style, and length limitations of the various platforms. Tom told us that he often gets press releases overnight and will then extract tweets, blog content, and other social media text from them. He usually pulls between four and five excerpts out of a white paper or press release, as well as an infographic or other visuals, which he then adapts to meet the needs of the intended audience and purpose, as well as to maximize the exposure and reach of that content for the company.
Take a break for ten minutes.
Then spend 30 minutes turning 1 of the articles we read for today’s class into 2 different tweets and one an Instagram post (if you don’t have a Canva account, then you can design your Instagram post in PowerPoint or Google Slides or whatever. Just put some text on an image). Pretend that we are the social media writers for an online education service. The audience for these tweets should be Professional Writing educators. We are attempting to get them to click on the article/link (drive that traffic!).
Your tweet to the article should include at least two suitable hashtags and a link to the article (pro-tip: you can Google a URL and use tiny URL to shorten it).
Share Journal Analysis Ideas
I’ve posted the text from last week below in case we need it.
For today, you should have read one article and generated a list of 10 other related articles that you could potentially read. I didn’t have anyone pop into office hours last Friday, nor did I get any panicked emails, so I am guessing that everyone completed this assignment without issue. I’ve published a turn-in on Canvas.
I want to spend a few minutes talking about people’s topics.
Professional Writing Review Essay
Our first month’s foray into Professional Writing scholarship will culminate with an analytical / bibliographic review essay. You will select a keyword/topic and trace how that topic has appeared across a range of journals over the past 4 years (so 2018-2021). I am hoping your keyword/idea is narrow enough to focus on 6-8 interrelated articles.
My expectation is that many of you are new to PWTC as an academic discipline, and likely have limited familiarity with the range of scholarship and research published. This project is meant to both give you a sense of that range and help you develop some expertise that might help you either in our community engagement project or in your own scholarly/professional trajectory.
Here’s the list of the journals with which we will work:
- Technical Communication Quarterly
- Journal of Business and Technical Communication
- Business and Professional Communication Quarterly (formerly Business Communication Quarterly)
- Technical Communication
- Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
- Written Communication
- IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
Your essay will work to create an ontology that helps organize and synthesize contemporary work.
So, what is a scholarly review essay? It is a kind of review essay–similar to a book review–that synthesizes several recent/important perspectives on an emerging disciplinary trend. Essentially, they offer scholars to stay abreast of developments in related fields without having to read dozens of articles. Generally a review essay is organized by topic not by source, and is the 2500-3500 word range (so slightly less than 1/2 of an academic article).
- Let’s look at the review section of Kairos
- ToC for an issue of Journal of Advanced Composition
- Taylor & Francis Author Services
Think of a review essay as a micro-lit review, except for folks who aren’t necessarily experts in the topic.
For next week: I’d like you to look through the journals above and identify an article you want to read. Ideally, this will be an article written in the last calendar year. Skim the article, taking note of the studies that lie central to its methods and argument. Then use that article–especially its keywords and bibliography–to compile a list of 10 other articles on the subject (book chapters in edited collections are also acceptable; given our time constraints, I would push you away from whole books). Don’t worry–you won’t necessarily read all ten, but I’d like you to have 10 on the list.
Final Due Date for this review essay: February 5th (I will respond to them on the morning of the 6th).
For Next Session
My plan for next week’s class:
- Write Up #4
- Talking about Review Essays (Organize Ideas)
- Introducing Our Partners
- In class: Weber and Spartz exercise (getting to know one of our nonprofits)
Next week I want to introduce you more to our potential service learning partners and projects. In preparation for that, I’d like you to read the following articles:
- Nelson, 2021, Developing Evaluable Principles for Community-University Partnerships
- Rentz and Mattingly, 2005, Selling Peace in a Time of War
For your Write Ups, I’d like you to focus on what you are reading for your review essays rather than on the weekly reading. Share with us what you are reading. Please read 3 articles from your list of 10 for next week. We’ll handle the weekly reading via class discussion.
