White Paper Activities (30-45 min)
White Paper sentences activity
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?
White Paper Scaffolding Activity
What is due for 9/27 is a draft. Whatever you give me will not be the same thing as the final draft you submit in December. This handout is a way to check in on your work-in-progress white paper.
Genre: Classification and Action (30-45 min)
Why the hell did we read this confusing article???????
What is its use for us as we are thinking about and doing writing for a public audience?
*Generous Reader*: That is the role we are gonna take on.
As always with blog posts, we are going to start from your excerpts.
Classification
Poor job of classifying and/or impossible to classify:
She goes on to say that there are two major problems: understanding the relationship between the rhetoric and its context, and understanding how a genre fuses “its situational with formal and substantive features.” What this means is that, essentially, there are a significant number of factors one must understand in order to relate rhetoric to a genre. It goes beyond the typical genre of “form” (such as length, layout, etc.), and it is also the point where I began to question the purpose of her arguments.
…
I would argue that, based on her argument alone, drawing any consensus would be nearly impossible—and if there’s no consensus, then why did she set out to classify rhetorical genre anyway.
Not about classifying:
Consequently, genre should be viewed as not solely a classification, but as a rhetorical tool for writers. This should be our main takeaway from Miller’s essay, in regard to public writing. When a writer defines their purpose, and beings to connect with their audience, the genre of writing must also be considered. Similar situations imply similar genres should be utilized, implying they are not solely a set of universal classification that a writer must adhere to. Instead, they are immensely more flexible. Just like the rhetorical appeals, a genre also helps strengthen the rhetoric by spreading the rhetoric in a socially accepted format, for that time period.
Genre is an “open class”…happy medium?
She finds, however, that rhetorical genre is based in social action rather than formal qualities or substance of text. In other words, rhetorical genre is based completely on social context (i.e. situation and motive) not the actual text (i.e. layout, media, tone etc.). She derives this perspective from Campbell and Jamieson (C&J) and Burke and Schutz. C&J claim that “rhetorical forms that establish genres are stylistic and substantive responses to perceived situational demands” [3]. Miller goes on to explain that genre is therefore fully rhetorical, a connection between intention and social effect of social action. C&J also describe genre as without limit or framework: “The critic who classifies a rhetorical artifact as generally akin to a class of similar artifacts has identified an undercurrent of history rather than an isolated act in time” [3]. Ergo, genre is an open class.
More on “open class”:
What I found most interesting from the reading was the idea that genre is dynamic, and what may be considered a genre now will be irrelevant in the future because the situations, actions, and reactions are no longer what they once were. This is captured by how the Aristotelian types often cannot apply to modern pieces because of how general they are, even though they did at one point in time work well for recurrent situations in ancient Greece. Carolyn implies that because society is constantly changing our classifications of different pieces of writing are as well by stating, “the set of genres is an open class, with new members evolving, old ones decaying.” This means that maybe someday the whole young adult classification of books like the Fault in Our Stars will die out or shift if people begin to lose interest or react to this type of writing in a new way.
Ideally, what would be gained by classifying genres?
What’s it mean to say genre is an “open class”? If that is true, does genre not exist? Is it just anything? What’s the point?
Action
Genre serves an action?:
Miller emphasizes an active definition of genre–one rooted in what you do with forms and not what they are on their own. I barely scraped out this meaning from the text, but admittedly, Miller does raise a few interesting, helpful points on genre that can be utilized for rhetors and professional writers.
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Genre does not just mean form, it is a form that serves a particular cause. Its shape is less important than its function. To writers and rhetors, it helps you understand how to participate in what it is you want to change.
“Usage”:
Miller maintains that “It is through the process of typification that we create recurrence, analogies, similarities. What recurs is not a material situation (a real, objective, factual event) but our construal of a type.” The same exact text, the same material object, could appear in a love letter, a prayer, or a eulogy. But those are both distinct genres. The main difference is in their usage.
A priori problems?:
One sentence that is especially difficult to process reads, “The organizing principles (from Harrell and Linkugel), in fact, do not distinguish classes of discourse; they distinguish methods of classifying discourse” (154). I perceive this point as being totally consumed by itself so that there is little meaning to be drawn out. I feel I do not fully understand what these clauses are working toward. Also, I feel as though one of the many impenetrable sentences could have held the secret to understand more of Miller’s view of genre. On page 159, she paints genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations.” I was stumped when reading this passage, and would be curious to hear what my fellow classmates made of it.
Sentences, style, genre
We spent all that time on looking at sentences, thinking about style in that earlier activity on white papers. After all of this talk about genre, how can we bring that discussion together with this one? Do we ever think about writing as writing separate from genre? How can we ever be outside of genre? Or outside of style? Or outside of both? Where is there overlap or not?
What about Booth? And Bowdon and Scott on professional and technical writing? What does genre have to do with the rhetorical stance, professional writing, public writing?
Break (15 min)
Interview Planning (10-20 min)
Logistics:
-You should have your interview scheduled by the end of September at the latest.
-You should complete your interview by mid-October at the latest.
-Unless impossible (i.e., you cannot meet in person), you will record your interview so you have the option of using audio or a written transcription. You must ask the interviewee’s permission.
-You will incorporate part or all of your interview into one of your group’s campaign pieces.
Questions to Ask Yourselves:
-Who are you interviewing and why?
-What do you want to learn more about in relation to your campaign?
-How might you use material from this interview for one of your campaign pieces? Brainstorm some ways.
Conducting the Interview:
-Don’t ask yes or no questions. If outcome is “yes” or “no”, these answers often aren’t that useful for future incorporation into a piece of writing.
-Let interviewee speak until finished, don’t answer for them or interrupt them too soon. Might miss out on something good. If you find them to be rambling, it might be worth trying to politely interject with a followup question, or subtle cues that time is running short.
-Ask permission to record on phone or computer (Download “Audacity” if using computer: a free program to edit sound recordings, will go over in class how to use a bit later this term).
Tech Tips:
-If using phone, almost all smartphones come with an audio recording app. Play around with it to get some practice. An iPhone has what is called “Voice Memos. To record, you simply hit the red button in the middle. To stop recording, you hit the same button. Be sure you know when it is recording and when it is not, not matter what the app is.
-If using computer, I am asking you to record via the free software called “Audacity.” This is a good and widely used sound editing program. To record in Audacity, click on the button with the red circle in the middle at the top of the page (it is the last button in the row that begins with the “pause” symbol, the “play” symbol, the “stop” symbol, the “rewind” symbol, and the “fast forward” symbol).
-If recording as audio, make sure the interview is in a quiet location. The person’s office would be ideal, for instance. A busy coffee shop will probably be too noisy to get a good recording.
-When you are in the interview, test the recording for 5-10 seconds and play it back to make sure everything is working alright, to ensure you are in a good location to record the interview, and to make sure everyone is speaking loudly enough (mostly for you, but you could test out if you can hear your interviewee by asking them to say a few things).
-Be sure the phone is close enough to the interviewee and the person asking the questions.
-When the interview is done, save the file to your computer. If you are using Audacity, this will be pretty straightforward as a sound editing file. As an audio file, you’ll have to convert it. I recommend MP3, and to do this you’ll need to download the LAME MP3 encoder; see these instructions or the manual on that. If you are using your phone, it should be pretty straightforward to plug your phone into your computer and save it somewhere. For an iPhone, it will come up right in iTunes. The default file type is incompatible with Audacity, so later on you may need to convert it if you want to use the audio file for a campaign piece.
Campaign Plan (10-20 min)
As a group, you should start thinking about who is doing what document, and start to coordinate around your campaign plan (due 10/4 by end of class–will do some informal sharing with classmates and then some final revisions as needed). Here is the prompt below:
First Draft of Collaborative Campaign Plan. 500-750 words. Due 10/4 by end of class to BB. Prompt: In this assignment, you’ll have to think about what your stance is for this problem, you’ll have to think about what evidence warrants this stance, what “public” you are addressing, you’ll have to begin to map out what rhetorical moves you can make to insert your (supported) stance into your selected public’s consciousness. With a draft of a white paper done, you can use what you learned from that to work through this assignment. Think of this as another “draft” of your proposal, only instead of trying to prove the merit of your issue, you are focusing much more on the merit of your decisions you have sketched out so far. These are the sorts of questions worth asking to help you write your campaign plan[1]:
-What attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, behaviors would you like to change or encourage?
-Who do you hope to reach? Why is this audience key to addressing your topic?
-What kinds of documents will your group be producing?
-Multiple media and compositions are typically used to address modern issues. What media will you use?-What modes (e.g., sound, static image, video, alphanumeric writing)?
-How will your documents reach your target audience? How will they see it, how will it get to them? In other words, how will you attempt to circulate these documents?
-What “themes” might bleed over across documents and how will you make that happen?
-Have a rationale. Why did you choose this kind of writing and media? For instance, why did you decide that your audience would respond better to a poster rather than a video? Why deliver this document at this time? Why these documents in this order? Why that document in that medium? Why do you believe your strategies for circulating your writing are effective?
-What have other people and organizations produced about this issue? What genres of writing? What sorts of audiences have they targeted? What media was used? What modes (sound, image, video, alphanumeric writing, etc.)? How might you adapt/build on what others have done? Or, how might you do something very different?
Remember, this is a first draft. You need not answer all of these questions in full, nor does this draft need to be fully polished. This is a first attempt at working through some initial ideas.
[1] Questions adapted from Appendix A of Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping A Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric by David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel.
Reflecting Back (10-20 min)
Below is what is on the handout (click hyperlink to access) I am passing out to you.
Background: As a way to prepare for the “pedagogical object” assignment that we’ll start in November, I want you to get in the habit of reflecting back on what you have learned so far, what you value, and what you find engaging about the practice of writing for a public. You’ll turn this into me, but I am not using it to evaluate you. I will scan these and return them to you all. Once you have all your sheets together by November, you can start to put them all together to help construct your group’s pedagogical object.
Directions: Spend about 10 minutes going back through your notes, through the lesson plans on the website, and through the work you have written (e.g., blog posts, comments, public interest narrative, white paper) and list out what you think you have learned and/or value about public writing. Use the following questions as a guide (and use back of page if necessary):
- What is public writing?
- What is important to know about public writing when you try to write for a public?
- Where am I growing and/or need to grow as a writer in respect to professional and public writing?
When finished, post your thoughts at the following link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bm3D74DRRZqcKm4VqIP-CS3lUUge9KfC3iUgPyZQ12c/edit?usp=sharing