Research, Proposals, and Reports (30 min)
See “Research, Proposals, and Reports” from 7-11-2019 Lesson Plan.
Records and Documentation (10-20 min)
Summary
-Having a record of what people agreed to do, will do, decisions that were made, etc. Useful to return to when delegating tasks or informing how to approach tasks.
-Needs to be clear for people who were not there. How can you write in a way that someone who was not present could understand the essentials of what happened? (e.g., people who could not make the meeting, for the public)
-If completed for legal reasons (e.g., to meet regulations), must meet necessary requirements for that document.
-CYA: can help cover the organization if there is a dispute of some kind.
-Many organizations will use templates or models for you to follow.
Activity: What records have you had to keep as a student or worker? What have you learned as important for good record keeping?
Types
- Meeting Minutes: close-ish record of what was said and by whom.
- Agendas: a plan on what will be done or discussed–typically for meetings.
- Logs: a record of hours worked on a project or tasks completed
- CYA Memos/Records: Things to write to yourself about something going on in case of legal dispute or something weird going on.
- Research Journal/Notes: A good practice as a researcher is to keep up with notes reflecting on how things are going, things you are finding out, etc. Helps work out ideas as you go.
Qualities of Good Records/Record-Keepers
- Details, details, details. While the “gist” is definitely important, many records are valuable for the smaller details that highlight things people may forget or overlook that contribute to that “gist” (and, thus, may create other possible interpretations). Getting the right wording of what someone said in meeting minutes, being as accurate as possible as to how you conducted your field work, accurately providing hours worked on a project–all of these small things can have large impacts on different approaches to work problems, figuring out why something went wrong, negotiating future contracts, etc.
- Attention to Design and Accessibility: This is true of all professional writing, but may be even more true for these sorts of genres. Badly organized records can be a nightmare for readers, since these can accrue to large amounts of writing, which requires good attention to how to organize them.
- Willingness to Collaborate. One way people go wrong with record keeping is by not seeking out help from others or models of how to do things correctly. As mentioned earlier, many organizations will have templates–make sure you follow what is expected. Further, if you are not sure about something someone else did (e.g., did you get their quote right in the meeting minutes? are you sure this is what your co-worker did on-site to write up in your log? are you sure your boss wanted to cover all these topics for the agenda?), you should follow up with them to accurately record what happened.
- Speak up: Related to the last point, as you are writing in meetings or as you are doing work that will be written up later for an agenda or log, make sure to get the information as it occurs. During meeting minutes, ask for clarification or remind the group about an agenda item they missed.
- The Eternal Enemies of Good Record Keeping: Laziness (to do them) and Boredom (to keep doing them). Be wary of these foes!
Policy Writing (30-45 min)
Summary
From WW, this is a good mnemonic: policies are about formal rules, procedures are general approaches to following the rules, and instructions are detailed specifics on how to perform a task.
Policies give an internal audience (and, sometimes, also an external one–especially for public institutions) the organization’s position on a topic and rules they have about that topic in a given workplace–anything as mundane as how to throw away trash to as serious as things like sexual harassment.
Policies are often coupled with procedures. For instance, a policy on sexual harassment might also include an attached procedure document on how to report sexual harassment (e.g., who to report to, how to make the report).
Like a lot of professional communication beyond correspondence documents, policies are often collaboratively written.
Writing Policy
- Use language that reflects the policy’s intent as much as possible. Policies aim to set a tone, so you should pay attention to tone by word choice (e.g., concrete nouns relevant to policy).
- Many organizations will have things like style guides, templates, models, “zombie” text, etc. for any new or revised policy that is written. Still, a good policy writer will have to have skill in putting these pieces together.
- Have short, simple sentences for most of the document. People really only need essential information in digestible chunks.
- Use good organization that responds to audience needs. E.g., most applicable parts should come earlier than less applicable.
- Also organize into sections and subsections where appropriate.
- Be careful with modal verbs like should, may, can. If something is not a choice, you should use certain language (e.g., will, must).
- If using qualifying clauses, make sure they do not alter meanings in ways you do not wish to occur (e.g., “All faculty must…however, part-time faculty…”; in this example, “all” contradicts the “however” statement).
Example Policy Writing
Go to this policy on photocopying copyrighted material at Pitt. Let’s reverse engineer these by making them “worse.” How did you do that? What sorts of language did you change? Did you organize it differently? What else?
Break (10 min)
Studio Time (30-45 min)
Work on Unit 2 project.
Intro to Unit 3 Project (30-45 min)
Pull up assignment prompts from CourseWeb>Course Documents>Assignment Prompts. There are two documents with ‘Unit 3’ in their title.
Brainstorming together: What is the product/”product”?
Procedures and Instructions AND/OR Cover Memo Review (20 min)
–Procedures. Go to the associated “procedure” for the copyright photocopying policy from earlier. Organized in terms of necessary knowledge and actions to take: E.g., purpose, scope, definitions, roles, actions to take for those roles for given situations.
Activity: If time, also, do the “make it worse” activity as we did for the policy. What did you do? Why?
–Instructions: usually for smaller, more material, and simpler/less legalistic tasks.
Activity: Pick something that you do everyday or nearly everyday that can also be done in class today (and is appropriate!). Write out instructions to do it. Partner will then follow your instructions exactly and see if they were successful.
Review and Next Time (5-10 min)
Review
-Proposals want to “get” something, Reports want to “inform” or “persuade” about a course of action beyond “receiving” material goods. These different purposes call for different rhetorical approaches in terms of organization, format, tone, etc.
-Documents like records, documentation, logs, policies, procedures, and instructions are often the most “direct” and purposefully unambiguous forms of professional writing. Thus, since there purpose might be different from that of things like emails or proposals, these also require differing rhetorical perspective to take on.
-WPC Project: Writing in action. How does this change how you approach your writing tasks?
Next Time
-Visual rhetoric
-Web writing and other public-facing writing
-Digital vs. Print Writing
-Studio time to work on Unit 2 and Unit 3 projects
-Catching up, if need be