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RebeccaH /
ReadingJournal9.27.07 Killingsworth Is Killing Me I relate the information in this chapter to the Britney Spears article scenario I previously wrote about. The entire rhetorical situation was the writer writing what I deem as common knowledge trying to pass as "news" and the readers response to the article. In this scenario the context of production failed because a) the story was out of date b)the audience's prior knowledge went unconsidered c) the writer failed to make them self credible. Therefore, the context of use was unsuccessful because most college students have some idea that Britney is a real piece of work these days, most of them saw the VMA's so someone's prediction on what would happened after it already happen is just a waste of time to read, and there was nothing to gain by reading the article because there was no new information being presented. This is me making a rhetorical analysis. For all these reasons, the purpose of the article was not recognizable and the tone was condescending by default. 9.28.07 Understanding Comics The McCloud reading was highly relevant for me. It showed how the rhetorical situation isn't as simple as the diagram in the Killingsworth reading because writing isn't just a writer producing work and a reader taking it for face value. A reader may challenge or question what they are reading or understand it in a completely different way. As McCloud attempted to define what a comic is his definition underwent many revisions as the audience saw faults in it and suggested ways to make it more meaningful. Most technical writers I imagine would love such instant feedback as to whether or not their writing was serving the intended purpose. Another point McCloud made, which I found really interested, although I cannot make a clear connection to techical writing, is when he wrote that it is often hard for the reader to separate the message from the messenger. 9.29.07 Faigley Social Perspective The idea of textual perspective in this section reminded me a lot of the discussion of genre in class specifically when we were talking about music. To me it seemed like textual perspective functions similarly was the categorizing of music. So for instance, punk music is suppose to be angsty and blues is suppose to be sad and the lyrics and music usually adhere to this and if they don't then there seems to be something off about fitting a song into a genre. In the same way, a research report or a memo is suppose to contain certain guidelines and have certain content and if it doesn't then the document doesn't fit neatly into a genre of writing. The concept of social perspective also seemed highly relative to genre because it doesn't just look at an individual document, but rather links a document to a chain of other documents or ideas within the subject area. This idea also looks at how writers and readers expect certain things out of certain types of documents and if those expectations aren't meant then there can be confusion. The idea of individual perspective seemed relative to the idea of context of production discussed in Killingsworth because it looked at how the writer makes choices when creating a document. These choices including identifying a purpose and audience for the document. The ideas of speech and discourse communities reiterated the importance of knowing your audience. When I read these sections I thought of the example used in class of humor, and how it can be misinterpreted if delivered to the wrong audience. 10/3/07 What's Practical About Technical Writing Carolyn Miller I found this reading very interesting and personally problematic. For me, the main debate in the essay was whether technical writing is an artful and sophisticated form of writing (high) or simply a means to get something done in a workplace (low). I, as a future technical writer who has written academically, would like to believe it to be both, which seems to be what Miller is arguing. While technical editing should be practical and efficient, there are still elements of writing and rhetoric dervived from academic writing which would no doubt better any technical document. This idea reminds me of the example you gave in class of an independent study student who was making a procedural document. You said that the document implied that the user or reader was like a robot and that there was no reasoning for the procedure included in the document. While that document may have led the reader accurately through all the there was no additional information as to why go through the steps or how these steps are helpful. In academic writing one can't just write what something is, a writer has to aim to explain, argue, and articulate the relevance for the document that is created. Why can't technical writing be good writing? A technical writer gets a job because they have good writing skills. Why then are these skills less important than someone who gets a job as a literary critic? This is what is problematic to me and apparently a lot of other people who are sited in this essay. The quote by Donald Schon was one I really appreciated, he said that technical writing is "art that professionals display in practice." Miller also wrote a lot about how technical writing programs and courses where evolving to better prepare graduates for the workplace. The whole section made me think about the different ways writing is taught in college based on the class. In all my literature classes I was taught to first and foremost think about the literature and come up with interesting theories and theses and then articulate and organize these ideas and turn them in. I got my paper back with comments and that was that. Here I am learning, after 5 revisions of the same memo, that turning something in for the grade isn't an end in technical writing. I could have learned more about writing from redoing my lit papers, but I wasn't required. I am sure that by doing all these revisions and focusing of different aspects of writing you are better preparing us for the workplace. 10/15/07 Regli The problem Regli seems to be examining in this essay is that the technical writing curricula is lacking in its ability to prepare students for the workplace. She also seems to be questioning the notion of knowledge and the areas of expertise a technical writer contributes to a document where the content is of a topic that the technical writer is not an expert in. She also dismisses the notion that writing is "a gift" and that the teaching of writing should include instruction of certain skills rather than asking students to rely on their "gift." Regli also stresses that real-world technical writing is best done in collaboration with the people who have expertise in the subject matter. Regli sites other articles that examine the role a technical editor has in generating a document. People look at technical writers as purely editors, but in the later portion of her essay Regli notes the areas of expertise a technical writer brings to a document such as the ability to analyze audience, the ability to structure information, and production skills. Two terms Regli uses in her essay are content space and rhetorical space. Content space is all the information given to the technical writer by the experts. Rhetorical space is what the technical writer does to this information (how it is presented, organized, etc.) to make it more effective. these terms emphasize the idea that a technical writer isn't simply an editor, but that a collaboration is needed between writer and expert to create a usable and valuable document. 10/16/07 NY Times Email Article This article relates to rhetoric in regards to audience awareness. By this I mean that the problem address in the article was the obliviousness to the writer's own tone in the emails and how it was interpreted by the audience. The writer assumed that the reader would read the email as the writer intended it to be interpreted, but that was not the case. This idea was backuped with the example of the study that showerd jokes sent over email were rated funnier by the sender than the receiver. A writer who is keeping in mind the different elements of rhetoric would be wise to think about possible ways tone or word choice would be interpreted. 10/17/07 Politness vs. Authority This article has led me to believe I am a male writer trapped inside a female writers body. I can't recall in recent times when I questioned my own authority on something I was writing. That to me seems totally counter productive. I understand one shouldn't sound inflated, but no one is going to read what you write with any interest or respect if you write apologetically. I know we're suppose to identify a problem in what we read, and while, the problem is clearly that the writer or this article finds young woman writers to be too polite in their rhetoric for their own good this article seems like it is presenting an observation rather than a problem. Although this article doesn't explicitly discuss the ideas of a born writer vs. the ability to learn to write I think it illustrates how writing curricula could help these female writers. If the lady writers learned certain rhetorical skills about tone and word choice rather than writing in a way that is molded by their background then this problem of passivity in their writing may be lessened or eliminated. 10/29/07 White Sands I am going to attempt to address problems being discussed in this piece because I think that is a good place to start. A problem Henderson found in his research/observations was that technology's presence alone does not a productive office make. The intention of adding technology into a workplace seems to be to aid in productivity, ease of work, and effectiveness. However, and as stated in this text, the introduction of technology can do just the opposite. In order for technology to be useful, people need to know how to use it and the system they are working in must need it in some way. Technology can slow things down all together considering it requires training to operate and problems can easily occur when using it. Another problem Henderson addresses is that in a classroom setting, students of professional writing are encouraged to use many functions on computers and are taught to think in a future-foward way and be innovative. In a real workplace, Henderson points out, these skills and ideas may not be practical. He suggests that the curriculum of professional writing should take time to teach students to work within impossible time restraints and with lots of guidelines and restrictions on documents for editing. He seems to think that these skills are equal to if not more beneficial than learning lots of computer features. Henderson's piece seems a lot to me like what our CGA paper might end up being. He was a part of his study, being someone who worked in the directorate, therefore it didn't seem like he needed to do very much ethnographic research. While studying the way new technology effected the workplace, he also examined the different kinds of documents the offices generated. Henderson certainly liked Faigley's idea that all documents are links in a bigger chain. 10.30.07 Driskill is Driskilling Me Well this was a tough to get through. Seems to me that what Driskill is saying is there are a lot of influences that effect how a professional writer creates a document for a company. There are also a lot of studies that have been done on these influences, but apparently none have been thorough or complete. There are two main types of influences: internal (within the firm/company/organization) and external (the rest of the world). There are of course other influences, such as a writer's personal arsenal of rhetorical tools and tactics, time and money restriction, values and goals set by the company and the writer, on and on. The problem seems to be that once these influences are recognized it is becoming harder to fit a document into a specific genre. The example of the mutual fund company brochure: a designer/writer for the brochure wants to sell funds and present them in a way people will buy them, but then the NASD says that the language being used isn't accurate and therefore could result in lawsuits so all the brochures have to be changed. The outside influence of NASD prevented the bonds from being presented to buyers in the "genre" of an advertisement and maybe by default maybe created some new sub genre "legal advertisement". 11.04.07 Understanding Failures in Organizational Discourse What the authors of this essay initially seem to be saying is that the failure of the TMI accident didn't just occur because of the practices for communication at Babcock and Wilcox (as Mathes suggests), but because of there wasn't a collective set of standards within the organization for using language and communication. Even within the same organization, the discourse communities varied to such an extent that there was communication failure. The linguistic analysis of the memos show that the language used by the two branches was understood, so surface level linguistics was shared. But the pragmatic analysis reveals that their understandings of their context within the organizational interfered with understanding each other. The part of this study I found relative to class is when the authors are discussing how Kelly viewed his memos as a presentation of information and how that limited what Walters wanted to do with it. When we did our intro memos we initially just wanted to offer up information, but soon learned that we had to present it in a way that was meaningful and useful to our audience if it was going to serve any purpose at all. What would Walter's want with Kelly's "knowledge" if Kelly doesn't explain how his knowledge is useful to Walters. 11.06.07 Katz "Ethic of Expediency" as best I can explain it, seems to me Katz's way of labeling the idea of technical writing serving as a means to an end, a way to get a task done, and that there needs to be a motivation to get it done, in this example an ethical reason. Technical writing serves a purposes. Someone reads a manual to figure out how to work a stereo. They want to read the manual because they want to use their new stereo and there is nothing ethically wrong with using a stereo. Katz is examining the problematic nature of rhetoric, when used efficiently, as a way for people to get things done when what they want to get done is not ethically correct. The opening quote of this essay from Cicero makes Katz's view clear, rhetoric is a powerful tool and therefore it should not go unnoticed what this took is being used for. Katz also points out that in order for the van memo to work, it needed to not only be logical but the readers as well as the writer needed to be in the same ethical mind frame. They both needed to agree that what they were trying to do was important. The phronesis of the audience was conducive to the ethos of this memo because they had also adopted it. Just had an audience and purpose in mind when he wrote this memo and hit every mark to make it effective. He wrote for his discourse community who understood and shared his ethically values. The memo was meant to serve as a means to an end, just as a stereo manual would. But unlike the purpose of a stereo manual, which relies mostly on logic, a memo such as Just's needed to depend on both logic and ethics. 11.16.07 Artifacts Politics in this article means arrangement of power and authority. In the first two examples (the bridges and iron casts) it seems that there are secondary purposes for initial purposes. The use of these technologies fulfill surface level purposes, but also purposes of the people who created them. The artifacts take on the politics of the users of creators. So technology, like a document, may have a primary goal, but by default or intentionally, other effects occur because of its presence and use. I don't know about this article, it seems pretty obvious to me that when technology is introduce there can be planned effects but undoubtedly there will be unforeseen additional effects. Or technology could be presented by its creator one way or to serve one purpose, but really the creator has already planned secondary purposes for the technology. Forms of technologies are artifacts, and more will become artifacts as time progresses. To say an artifact possesses politics, to me, seems like a stretch. To say a social group as politics which are reflected in their technologies makes sense to me. A technology, like a genre has certain features to aid in enabling a purpose. A letter is set up a certain way to make it more purposeful to the reader just as a bridge is built a certain height to keep buses from passing under. 11.18.07 Katz Individuation I this this article is really beneficial to looking at our CGAs, specifically looking at the development of personal authority social authority, and situational authority. I'm doing my CGA on a class, but if I were doing it about the restaurant I work at I would easily be able to identify these stages personally. I went into the restaurant with personal authority because I had already worked in restaurants for 5 years. I gained social authority when my bosses and people who worked there longer than me realized I didn't need very much training and I was competent, friendly, and hard working. I also knew a lot of server tricks of the trade which proved I had experience. I received situational authority when I was allowed to manage when none of the managers were able to. I didn't become a manager, but I was trusted enough to take on that role when needed. As a result of a few managing shifts, my co-workers looked at me as a manager and came to me with questions. Over time I have worked individuated Tower's system to work for me. I won't become a manager because the money isn't worth the work, but I can do managerial things to help me as a server, like make my own drinks and get my own change out of the register. |