Arrival view of Oahu -- Diamondhead and a bit of Waikiki.

English 424: Technical Writing

Welcome to English 424: Technical Writing. This website is a wiki, like Wikipedia, which allows us to create webpages and work online pretty easily. We'll spend a good bit of time getting started setting things up right away. We'll be doing a great deal of work in the wiki, but we'll also be using Microsoft Word for a lot of your work as well. We'll be discussing file formats, file naming and tracking, and a bunch more. Again, welcome to the course.

Week of 11/26 :: Finish Airbag Case, CGA Cont'd, Portfolios

Tues 11/27 :: Airbag Final Stuff, Begin Portfolios, CGA ::

Final Words on Airbag Case
Portfolios :: Showing your Learning
CGA ::
- Going over the "funnel" structure again
- Characterizing the parts
- What do you have to offer?

Homework: Create Portfolio Home Page and a Page for each project, brainstorm theme ideas

Homework: Collaboratively build list of tech comm terms to use in CGA, with bullets of connections

Thurs 11/29 :: IM Review, CGA, Portfolios ::

Reviewing the IM
Workshopping CGA Chunks (Homework)

Week of 11/12: Drafting CGAs, Airbag Case

11/13: Thinking more about Researching 'Writing'

Discussing Prior, Driskill, others--Patterns in Practice mean Patterns in Conception
Discussing more possible ideas, and proposals
Discussed Do Artifacts have Politics, Politics in relation to writing systems,
Writing the Report: Have to move back and forth between parts, more heuristics for possible research claims

11/15: Crash Test Dummies Example-The Airbag Case

Building on what we discussed last class, we'll start a quick case that shows genre and purpose as constantly changing
Discussing more possible ideas, and proposals

Week of 10/29: Finishing CRS (for now), Proposing CGAs

10/30: Doing Writing Research: What 'Happens'--How Does it 'Work'?

Discussing White Sands--Patterns in Practice mean Patterns in Conception
Discussing Possible Contexts--what makes for good projects?

Homework:

List of Advice for Someone coming in to your Context
Choose 2 pieces of Advice from the List and Explain: Why is it needed? What assumptions make it needed--about how this kind of job/class/place works, writing works, different sorts of people work? --about bosses and underlings and power relationships? --about the typical ways documents work? --about specifics regarding this particular context, the people, the responsibility structure, the roles, the ways documents work (or don't), etc. As we explained in class, this is a heuristic exercise.
Read "Understanding Failures in Organizational Discourse", Herndl, Fennell, Miller, in eReserves, and write a journal entry.

11/1: Thinking more about Researching 'Writing'

Discussing Prior, Driskill, others--Patterns in Practice mean Patterns in Conception
Discussing more possible ideas, and proposals

Week of 10/22: CRS, Digging into 'splainin' Readin' between the Lines

10/23: Sharing Analysis Chunks: Coming up with a Structure?

Sharing Drafts to Pull Section Names and Construct Areas
- Flavor & Meaning in Relationship
- How to Integrate New Stuff
- Thinking about Publicly Performing, Sharing, Explaining
- What the heck is Rhetoric, Anyway?
  - Situation, Context, Audience, Purpose, Argument, Claim, Support, Warrant, Invention, Practical, Discourse Community, Ethos, Logos, Pathos, Ethics, (let's add more)
Starting on Proposals

10/25: Discussion of Proposals: Linking CRS to CGA

Week of 10/15: CRS, Readin', Readin' between the Lines, 'splainin' Readin' between the Lines

10/16: Discussion of E-Mail NYTimes article, Regli, and their Relationship to CRS

10/18: Continue Discussions from Tues, CRS Strategies, Beginning Analysis : Politeness vs Authority

10/9: CRS Dev--Explaining Dialect Features & Relationships, "Plotting" Dialogs, and digging deeper on Miller's "What's Practical": For today people should have 2-3 "plots" or strategies for their dialogs, and first drafts of the sections explaining/introducing your dialog partner and the personal discourse community you share.

10/11: NO CLASS (I'm away at a conference), so work needs done through the wiki. CRS Dev--Drafting Dialogs, Levels of Analysis, Intros:

To do ::

Bef. 5 Friday:

Have 2-3 possible dialogs "plotted" (could start talking about X, transition to Y, shift to Z, over to F)
Choose one and complete Draft 1 of Dialog, Draft 1 of Intro to Speakers, Mode of Speech, Relationship (Create this inside the wiki)

Bef. 5 Monday:

Read Regli, Technical Writer's Expertise in Inventio'', and write up journal entry.
Partner up with a classmate, or into groups of three, and read a classmate's Intro and Dialog, and offer feedback on what you understand, what you don't, if you're "getting" the particular, unusual ways communication works, and finally, discuss how the dialog plot or development seems to you--offer help or suggestions about how it gets into, links to, connects to, discusses, rhetoric.
"E-mail is Easy to Write (and Misread)" NYTimes Article, while about e-mail, shows how "rich" in signals F2F communication is. Relevant both to our CRS project, but also to all of our tech writing and communication work. It's a very short read--so Reading Journal posts can be simple--but do share a connection. Link to NYTimes Online, but I'll also add a pdf of the article in our handouts folder.

10/4: CRS Dev--Dialect Features and Purposes, Discuss Miller "What's Practical": For Tues people had snippets of dialog, and we'll share bits and discuss how aspects of the conversations actually function. Should be fun. Then we'll talk about how to present this stuff, Miller, and more connections.

10/2: CRS Dev--Learning by Comparing & Connecting: McCloud, Faigley: We got more detailed in examing how McCloud worked as much as what he was saying, and linked that and the CRS in the "communication chain" just as Faigley was pointing out. IM Portfolios due Thursday unless people need extensions (email me so I have it in writing), and for Thursday beginnings of CRS Intro--isolating dialect features and purposes.

9/27: Discuss Killingsworth, Begin Creative Rhetoric Scenario: We began going over key terms from the reading and a couple of connections classmates drew, shifted to the general problem of how, in doing effective rhetorical design, one has to "draft" inside the "context of production," but must test and refine for the "context of use." We went over the IM and PDM once more--completed portfolio due Thurs--and introduced the CRS project. The CRS homework is to come to class with a snippet of made up dialog between you and a close friend, in dialect, for discussion. Reading homework (create a Reading Journal page) is to re-read and comment on McCloud and to read the Intro to Prof Writing & Rhetoric, and the Faigley article. We wound up class quickly reading an excerpt from McCloud's Understanding Comics and beginning to see how many connections we can make between the reading, the CRS, and other class topics.

9/25: Feedback, Format that Functions, and Documenting "Process" -- Applied Learning: We'll be going over the feedback process, posting, etc., working with MSWord styles, and most importantly really digging into the PDM (Process Documentation Memo). Homework: Revising IMs, PDMs (be ready to share PDMs again in class), Read Information in Action (eRes) up to p.20, share story in wiki contrasting context of production and context of use from your experience. This is going to be our typical practice for the course readings--what you read doesn't "stick" unless (just like our writing practices so far) you build connections. To do that you need, in particular, to 1) catch key terms, and 2) connect/apply those terms to examples from your own experience. We'll be discussing this more in class (and set up the Reading Journal page for each of you in the wiki).

Welcome to English 424, fall 2007.

This website is a wiki, like Wikipedia, which means pages are easy to create and save, and we'll be using it to do a lot of writing through the term. We'll begin with everyone creating their own "home page" inside the wiki, and setting up space to draft, critique each other's work, comment on readings and carry on discussion, and set up final portfolios for each project and for the course.

Wikis, like the website Wikipedia that you are probably familiar with, are easy-to-edit, collaborative websites. We will be using this one as an experiment in gathering and keeping class writing activities, notes, group work, etc., in digital and online form. While the wiki work can't replace pen-and-paper notes because of the ability to draw and mark more free-form, it should make other sorts of groupwork and freewriting easier to share and more productive.

As everyone will be writing multiple pages and also working in groups, we will need to have home pages where you will have links to all the pages you create. I've set up an initial list here, but you will all need to create your own home pages, and then you will add links from them to the work you will do during the semester.

9/18 ::

Conversation and Argument Analysis
Applying same analytic to draft chunks
Discussing purposes, hidden info, situation, ethos, and more

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This is an F6F Hellcat crash-landing on a carrier in WWII.

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English 424: Technical Writing