Rhetoric and Professional Writing (20-30 min)
Going with big headers here because there are some subsets to each section today.
General question: what does the word rhetoric do for us when thinking about professional (or technical) writing? Bring me them meaty concepts and let’s eat. Also, obviously I’m on Team Rhetoric, but you should challenge me if you want to deep down. Not disciplinary way of knowing is perfect.
Ok, now to your smart work…
Poetry, Technical Writing, Professional (Public?) Writing
…composing text for the public brings with it a host of specific considerations and warrants the possession of certain skills. Poets write to evoke image and emotion. Writers of technical manuals create a clinical and straightforward set of instructions. Professional writers are tasked with demonstrating their knowledge of a subject and educating their public.
Lots of folks, lots of pressure, maybe lots of compartments, too
The reason this is such an important point is because whenever a person is reading a professional piece, the reader accepts that this writer is knowledgeable on the topic in question. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on writers of professional pieces, which not all forms of writing can begin to experience. Words that the professional pieces contain are taken for fact at the hand of the public and when pairing persuasion with this writing style, false information can be hazardous. (bolding is from Dan).
And another excerpt:
Writing with the consideration of public views in mind changes the way people write. It forces them to be more aware of their actions and word choices and allows for them to connect with their audience to the point where the writer hopefully understands what it is like to be in each reader’s position. As the writer is also a part of the public they should be able to discern between what is acceptable and what is not. (HAD ME THINKING: when should you be unacceptable??? Example to think through: National Anthem protests.)
And a third:
Public writing, to an extent, involves a sort of compartmentalization. We have been conditioned through all our years of school to understand how we speak to our fam, our homies, is not how we would speak in a more formal setting. … This brings us to one of the concepts discussed in the reading: kairos. The idea that you are saying the right words at the right place and at the right time. We must, as rhetors, be able to read the dynamics of our audience and adapt. We must, as rhetors, be able to read the dynamics of our audience and adapt. I’ll call on my own personal experience and the topic of my group project for class: food deserts. Now I have personally experienced being in a food desert in my hometown and was privileged enough to only see it as an annoying hassle, not a dire situation. Yet, I have experienced numerous forms of racism (internalized and external) and sexism. How, as a woman of color, can I take my emotions and transform them into professional writing, especially when I am so passionate about it? How can I become the next public face of the people of color while appealing to white people? How can I make them understand my struggles and an immigrant from the Dominican Republic?
Shirley, you can’t be serious
According to Bowdon and Scott, the distinction between professional writing and other kinds of writing, such as creative and academic writing, is that professional works are produced for “actual, concrete audiences who will use them to make decisions or perform actions”. From this I extrapolated that professional writing is simply much more serious than other forms. It must be accurately researched and edited such that it does not broadcast any misinformation. Professional writing is written for an audience that uses the piece as a basis for further action to be taken.
Here’s another excerpt:
I like the point you made about professional writing being more serious, but I want to challenge it a little bit. One way that you support your claim is that “Not many people take action after reading a fairytale, whereas someone writing about an issue with real world application could result in a different action.” Although I agree with you to some extent, I don’t believe that this is good evidence. Just because something is written for fun or for pleasure reading doesn’t mean that it isn’t serious or shouldn’t be taken in a serious manner. I know it seems far-fetched, but fairytales were originally meant to teach a lesson, even if the way it was taught involved magic or witches or talking animals. Is this different from writing for the public?
Audience: How do we relate? Or, don’t we?
It is up to the writer to decide which form of presenting the text will most effectively please their audience. For example, someone reading instructions will be looking for a numbered, step-by-step list accompanied by visuals in order to troubleshoot something. Meanwhile, someone reading a proposal will want an explanation of the problem, how one is expecting to solve it, and how they are going to support this plan. Though these are both examples of technical texts, they are executed differently solely based on their audience. Changing the form of text to better appeal to one’s audience is critical because it will allow the readers to more easily follow and later use the information they were presented. Writers, however, not only have to alter their text for the communities they’re addressing but for whom they’re representing as well. This is important to note because there could possibly be restrictions imposed on the writer depending on who they are writing for and what it is that they are writing about.
Another one…
I think this blog post really understood the Bowden and Scott chapter, but there is one thing I would like to debate. It comes from the line: “The closer the relationship between the two, the less formal the writing style needs to be.” … Regardless of my being best friends with the person reading my writing or not, my goal—whether it is to persuade, educate, or debate— needs to have the desired effect. And that might mean I will have to write something formally in order to teach, especially if he does not already know about the subject. I might not be able to use a more colloquial style because I would not want him to take my writing as a joke. So relationship along with purpose of writing is what will indicate the formality.
Hit me again with those sweet, sweet excerpts:
I do agree with that point, it is very important to appeal to your specific audience to make sure they are interested and will not be offended by any possible opinions or language in your piece. Similarly, “Mam636” stated “Rhetoric, I’ve come to learn, is heavily based on the writer-audience relationship. Bowdon and Scott also put a large emphasis on the audience.” However, “Mam636” seems to be suggesting that the audience is the most important influence on rhetoric and backed up his/her conviction with his/her interpretation of Bowdon and Scott’s book on rhetoric. While, in what case do you not have an audience to consider?
Be accessible to broad audience, be specific: contradiction?
Though homelessness is an extremely ubiquitous issue across the globe, I cannot assume that everyone has the same level of knowledge about the matter. Therefore, I would need to find a balance of providing fundamental information regarding the matter while also not overwhelming the audience with a lot of facts and figures. In other words, I need to ensure I’m getting my message across while having a high level of clarity and conciseness.
Sigh, our last one:
when writing professionally the author must be able to write generally to whatever target audience he or she is trying to reach. Meaning, the author cannot go in-depth about things that the general person in his or her target audience do not implicitly know.
Publics: Relating to them, in style (20-30 min)
Let’s do an activity, getting our hands into some concrete, actual public writing.
What is style? Style is notoriously difficult to define. Many elements of style are unconscious, we don’t even think about them when we write. Style takes place at the sentence level, with each stylistic choice assembling with others to create tonal and genre convention elements of a larger piece. Have you ever seen a roast? The comedian will often conventionally and repeatedly compliment the subject of the roast before eviscerating them with (an often horrid) joke. The compliments that precede the joke help the tone of the jokes in order to build the relationship between comedian and audience. This move also conforms to a pattern that an audience has come to expect from a roast (read: genre expectations).
Find an example of 2-3 sentences from the two documents that are different (e.g., one longer and the other shorter, one uses second person the other uses third person). Use what you know about sentences from years of writing them (y’all are highly literate and educated, don’t be shy about this)! Why may they be different? Because of audience? Genre? What do you think? Consider these sentences also from these perspectives:
- Consider the “tone” of each document. If you had to list characteristics of the document based on the “tone,” what would they be? List as many as you can and think about how these characteristics relate to individual sentences or chunks of sentences.
- Do these differences in sentence style and tone have anything to do with the age of the target audience, the genre of the document, or both? Or something else? All audiences will have certain expectations of style according to the genre and the rhetorical situation.
- Finally, are there any “secondary audiences” at play in any of these documents? How do you know?
Here are the documents to look at:
Genre Brainstorming (10-15 min)
Genres are about form and expectation. While never rigid, fulfilling expectations of readers by doing something recognizable and conventional is an important move for gaining attention of a reader. What are all the types of writing you could do for a public audience? We already know of about a few from what we saw on during our first few classes: a white paper, a brochure, an informative webpage, a blog post. What other options are there? As many as we can get. What options would be useful for your campaign? What ones do you want to know how to compose? What might be useful for you later, too?
Break (15 min)
Collaborative Writing (10 min)
Collaborative writing is big in professional writing (and, for that matter, many forms of academic writing). How did you all write your proposals with multiple authors? What strategies did you use? Were you all in the same room ever? What did you do then? Who wrote and how? Were you ever working apart from one another? Did you work in tandem? Did you work independently? How? What was effective? What was ineffective? What might you do differently for your campaign plan draft (due 10/4)?
Tips and Tools:
Collaborative Writing Tips. There are some helpful tips here. Making sure you plan pretty thoroughly first, is key. Defining roles and going over how labor is split up can also be important: Assign roles (e.g., drafter, reviewer, editor) or parts (e.g., introduction, middle portion, discussion, results). Another way to do it is to horizontally take things on by making sure each person has cycled through each role or part—as in: each person would have been a drafter, reviewer, and editor at some point or each person would have written or reviewed each section at some point.
Google Docs. Google docs is great because you can work on things simultaneously, it is free, and it taps into a lot of other services that Google has like Drive and Sheets. You can also see historical revisions and backtrack, as needed.
Interviews, White Papers (10 min)
One way to try and get you to learn more about your subject is to conduct an interview. I’m hoping that each group completes their interview by mid-October, so group members have an opportunity to incorporate them into their first campaign piece if they wish. I am asking that at least one document per group incorporates part or all of their interview into the piece. Today, I just want you to start thinking about who you might interview. Next class and/or the class after we will spend a little time thinking about how to develop questions and how to conduct an interview. You should plan to reach out to someone this week.
Who knows a lot about your topic?
Are they accessible?
Who is going to reach out to them?
By when?
Campaign Planning (10-15 min)
Get together with groups and catch up. Focus on the types of documents you might write together.
White Paper Draft (9/27 by 4pm) (20-30 min)
This is an independent assignment. Prompt: White papers are a genre of writing that seek to gather research about an issue in order to present to decision-makers (e.g., legislators, community leaders, consumers) a series of informed recommendations for courses of action. For your campaign, you should be informed about your issue and some reasonable outcomes for courses of action for that issue. In this assignment, you will gain practice in a common genre for professional public writing as well as gain insights into your issue that can then inform the design of your campaign pieces and plan. Be sure to imagine writing to an audience of decision-makers that would be relevant to your issue. White papers typically have two crucial components: 1) a review of research on the issue, and 2) a series of recommendations for how the decision makers might act based on this research. You are required to have at least 6 sources that serve as a “review” of the research on your issue. These sources should be credible; that is, they should originate from subject-matter experts. See examples of white papers on our WFP resources page (we will have gone over some of these in class by this point, beginning September 6).
Activity: Go back and find the two white papers from last week. Open them up on your laptop. I’m passing out the first “section” of both of them. Read these sections. Mark them up with a pen as you think about these questions while reading:
- What does each opening want to make you “feel”? How do you know? Point to some example sentences. Anything peculiar or different about these kinds of sentences compared to other genres of writing?
- Pick a sentence at random from both white papers and compare. What do you notice? Can you back that up when looking at other sentences? Where do you typically see these kinds of sentences?
- How does each opening progress? Name what each paragraph “does” and how it connects to the following paragraph. Look at these “namings” and try to come up with the overall goal of the opening part of both white papers.
Now, skim through both white papers, and think about the following questions:
Design: How is the layout different? Why?
Organization: what do both white papers share in common? Skim through each of the sections. If we had to define “what a white paper is” and how it is organized based on these two papers alone, what would you make of it?
Admin (5-15 min)
Blogs, doing them. Blog, the one next week.