On texts of some length, proofreading/editing is often the final step in the writing process prior to publishing your text. Proofreading usually takes place nearer the end of the revision process than at the beginning. Why? Because it doesn't make sense put in the effort to proofread looking at every sentence and word level issue until your draft is fairly solid. In other words, why proofread and edit sentences and words which might still be cut? Why proofread haphazardly when you can proofread systematically after you've finished most revisions and save effort and time?
Here are my own notes on proofreading. Those just below are the main ones to remember:
It's nearly impossible to effectively proofread your own work. You know what you mean to say. When you read your own work, you often read over mistakes. My best piece of advice is to get others to proofread your work. Try to get at least three people to look at your work prior to turning it in. If necessary, hire someone or create a writer's group to help you with proofreading.
EVERYONE makes mistakes. Don't kick yourself for your mistakes, learn to recognize them and how to fix them. Even then, you'll still make mistakes.
I once worked for an academic journal. Four sets of eyes proofed each article--the professor who wrote it, myself, the departmental secretary, and the editor. Still, EVERY time we got the journal back from the printers, I opened it to a random page and found at least one mistake. EVERYONE, even professionals, make mistakes.
When you proofread, you're trying to do something called breaking set. This means you want to change the way you usually read, so you don't read over mistakes. Most of the proofreading tricks I list below have to do with changing how you read, so you can see what you've written.
1. Give yourself time to proofread. It's easy to find yourself adding the last sentence to a text at the last possible minute. As we finish drafting, the last thing we want to do is acknowledge there's yet more work to do. We want to be done. Resist the temptation. Give yourself time to proofread. Your final product will be better for the time. To give yourself time, set your deadline for finishing your draft in time to revise the draft for content and structure and to still have time to proofread.
2) Read backwards from the last sentence to the first. When proofreading for spelling, read backwards one word at a time. Learn to isolate each word, even those which have been passed by the spellcheck. It doesn't catch every misspelling. When proofreading for sentence issues, read backwards one sentence at a time.
3) Read slowly and out loud. You'll be surprised how reading something out loud, as opposed to silently, will let you hear errors you'd otherwise overlook.
4) Read to someone else. Reading your paper to someone else forces you to take an audience into account. Not only can the person you're reading to ask questions about content, they can mark places in a copy of your paper where they're confused or they hear an error as you read. When you hear a mistake or a piece of awkward phrasing, you can mark it and come back later to fix it.
5) Print out your text. If you usually read your papers on the screen, make a hard copy. As you find errors, mark them, and later revise your electronic copy. When we're drafting and hit the creative zone, we often work quickly and have a hard mental focus on meaning. These habits of reading quickly and thinking in terms of meaning and adding or cutting content can track over into efforts to proofread on the screen. Remember, when you're proofreading, you're not so much worried about content or organization (hopefully, each of these elements was polished earlier in the writing process), when proofreading you're looking at mechanics, usage, spelling, and grammar and only at mechanics, usage, spelling, and grammar.
6) Get someone else to read your work to you. Print out two hard copies. Get a friend to read your work to you. Both of you mark places which don't make sense or appear to be problematic. Use both copies as an index when fixing your text. Go back and look at each place which was marked and try to figure out what caused the area to get marked.
7) Have the computer read the text two you. Make a hard copy and set up the computer to read the text out loud. It will read what's there. Every time you hear an error, mark your hard copy. Use your marked copy as an index to what needs to be fixed.
8) Give yourself time. Breaking set isn't just about reading backwards or reading out loud. You get close to a text when you draft it and work on content and structural revision. If you try to proofread after working this closely with the text, you'll find yourself seeing what you meant to say rather than what you're actually saying. Horace, a Roman rhetorician, recommended putting what you write away for nine years, that is, until it reads as if someone else wrote it. We don't have such luxury, but giving yourself a day or two to let the text set, even just doing something else between finishing your content revisions and proofreading, gives distance enough so you're can bring fresh eyes back to your text. So, finish your draft and reward yourself with a night's sleep, a night out, or a workout prior to proofreading.
9) Give yourself time to proofread. Slow down. You're not in a race to get through, you're trying to look closely at multiple things, and the process takes time. Slow down. Read slowly. Take the time it takes to truly see and truly edit every sentence and word.
10) Physically touch every word. Talk about breaking set! Read backwards. Read out loud, and touch every word to make sure you're seeing and proofreading each and every word and sentence.
11) Use the grammar and spell checker. The state of the art in grammar and spell checkers isn't quite there yet, but they can help you see some errors. Just don't their word as law. Use them for the things at which they're effective. They can isolate "to be" verb constructions and give you an index to possible passive voice constructions. They can show you long sentences. They can usually recognize subject verb disagreements. They can sometimes help with punctuation. The real trick with using grammar and spell checkers is to learn their weaknesses and to learn how to customize them to the style of writing you want to reproduce.
12) Boo-boo or demon words. You know these words. They're the ones which sneak through the spell checker. Usually they're jargon or proper names you misspell or forget to capitalize. You can customize autocorrect to make corrections for your most typical boo-boo words.
13) Use a ruler or a piece of paper to isolate the sentences you're proofreading. This practice forces you to look at the sentence you're proofing, not the next sentence, not the previous sentence, the sentence you're supposed to be looking at.
14) Learn your problem areas. Everyone is prone to making different mistakes. If you or someone else sees a pattern in your mistakes, put it on a personal "list of things I have to look at when proofreading." (This is why it's a good idea to read the papers you get back from teachers and proofreaders. Often your professor will mark errors. Use their work to help develop your list of "things at which I have to look.") By learning to recognize the problems you're prone to introducing into the text and how these errors can be fixed, you'll soon find yourself making fewer errors. Every once in a while, take your copy of "things at which I have to look" and find your worse error. Spend some time researching how to recognize and fix your worse error. Eventually, you'll find your list of common errors getting shorter and your sentence level writing improving in proportion.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Answers to a couple of more good questions...
The prewriting posts to your individual blogs are meant to be on the formal papers only. Don't worry about doing the pre-writing for past papers, only for those on which you are currently working or will work in the future.
Publish your formal papers either via google docs including me as a collaborator (my preference) or via the class drop box.
I like google docs because you can invite viewers or collaborators, and the immediate feedback you can get is a useful tool in writing. I also like the online web writing and production tools because many web teams are using them as basic tools for working at a distance and asynchronously.
Having said this, one of the mistakes I've made is in not paying enough attention to how UAT students are used to turning in assignments, so I'll be happy to accept assignments in the class drop box or the Q&A forums.
Publish your formal papers either via google docs including me as a collaborator (my preference) or via the class drop box.
I like google docs because you can invite viewers or collaborators, and the immediate feedback you can get is a useful tool in writing. I also like the online web writing and production tools because many web teams are using them as basic tools for working at a distance and asynchronously.
Having said this, one of the mistakes I've made is in not paying enough attention to how UAT students are used to turning in assignments, so I'll be happy to accept assignments in the class drop box or the Q&A forums.
Clarifying Ethos, Pathos, and Logos Appeals
I thought I'd pass on my response to Jason's rhetorical analysis paper. He wrote on Ultimate Destruction. Since the Hulk is such a popular culture icon, I thought my response and discussion of ethos, pathos, and logos in Jason's paper might resonate with many of you.
Pathos often is the first of the appeals to make sense. This seems odd because most of us have been trained to think in terms of logos as being the strongest of the appeals. It's certainly the most used in academic writing, where appeals to emotions are frowned on. Ethos is the hardest of the appeals to get your head around, because ethos appeals often hide in the guise of logos appeals or pathos appeals. Think, for instance, about using a particular form of documentation. When you use MLA style and write a paper in MLA format, the format and form of documentation are part of an ethos appeal. The assure your audience that you're part of the discourse community who knows how MLA style and formats work. The upshot? While citing a source is part of making a logical appeal and appearing objective (pathos is also be a lack of emotion), you are also making a subtle ethos appeal.
Now my response to Jason's paper. I hope it helps you get a better handle on ethos, logos, and pathos.
I also liked your section on ethos. As you argue, ethos is about reputation, and the reputation of the company creating a game goes a long way toward reassuring the player that they'll be getting a quality game experience, hence increasing the game's appeal. This kind of branding through company or author name is a fairly new way for ethos to work, and I remain fascinated with it. In fact, there are some history of the book scholars who have argued that one reason the concept of the professional author developed side-by-side with the mass consumption of books was that books could be branded by their author. Just like shopping at McDonalds, we know what we're buying when we pick up a Stephen King novel. This kind of audience branding was why Author Doyle worked so hard to kill off the character of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle wanted to write historical fiction, but he was forever linked with the Holmes character and the mystery short story. The same thing happened with Ira Flemming and James Bond. I find it fascinating that the same thing is happening with companies and games.
Write with questions.
Steve
Pathos often is the first of the appeals to make sense. This seems odd because most of us have been trained to think in terms of logos as being the strongest of the appeals. It's certainly the most used in academic writing, where appeals to emotions are frowned on. Ethos is the hardest of the appeals to get your head around, because ethos appeals often hide in the guise of logos appeals or pathos appeals. Think, for instance, about using a particular form of documentation. When you use MLA style and write a paper in MLA format, the format and form of documentation are part of an ethos appeal. The assure your audience that you're part of the discourse community who knows how MLA style and formats work. The upshot? While citing a source is part of making a logical appeal and appearing objective (pathos is also be a lack of emotion), you are also making a subtle ethos appeal.
Now my response to Jason's paper. I hope it helps you get a better handle on ethos, logos, and pathos.
Jason,
Your section on pathos was your strongest, probably because the notion of an appeal to emotion makes more intuitive sense than does logos or ethos. You were right on the money when you said, "the greatest appeal that this game offers to players is making them feel powerful." Why did this line stand out in my mind? Because it was here I saw you integrating the notion of the game authors using an appeal to have a specific effect on their audience. "Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction," as you point out, manages to create much of its appeal by building on the notion of the un-outstanding wanting to indulge a fantasy in which they are suddenly powerful.
I also liked your section on ethos. As you argue, ethos is about reputation, and the reputation of the company creating a game goes a long way toward reassuring the player that they'll be getting a quality game experience, hence increasing the game's appeal. This kind of branding through company or author name is a fairly new way for ethos to work, and I remain fascinated with it. In fact, there are some history of the book scholars who have argued that one reason the concept of the professional author developed side-by-side with the mass consumption of books was that books could be branded by their author. Just like shopping at McDonalds, we know what we're buying when we pick up a Stephen King novel. This kind of audience branding was why Author Doyle worked so hard to kill off the character of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle wanted to write historical fiction, but he was forever linked with the Holmes character and the mystery short story. The same thing happened with Ira Flemming and James Bond. I find it fascinating that the same thing is happening with companies and games.
There's another level to ethos, however, about which I'd like you to think. Ethos appeals also have a lot to do with how an author gets their audience to identify with them. In the study of rhetoric we call this kind of ethos appeal, identification. To get a handle on how this kind of appeal works, think for a moment on why players might identify with Banner. As you noted in your pathos section, one reason the game appeals is that it works on our emotions to make us feel powerful, but we identify with Banner because we too have felt impotent and wanted to let go of all our inhibitions. Like Banner we struggle with finding a balance between letting go and being innocuous and meeting social expectations.
This brings us to logos. One of the ideas behind the Hulk which makes the character so appealing is in identifying with Banner, we have to think through the basic idea behind his character. That is, we have to figure out and play with the idea of the animal side of human nature and the logical, social side. I think the Freudian terms are id vs ego. As we indulge in the fantasy, we're also living through identification with a character who, on the one hand, can assume great power but, on the other hand, can only do so via an essential loss of control. The Hulk also forces us to think about our beliefs. For instance, do we believe we have an essential nature? Is who we are tied to our brain or our heart? Is it some mixture of the two? One way logos works to make a game appealing is to present us with powerful questions, questions which compel us even if we're unaware we're thinking about them. This unconscious confrontation with ideas is one reason fiction, either in the genre of games or another form of story, is so powerful. It causes us to think under the guise of entertainment. It gets in our heads via a means against which we have very little defense.
Write with questions.
Steve
What to put on your blogs and how weekly assingments work with your outcomes inventory...
Travis also wrote with a couple of good questions. He was confused by what I expected you to put on your individual blogs, by how the outcomes inventory worked, and how the weekly papers integrated with the ongoing inventory assignment. Since if one student is asking a question, I assume others may share it, here's my response to Travis. Write if you have follow up questions:
The blogs you set up individually are places to write about your writing and to post some of the steps involved in producing your papers. In specific, I've asked that you do a prewriting exercise for each paper. As part of this exercise, you'll produce a post for your blog in which you answer the following questions:
Who is your audience(s)?
What goals do you want to achieve by producing your text?
What is your topic?
How will you organize the text?
You might also post to the blog any pre-writing exercises in which you come up with ideas for your paper. These kinds of posts may take the form of a list, an outline, a free write, or a link to a mind map. I'll be posting to the class blog how to use such exercises to help you come up with ideas you can incorporate into your writing.
Your responses to the WPA outcomes is an ongoing exercise. For many of you, your initial reaction to a specific outcome may well have been, "I have no idea what this means." Remember, the outcomes represent knowledge and skills you should have after completing a full year of freshman level writing. However, as the class progresses, and I make posts to the class blog, exchange emails like this with you, you do some reading, and you write your weekly papers, I'm hoping you'll gain deeper insight into many of the outcomes. As you gain these insights and reflect on them, you should revise the corresponding individual entries in your inventory.
The papers you write each week, the process you use to develop and produce them, and your reflection on this process should provoke some thought about how the assignment and your work on the paper might provide evidence for claims you make about your comprehension of an outcome. For instance, when you first responded to the outcome about integrating critical inquiry, reading, and writing. You well may have written something fairly vague or simply said, "I don't understand." After thinking about your paper doing a rhetorical analysis of a game, you might change this claim and say you've learned to integrate critical inquiry, critical reading, and writing. You might support this new claim by pointing to what you learned about a game with which you were already familiar as you "read" it and wrote about it using the rubric of the three appeals---logos, pathos, and ethos.
Does this help?
Steve
The blogs you set up individually are places to write about your writing and to post some of the steps involved in producing your papers. In specific, I've asked that you do a prewriting exercise for each paper. As part of this exercise, you'll produce a post for your blog in which you answer the following questions:
Who is your audience(s)?
What goals do you want to achieve by producing your text?
What is your topic?
How will you organize the text?
You might also post to the blog any pre-writing exercises in which you come up with ideas for your paper. These kinds of posts may take the form of a list, an outline, a free write, or a link to a mind map. I'll be posting to the class blog how to use such exercises to help you come up with ideas you can incorporate into your writing.
Your responses to the WPA outcomes is an ongoing exercise. For many of you, your initial reaction to a specific outcome may well have been, "I have no idea what this means." Remember, the outcomes represent knowledge and skills you should have after completing a full year of freshman level writing. However, as the class progresses, and I make posts to the class blog, exchange emails like this with you, you do some reading, and you write your weekly papers, I'm hoping you'll gain deeper insight into many of the outcomes. As you gain these insights and reflect on them, you should revise the corresponding individual entries in your inventory.
The papers you write each week, the process you use to develop and produce them, and your reflection on this process should provoke some thought about how the assignment and your work on the paper might provide evidence for claims you make about your comprehension of an outcome. For instance, when you first responded to the outcome about integrating critical inquiry, reading, and writing. You well may have written something fairly vague or simply said, "I don't understand." After thinking about your paper doing a rhetorical analysis of a game, you might change this claim and say you've learned to integrate critical inquiry, critical reading, and writing. You might support this new claim by pointing to what you learned about a game with which you were already familiar as you "read" it and wrote about it using the rubric of the three appeals---logos, pathos, and ethos.
Does this help?
Steve
Clarifying some terminology...
In Jason's first draft the first paper, he responded to the WPA Outcomes by saying there were terms used, like rhetoric, genre, and format, which didn't make sense on an intial reading, but which he assumed would make more sense later. In my response to the google doc of his most recent draft, I clarified these terms, and I thought I'd pass my response on to the class as a whole.
rhetoric--the study of how to accomplish one's intentions through effective communication.
genre--a type or kind. Music has genres, like classical, ballad, rock, or bluegrass. Games have genres like board, video, RPG, etc. Writing too has genres. Most of us are used to thinking of writing genres like poetry, the novel, the short story, or drama, but each time you write a specific kind of text, you write in a genre of writing. The concept of genre gives you a rubric through which to think about the characteristics of different kinds of writing. Email, for instance, is digitally published and distributed, usually short, conversational, informal, and covers a single topic. It has a specific format. There's a subject line. There's a body. Often there's a signature. Google "How to write good emails," and you'll be linked to a host of advice about how to effectively create texts in the genre of email. In a similar manner, you can research how to write in any number of genres. Google how to write a good term paper, portfolio, resume...
format--one aspect of a genre is the format. The format refers to how a document is laid out, the order in which information is presented, if it's OK to use bullets or sub-headings, what kind of documentation style to use, what margins to use, etc. Researching and learning the expected format for a genre can be as simple as asking for an example of it. For instance, when your boss asks you to put together a proposal, ask if she has an example of a good proposal she can share to use as a model.
Keep the questions coming.
Response to several of your concerns.
Seth wrote to let me know of how frustrated many of you are, so I thought I'd post my email response to him here and also on the class site.
Read the class blog at ENG101fall2007UAT.blogspot.com. It should clear up at least some of your confusion and, I hope, frustration.
Some of the confusion was a result of the initial week's problems. Some is my unfamiliarity with student practice at UAT. My usual practice is to let students struggle with the first paper on their own, this practice is meant to cause frustration I then use as a learning platform. However, added to the initial frustration and confusion with the course, employing this practice hasn't---to say the least---played well.
The reason I have students struggle with the first paper is to give a graphic lesson in just how much information they're usually given prior to writing in an academic setting, information which they will have to figure out on their own as they adapt their writing to rhetorical situations outside the classroom. If the lesson goes well (and it usually does), students quickly learn the value of prewriting, that is, what exactly they need to know prior to beginning to write; and, instead of just accepting that they will be given essential information like genre, format, length, and jargon common to a new discourse community, they learn they have to actively seek this information out. Learning just how much information is needed prior to writing is an important aspect of a writer's skill set. Think, for instance, how many folks will end up doing consultant work with their UAT degrees or moving between different company cultures as their career matures. Each of these moves will involve you in learning the writing expectations of the your new discourse community.
In this class, however, what is usually an effective tactic just added to the loss of ethos inherent in the confusion of changing the course design in the middle of the first week. My other faulty assumption was in assuming that students would write me at prof.brandon@gmail.com with questions and concerns. Instead, I've found students at UAT try to work out these concerns in threaded discussions on the class site; so, while I've been monitoring my email at both UAT and my gmail accounts, I wasn't hearing or responding to the level of frustration building up on the class site.
Last but not least, I assumed that students would dive into the class blog, and all I needed to do was direct them to it via an announcement on the class site. Instead, students continued to look for updates, content, and clarification on the ecollege web site.
Here's my plan:
1) I'll be more involved in the threaded discussion on the class site.
2) I will no longer assume students will write me directly with concerns or questions.
3) I will update the ecollege class shell and not just handle the class through the blog and email.
I hope you'll meet me half-way and read the class blog at eng101fall2007uat.blogspot.com. I does answer many of your frustrations and concerns. If questions still remain, do write. I'm here to teach and want you to know I am available and more than willing to help in any way I can.
Steve
Read the class blog at ENG101fall2007UAT.blogspot.com. It should clear up at least some of your confusion and, I hope, frustration.
Some of the confusion was a result of the initial week's problems. Some is my unfamiliarity with student practice at UAT. My usual practice is to let students struggle with the first paper on their own, this practice is meant to cause frustration I then use as a learning platform. However, added to the initial frustration and confusion with the course, employing this practice hasn't---to say the least---played well.
The reason I have students struggle with the first paper is to give a graphic lesson in just how much information they're usually given prior to writing in an academic setting, information which they will have to figure out on their own as they adapt their writing to rhetorical situations outside the classroom. If the lesson goes well (and it usually does), students quickly learn the value of prewriting, that is, what exactly they need to know prior to beginning to write; and, instead of just accepting that they will be given essential information like genre, format, length, and jargon common to a new discourse community, they learn they have to actively seek this information out. Learning just how much information is needed prior to writing is an important aspect of a writer's skill set. Think, for instance, how many folks will end up doing consultant work with their UAT degrees or moving between different company cultures as their career matures. Each of these moves will involve you in learning the writing expectations of the your new discourse community.
In this class, however, what is usually an effective tactic just added to the loss of ethos inherent in the confusion of changing the course design in the middle of the first week. My other faulty assumption was in assuming that students would write me at prof.brandon@gmail.com with questions and concerns. Instead, I've found students at UAT try to work out these concerns in threaded discussions on the class site; so, while I've been monitoring my email at both UAT and my gmail accounts, I wasn't hearing or responding to the level of frustration building up on the class site.
Last but not least, I assumed that students would dive into the class blog, and all I needed to do was direct them to it via an announcement on the class site. Instead, students continued to look for updates, content, and clarification on the ecollege web site.
Here's my plan:
1) I'll be more involved in the threaded discussion on the class site.
2) I will no longer assume students will write me directly with concerns or questions.
3) I will update the ecollege class shell and not just handle the class through the blog and email.
I hope you'll meet me half-way and read the class blog at eng101fall2007uat.blogspot.com. I does answer many of your frustrations and concerns. If questions still remain, do write. I'm here to teach and want you to know I am available and more than willing to help in any way I can.
Steve
I'm back up and running.
The Verizon FIOS setup went without a hitch, and the fiber optic to the house is much, much faster than the cable at the apartment. So,...
I'm reconnected much quicker than I originally expected. I'm working sans desk, but I can work. Once again, you can contact me at prof.brandon@gmail.com or my cell at 505-553-3853. Several of you have written with questions, and I'll post responses to the frequently asked questions later tonight.
Steve
I'm reconnected much quicker than I originally expected. I'm working sans desk, but I can work. Once again, you can contact me at prof.brandon@gmail.com or my cell at 505-553-3853. Several of you have written with questions, and I'll post responses to the frequently asked questions later tonight.
Steve
I'll be out of touch for a few hours to a day...
My wife and I are moving into our new house today (28 November). More importantly, we're getting Verizion over to install FIOS this afternoon. The upshot is my computer and/or home internet access will be down for anywhere from a few hours to a day. In between, I'll check my email (prof.brandon@gmail.com) as I am doing now, that is, from work. Do know you can still get in touch with questions, concerns, etc. via my cell phone, 505-553-3853, and I will be back on tomorrow morning at the latest via my office computer.
Steve
Steve
The Writing Process Is Messy
As I promised yesterday, I wanted to post on how the writing process is messier than the prewriting, drafting, revision, proofreading, and review rubrics may make it seem at first glance. As I noted in the last post, the theory of process writing was developed out of the process taught by Greek and Roman rhetoricians to would be rhetors--that is, those who wanted to learn to use rhetoric. As it came into being in the 1970s and 1980s, process writing was seen as the panacea for all writing ills. While it can help you solve a host of writing problems and improve the efficiency of your writing process, it turned out that few writers actually follow the step-by-step process folks were taught to teach. This is especially true of successful, professional writers.
When folks began actually studying the processes used by profession writers, here's what we found:
1) Professional writers write regularly, usually on a daily basis. They set up a schedule to write and usually try to go for production of a set number of publishable words per day. Often, they draft for one to two hours a day, and they reserve the rest of their time for other aspects of the writing process. Indeed, many writers will get antsy if they don't follow their writing schedule.
2) Professional writers consider the most difficult aspect of the writing process the drafting stage. When they set up a writing schedule, they reserve their most productive time--my time is early in the morning, but many folks draft best late at night--for getting words on paper. When they do this work many strive to find a time will little or no distraction. I know more than a few blog writers, for instance, who draft early in the morning before spouses and kids wake up.
3) Professional writers spend a lot of time on revision, but their final prose is often governed by the prose they write during the drafting stage. In other words, they often revise and even proofread during the drafting stage. That is, as they find themselves stuck, some writers will move on from the section where they are stuck to a section of a text with which they feel more confident. Some writers will get stuck and move into review of what they've already written as a means of getting further ideas; and, as they move through what they've written, they'll often take the time to spell or grammar check. In any event, the movement from drafting, to getting stuck, to review or revision, and then back to the section on which they are stuck is part of a set, conscious process which is followed with almost a religious fervor.
4) Many of new ideas "flow" from areas already written, and many writers will start or end a writing session by reviewing (re-reading) what they have just written. Often this review dredges up new ideas to add into the writing.
5) Professional writers aren't afraid to cut. One motto which comes up again and again is: "The most powerful end of the pencil isn't the lead; it's the eraser."
6) Another motto which one hears again and again is: "Good writing is re-writing." However, this rewriting is usually set into a session at a time different from drafting.
6) Professional writers aren't afraid to move text around. If a section of a text isn't "working" where it is, writers often cut, paste, and smooth out the transitions rather than discard. They look for opportunities to improve their text by moving a section or by incorporating a section written for another project.
7) Professional writers try to have a plan for each writing session. They end one day's writing session with a review and try make a plan for where they'll start the next session. Most write down where they'll start. Some don't. In either case, they're trying to limit the time spent fumbling for a starting point.
8) Professional writers schedule in specific times (sessions) for research, blocking out new projects (texts), and playing with angles and different approaches. They will do the same for proofreading, but often they don't schedule different sessions for revision, considering revision part of the drafting stage.
9) Professional writers write, and they know how they write. They study how others write, and they work to pick up tricks to make their own process easier. This sounds trite, but one of the things which was found when folks began studying how successful writers write is that successful writers don't by necessity like writing, but they do write regularly and often and in various genres. They practice the craft.
10) Professional writers let their subconscious do work for them. Rather than trying to force a creative session, many successful writers will often just move on to another aspect of the writing process and let their sub-conscious work on the problem which has them stuck. They'll schedule enough time that they can sleep on a problem, let their subconscious come up with a solution, and implement the solution in the next writing session.
11) Most professional writers keep several projects going at once, and they move between these projects as they get stuck on one.
Student writers can learn a lot about process from these "post process" studies of successful writers. Think about the following hints:
1) Pay attention to your own writing process. Learn how you write and develop a process which plays to your streghts.
2) Break large writing projects down into smaller writing sessions. In doing your WPA outcomes inventory, for example, you'll be writing and revising on a regular basis, but you'll be paying attention to writing on individual bullets. Over the course, you'll end up writing a tremendous amount, and the writing will be pretty solid. Why? Because you'll have thought about, revised, and proofread each bullet several times. This same process will work for your senior portfolio, the one which will help you get a job.
3) Figure out when you're at your most productive, and schedule drafting of new material for your most productive and creative.
4) At the end of each writing session, review what you've done and figure out a specific job for the next session.
5) Keep your writing sessions short. Rather than try to finish a paper in one evening, start earlier and give yourself the chance to work in one and two hour increments.
6) If you start earlier and write in shorter sessions, you can give your unconscious a chance to do much of the creative work for you; but, you have to allow time for such incubation to work.
7) Focus on one aspect of writing at a time. Recent work on productivity has proven that multitasking results in less and worse work than does uni-tasking. I'm firmly convienced, though I don't have the research to back it up, that writer's block, particularly among students, comes from trying to cram too many of the steps of writing into drafting.
Finally, I wanted to take a moment and point out how many of the things we found out about successful writers apply to other folks who create a given product on a regular basis. Many of you program, design games, impliment network security protocals, etc., and you can speak to how productive work in these area carry over (or dosen't) into your own experience. I encourage you to start a thread on the Q&A where you can discuss how you write, work, and maintain productivity.
When folks began actually studying the processes used by profession writers, here's what we found:
1) Professional writers write regularly, usually on a daily basis. They set up a schedule to write and usually try to go for production of a set number of publishable words per day. Often, they draft for one to two hours a day, and they reserve the rest of their time for other aspects of the writing process. Indeed, many writers will get antsy if they don't follow their writing schedule.
2) Professional writers consider the most difficult aspect of the writing process the drafting stage. When they set up a writing schedule, they reserve their most productive time--my time is early in the morning, but many folks draft best late at night--for getting words on paper. When they do this work many strive to find a time will little or no distraction. I know more than a few blog writers, for instance, who draft early in the morning before spouses and kids wake up.
3) Professional writers spend a lot of time on revision, but their final prose is often governed by the prose they write during the drafting stage. In other words, they often revise and even proofread during the drafting stage. That is, as they find themselves stuck, some writers will move on from the section where they are stuck to a section of a text with which they feel more confident. Some writers will get stuck and move into review of what they've already written as a means of getting further ideas; and, as they move through what they've written, they'll often take the time to spell or grammar check. In any event, the movement from drafting, to getting stuck, to review or revision, and then back to the section on which they are stuck is part of a set, conscious process which is followed with almost a religious fervor.
4) Many of new ideas "flow" from areas already written, and many writers will start or end a writing session by reviewing (re-reading) what they have just written. Often this review dredges up new ideas to add into the writing.
5) Professional writers aren't afraid to cut. One motto which comes up again and again is: "The most powerful end of the pencil isn't the lead; it's the eraser."
6) Another motto which one hears again and again is: "Good writing is re-writing." However, this rewriting is usually set into a session at a time different from drafting.
6) Professional writers aren't afraid to move text around. If a section of a text isn't "working" where it is, writers often cut, paste, and smooth out the transitions rather than discard. They look for opportunities to improve their text by moving a section or by incorporating a section written for another project.
7) Professional writers try to have a plan for each writing session. They end one day's writing session with a review and try make a plan for where they'll start the next session. Most write down where they'll start. Some don't. In either case, they're trying to limit the time spent fumbling for a starting point.
8) Professional writers schedule in specific times (sessions) for research, blocking out new projects (texts), and playing with angles and different approaches. They will do the same for proofreading, but often they don't schedule different sessions for revision, considering revision part of the drafting stage.
9) Professional writers write, and they know how they write. They study how others write, and they work to pick up tricks to make their own process easier. This sounds trite, but one of the things which was found when folks began studying how successful writers write is that successful writers don't by necessity like writing, but they do write regularly and often and in various genres. They practice the craft.
10) Professional writers let their subconscious do work for them. Rather than trying to force a creative session, many successful writers will often just move on to another aspect of the writing process and let their sub-conscious work on the problem which has them stuck. They'll schedule enough time that they can sleep on a problem, let their subconscious come up with a solution, and implement the solution in the next writing session.
11) Most professional writers keep several projects going at once, and they move between these projects as they get stuck on one.
Student writers can learn a lot about process from these "post process" studies of successful writers. Think about the following hints:
1) Pay attention to your own writing process. Learn how you write and develop a process which plays to your streghts.
2) Break large writing projects down into smaller writing sessions. In doing your WPA outcomes inventory, for example, you'll be writing and revising on a regular basis, but you'll be paying attention to writing on individual bullets. Over the course, you'll end up writing a tremendous amount, and the writing will be pretty solid. Why? Because you'll have thought about, revised, and proofread each bullet several times. This same process will work for your senior portfolio, the one which will help you get a job.
3) Figure out when you're at your most productive, and schedule drafting of new material for your most productive and creative.
4) At the end of each writing session, review what you've done and figure out a specific job for the next session.
5) Keep your writing sessions short. Rather than try to finish a paper in one evening, start earlier and give yourself the chance to work in one and two hour increments.
6) If you start earlier and write in shorter sessions, you can give your unconscious a chance to do much of the creative work for you; but, you have to allow time for such incubation to work.
7) Focus on one aspect of writing at a time. Recent work on productivity has proven that multitasking results in less and worse work than does uni-tasking. I'm firmly convienced, though I don't have the research to back it up, that writer's block, particularly among students, comes from trying to cram too many of the steps of writing into drafting.
Finally, I wanted to take a moment and point out how many of the things we found out about successful writers apply to other folks who create a given product on a regular basis. Many of you program, design games, impliment network security protocals, etc., and you can speak to how productive work in these area carry over (or dosen't) into your own experience. I encourage you to start a thread on the Q&A where you can discuss how you write, work, and maintain productivity.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Another way to think about writing and process...
In previous posts about process, I've covered the notion of Kaizen and the writer (you) as an author in the process of becoming a better writer. In these posts, I encouraged you to think about writing and process from the perspective of developing a process through which you can become a better writer. The process I'm encouraging through assignments is that of taking an inventory of your understanding of the skills and knowledge covered in the WPA outcomes and adding to this assessment as your knowledge and use of skills improves. There's another, equally important way to think about writing and process.
Several years ago, those of us who teach composition rediscovered another idea the Greeks had visited first, namely, that of trying to describe the various stages a speaker or writer goes through as they produce a text. The Greek and Roman version of this process was called the Canons of Rhetoric. The modern version developed from these canons is called "The Writing Process" or the "Process Theory of Writing."
Modern process theory encourages writers to see the value of breaking the task of writing down into a specific set of ordered tasks and devoting their full attention to each task. It teaches various strategies for tackling each task and encourages the writer to find the strategies which work best for him or her. The standard division is as follows:
Prewriting--I've mentioned this step in previous posts and in the syllabus. In this step, you do the work needed prior to beginning to draft your text. You decide on what topic you'll write on. You decide which audience you'll write for. You decided on how you will develop your topic. You figure out what you can say. You figure out the order in which to present your ideas and/or to develop them. One reason I have you writing in your individual, metadiscourse blogs is to help you make prewriting a conscious part of your writing process, and I'll be suggesting tactics for answering prewriting questions, doing an audience analysis, discovering what you can say, and organizing your writing.
Drafting--This step involves you in just getting the your ideas down on paper. Often it's the hardest step for beginning writers, and it's where verbal constipation can occur, that is, if you try to cram all the other steps in writing into drafting.
Revision--In this step you move through multiple drafts of your text looking at various aspects of your text. You make sure the text uses the right tone for your audience. You make sure it strikes the right balance between formality and informality. You think about changes to your organization. You look for places to add an example, evidence, an illustration, a story, or further evidence. You cut out places where you repeat. In short, you make changes to content.
Proofreading/editing--One edits another's paper. One proofreads one own. In this step, you look at grammar, usage, and spelling. It's here where you tackle surface level issues which don't have anything to do with content. Overtime, you develop a set of issues for which you know you have to look. Keeping an error log, that is, a list of your frequent errors in usage, spelling, and grammar is one of the tricks of the trade. It helps you keep an index of all the issues for which you have to look. Issues drop out as you figure out how to recognize and fix them, and they are added as your writing process changes, introducing more chances for new errors.
Review--In this step, you take your product or text, and you judge what you've done, what tactics worked and which didn't. In the Rhetorical Canons, there used to be a canon for rhetorical memory. Literally, this was your memory of tricks of writing and speaking which had worked in the past, tricks you could use in producing the text you're working on currently. By making it a conscious step to add to your rhetorical memory, to review your texts and their effectiveness, you develop a repertoire or a library of ways to write (and not to write).
This division makes the notion of the writing process seem very straightforward. "Follow these steps, and you'll produce good writing." It turns out, however, the division of writing into the steps above is useful as a rubric, but most real writers follow a more messy actual process. The upshot? Learn the terms of the writing process. Think about how they apply to the processes you use to produce texts. Become especially aware of places where you can make a simple change to your process by adding, say, a conscious step in which you figure out your organization prior to writing; but, don't try to slavishly follow rubric above. It can be done, but it's a recipe for frustration. Most on how to use the writing process rubric to improve your writing in tomorrow's post.
Several years ago, those of us who teach composition rediscovered another idea the Greeks had visited first, namely, that of trying to describe the various stages a speaker or writer goes through as they produce a text. The Greek and Roman version of this process was called the Canons of Rhetoric. The modern version developed from these canons is called "The Writing Process" or the "Process Theory of Writing."
Modern process theory encourages writers to see the value of breaking the task of writing down into a specific set of ordered tasks and devoting their full attention to each task. It teaches various strategies for tackling each task and encourages the writer to find the strategies which work best for him or her. The standard division is as follows:
Prewriting--I've mentioned this step in previous posts and in the syllabus. In this step, you do the work needed prior to beginning to draft your text. You decide on what topic you'll write on. You decide which audience you'll write for. You decided on how you will develop your topic. You figure out what you can say. You figure out the order in which to present your ideas and/or to develop them. One reason I have you writing in your individual, metadiscourse blogs is to help you make prewriting a conscious part of your writing process, and I'll be suggesting tactics for answering prewriting questions, doing an audience analysis, discovering what you can say, and organizing your writing.
Drafting--This step involves you in just getting the your ideas down on paper. Often it's the hardest step for beginning writers, and it's where verbal constipation can occur, that is, if you try to cram all the other steps in writing into drafting.
Revision--In this step you move through multiple drafts of your text looking at various aspects of your text. You make sure the text uses the right tone for your audience. You make sure it strikes the right balance between formality and informality. You think about changes to your organization. You look for places to add an example, evidence, an illustration, a story, or further evidence. You cut out places where you repeat. In short, you make changes to content.
Proofreading/editing--One edits another's paper. One proofreads one own. In this step, you look at grammar, usage, and spelling. It's here where you tackle surface level issues which don't have anything to do with content. Overtime, you develop a set of issues for which you know you have to look. Keeping an error log, that is, a list of your frequent errors in usage, spelling, and grammar is one of the tricks of the trade. It helps you keep an index of all the issues for which you have to look. Issues drop out as you figure out how to recognize and fix them, and they are added as your writing process changes, introducing more chances for new errors.
Review--In this step, you take your product or text, and you judge what you've done, what tactics worked and which didn't. In the Rhetorical Canons, there used to be a canon for rhetorical memory. Literally, this was your memory of tricks of writing and speaking which had worked in the past, tricks you could use in producing the text you're working on currently. By making it a conscious step to add to your rhetorical memory, to review your texts and their effectiveness, you develop a repertoire or a library of ways to write (and not to write).
This division makes the notion of the writing process seem very straightforward. "Follow these steps, and you'll produce good writing." It turns out, however, the division of writing into the steps above is useful as a rubric, but most real writers follow a more messy actual process. The upshot? Learn the terms of the writing process. Think about how they apply to the processes you use to produce texts. Become especially aware of places where you can make a simple change to your process by adding, say, a conscious step in which you figure out your organization prior to writing; but, don't try to slavishly follow rubric above. It can be done, but it's a recipe for frustration. Most on how to use the writing process rubric to improve your writing in tomorrow's post.
Your Outcomes Inventory and Your Portfolio.
Take a day or two each week to review the work you've done and fit it into your inventory of your learning of the WPA bulleted outcomes. As you do, update your responses including new information you gain from reading my posts on rhetoric, process, critical reading and writing, and conventions. Each week, you'll do an assignment designed to give you a better grasp of a specific area of the outcomes.
Your first week's essay was to get you thinking about where you are in terms of your career and your past experiences with writing and communication. Hopefully, it also gave you some insight into how communication and your career goals fit together. Reading other's essays should have given you some insight into how others are making their decisions about career, communication skills, and past and future plans. Commenting on and learning from comments on these essays should have given you some basic insight into how peer readers can help your own writing.
Your second week's essay, the one doing a rhetorical analysis of a game, had you researching the rhetorical appeals of logos, pathos, and ethos and applying them to a text--a game--with which you are familiar. This assignment is designed to get you thinking about using new critical thinking rubrics. Rubrics are ways of reading and making sense of texts. Just as every discipline has their own conventions of writing, they also have their own ways of reading. History, for instance, uses rubrics like chronology, cause and effect, and narrative to make sense of the past. When a new fact is found, historians work to place it in context of the existing (current) narrative of history. They place in a time line, so they understand where the new fact fits; and, they try to figure out if the new fact is cause, effect, or both. In a similar way, rhetoricians--those who study how to use language effectively--use a set of rubrics or interpretative frameworks. Ideas like looking at how a text makes appeals to its audience and dividing these appeals in terms of logos, pathos, and ethos constitute one of these rubrics. Another rubric used by rhetoricians is that of the rhetorical triangle, where we look at questions like: Who is the Author? What is his or her purpose in creating their text? Who was the text written for? What kinds of noise prevented or limited the author from achieving their purpose? What techniques did the author use?
As you revise the second week's paper using class discussion and new information to be found in these posts, you'll gain insight into many of the outcomes under the "Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing" section of the WPA outcomes. Think, for instance, of the interpretative frameworks or rubrics used in your own professions. What questions appear again and again as you attack a problem? What kinds of texts does your profession address? How do you address and make sense of these texts? What do you try to do with the texts you read in your profession? You should also be thinking about how using a rubric from another discipline gives you insight into texts with which you are already familiar. What, for instance, did looking at a familiar game in terms of logos, ethos, and pathos teach you about the game? Did you gain any insights into how and why the game is successful and why it appeals to its audience? Thinking in these terms will help you understand why some games sell well and have a huge impact and why others don't.
In addition to getting a handle on reading or interpretive rubrics, you should be thinking about how writing itself helps you gain insight into texts and improves your critical knowledge. If you've every made a pro vs con sheet to try to make a difficult decision, you've used writing to help you do critical thinking. In a similar way, the very process of writing, that is, making sense of something for an audience, causes you to make sense of a text for yourself.
The paper you're working on for this week describes a process you use in the creation of products in the profession for which you are training. You might also provide an overview of the process you've used in writing code, designing a game, setting up a security system for a network, etc. The idea here is to get you thinking about the processes with which you are already familiar, and, more importantly, how to articulate these processes to yourself and to others. This effort should give you some insight into the outcomes under the "Process" section of your outcomes inventory.
This class is about figuring out where you are as a writer and how you can build on your current skills to become a better writer. You need to come to understand the processes you currently use to create written and spoken texts, and how you can improve these processes.
Your inventory of yourself as a writer, that is, your short responses to the various bulleted points in the WPA outcomes is an important aspect of gaining an idea of where you are as a writer. Your understanding of yourself as a writer can't stop there. As you gain new knowledge of one or more of the outcomes, you should take time to update your responses. My best suggestion here is to set up a google doc using the bulleted points in the WPA outcomes as a template. Many of you already have. Add your classmates and me as collaborators on your inventory. As you do an assignment, write and revise an essay, read a post, read your peer's inventories, etc. update your response to the various bulleted points in your template. What you are creating here is a document constantly under revision, one which records your understanding of rhetoric, critical thinking, process, and knowledge of conventions. It is an ongoing inventory of your self as a writer. Take a few moments every time you do work for the class to run through your inventory and add new information as you learn new things.
This inventory will form the core or body of the cover letter in your portfolio. To turn the inventory into a cover letter, you'll frame the inventory with a brief introduction and a conclusion in which you'll argue for a specific grade in the class based on how much you have learned. The inventory will provide a record or index of what you have learned. Under each bulleted point, you should make a specific claim. For instance, "I understand how to use writing to gain a better critical knowledge of a subject." You'll then support your claim with proof. This proof might include an explaination of what you mean by using writing to gain knowledge. The proof should also contain examples of places where you've used writing to gain knowledge of a subject, and it might point to specific pieces of knowledge and the role writing played in learning them.
One of the critical lessons of the class is that the major difference between academic discourse and everyday discourse is academic discourse doesn't just make claims or offer an opinion, it backs the claims and opinions up with evidence, examples, etc.
In addition to the cover letter in which you reflect on what you have learned and argue for a grade, you'll include actual writing in your portfolio as evidence of what you have learned. These are examples of writing which demonstrate you've learned the skills and outcomes you claim to have learned. For instance, to back up the claim you've learned to use writing to acquire critical knowledge, you might point to the paper you wrote doing a rhetorical analysis of a game. Or, to back up the claim you've learned the value of revising your papers and taking them through multiple drafts, you might include an intermediary draft of a paper you wrote for this class. Remember, this evidence can come from not only the work you do for this class but also work you've done in your jobs, for other classes, or for yourself.
I hope this post makes the process of and reasoning behind the inventory and the portfolio a tad clearer. As always, write with questions, concerns, etc. As always, the prof.brandon@gmail.com address is the one I access most frequently.
Your first week's essay was to get you thinking about where you are in terms of your career and your past experiences with writing and communication. Hopefully, it also gave you some insight into how communication and your career goals fit together. Reading other's essays should have given you some insight into how others are making their decisions about career, communication skills, and past and future plans. Commenting on and learning from comments on these essays should have given you some basic insight into how peer readers can help your own writing.
Your second week's essay, the one doing a rhetorical analysis of a game, had you researching the rhetorical appeals of logos, pathos, and ethos and applying them to a text--a game--with which you are familiar. This assignment is designed to get you thinking about using new critical thinking rubrics. Rubrics are ways of reading and making sense of texts. Just as every discipline has their own conventions of writing, they also have their own ways of reading. History, for instance, uses rubrics like chronology, cause and effect, and narrative to make sense of the past. When a new fact is found, historians work to place it in context of the existing (current) narrative of history. They place in a time line, so they understand where the new fact fits; and, they try to figure out if the new fact is cause, effect, or both. In a similar way, rhetoricians--those who study how to use language effectively--use a set of rubrics or interpretative frameworks. Ideas like looking at how a text makes appeals to its audience and dividing these appeals in terms of logos, pathos, and ethos constitute one of these rubrics. Another rubric used by rhetoricians is that of the rhetorical triangle, where we look at questions like: Who is the Author? What is his or her purpose in creating their text? Who was the text written for? What kinds of noise prevented or limited the author from achieving their purpose? What techniques did the author use?
As you revise the second week's paper using class discussion and new information to be found in these posts, you'll gain insight into many of the outcomes under the "Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing" section of the WPA outcomes. Think, for instance, of the interpretative frameworks or rubrics used in your own professions. What questions appear again and again as you attack a problem? What kinds of texts does your profession address? How do you address and make sense of these texts? What do you try to do with the texts you read in your profession? You should also be thinking about how using a rubric from another discipline gives you insight into texts with which you are already familiar. What, for instance, did looking at a familiar game in terms of logos, ethos, and pathos teach you about the game? Did you gain any insights into how and why the game is successful and why it appeals to its audience? Thinking in these terms will help you understand why some games sell well and have a huge impact and why others don't.
In addition to getting a handle on reading or interpretive rubrics, you should be thinking about how writing itself helps you gain insight into texts and improves your critical knowledge. If you've every made a pro vs con sheet to try to make a difficult decision, you've used writing to help you do critical thinking. In a similar way, the very process of writing, that is, making sense of something for an audience, causes you to make sense of a text for yourself.
The paper you're working on for this week describes a process you use in the creation of products in the profession for which you are training. You might also provide an overview of the process you've used in writing code, designing a game, setting up a security system for a network, etc. The idea here is to get you thinking about the processes with which you are already familiar, and, more importantly, how to articulate these processes to yourself and to others. This effort should give you some insight into the outcomes under the "Process" section of your outcomes inventory.
This class is about figuring out where you are as a writer and how you can build on your current skills to become a better writer. You need to come to understand the processes you currently use to create written and spoken texts, and how you can improve these processes.
Your inventory of yourself as a writer, that is, your short responses to the various bulleted points in the WPA outcomes is an important aspect of gaining an idea of where you are as a writer. Your understanding of yourself as a writer can't stop there. As you gain new knowledge of one or more of the outcomes, you should take time to update your responses. My best suggestion here is to set up a google doc using the bulleted points in the WPA outcomes as a template. Many of you already have. Add your classmates and me as collaborators on your inventory. As you do an assignment, write and revise an essay, read a post, read your peer's inventories, etc. update your response to the various bulleted points in your template. What you are creating here is a document constantly under revision, one which records your understanding of rhetoric, critical thinking, process, and knowledge of conventions. It is an ongoing inventory of your self as a writer. Take a few moments every time you do work for the class to run through your inventory and add new information as you learn new things.
This inventory will form the core or body of the cover letter in your portfolio. To turn the inventory into a cover letter, you'll frame the inventory with a brief introduction and a conclusion in which you'll argue for a specific grade in the class based on how much you have learned. The inventory will provide a record or index of what you have learned. Under each bulleted point, you should make a specific claim. For instance, "I understand how to use writing to gain a better critical knowledge of a subject." You'll then support your claim with proof. This proof might include an explaination of what you mean by using writing to gain knowledge. The proof should also contain examples of places where you've used writing to gain knowledge of a subject, and it might point to specific pieces of knowledge and the role writing played in learning them.
One of the critical lessons of the class is that the major difference between academic discourse and everyday discourse is academic discourse doesn't just make claims or offer an opinion, it backs the claims and opinions up with evidence, examples, etc.
In addition to the cover letter in which you reflect on what you have learned and argue for a grade, you'll include actual writing in your portfolio as evidence of what you have learned. These are examples of writing which demonstrate you've learned the skills and outcomes you claim to have learned. For instance, to back up the claim you've learned to use writing to acquire critical knowledge, you might point to the paper you wrote doing a rhetorical analysis of a game. Or, to back up the claim you've learned the value of revising your papers and taking them through multiple drafts, you might include an intermediary draft of a paper you wrote for this class. Remember, this evidence can come from not only the work you do for this class but also work you've done in your jobs, for other classes, or for yourself.
I hope this post makes the process of and reasoning behind the inventory and the portfolio a tad clearer. As always, write with questions, concerns, etc. As always, the prof.brandon@gmail.com address is the one I access most frequently.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Rhetoric, Process, and Kaizen: Take Two.
Now you are getting your head around the basic elements of communications---the sender, the message, the receiver, noise, and feedback---and learning to notice how appeals work in terms of your head, your emotions, and to gain identification---logos, pathos, and ethos, it's time to talk some down and dirty about how to improve your writing. The basic notion of how to make improvements in any process (like writing), can be found in the industrial management philosophy of Kaizen.
If you do a quick google of "Kaizen," you'll learn it's the industrial management philosophy which led to Japan being the technological and industrial powerhouse it is. This way of approaching process brings together the best of Western ideas about motion study and efficiency and Japanese notions of how communities and individuals work. It's one of a handful of the most powerful ideas to emerge from the 20th C, and it came into being at the end of WWII.
The US wanted to build a working democracy out of the wreckage of Japan at the end of WWII. Japanese industry was geared up for war, and the US had learned from how it had handled Germany at the end of WWI that for democracy to work, you had to have a certain amount of wealth flowing through out a viable economy; so, the US sent in some of our best industrial engineers to help Japan to build a consumer industrial base.
These folks were well grounded in how to set up a factory to mass produce, but they didn't have a clue as to how Japanese culture functions. The upshot was they tried to impose the latest 1930s/'40s motion and process theory and failed miserably. Japanese culture sees work holistically. It tends to see the individual as part of a community, and the function of work not so much as a means of producing a product but as a means of maintaining the viability of the community and the pride and sense of status of the individual within the community. Luckily, the Japanese were able to work with the well intentioned Americans to come up with a theory of industrial process which combined the best of both ways of working.
From the US, they took the notion of process, that is, when you do something over and over (like writing a sentence, paragraph, or email), you tend to follow the same steps and tend to need the same stuff. If you break down such repeatable activities into set steps, you can focus on one aspect of the process at a time and work to improve its efficiency. You might, for instance, make sure the tools you need for a task are at your workstation instead of stored across the room, saving you the time needed to get up, loose your train of thought, and go across the room to get a pencil or keyboard. The idea is as you improve the efficiency of the individual steps, you improve the overall efficiency of the process and your ability to compete.
Now American thought tended to think of process efficiency as a means to an end. You get a factory up to a certain level of productivity per man hour, and you can compete. The Japanese had the brilliant insight---based on Zen notions of work based meditation--that one never reaches a perfect process; instead, one can just improve the process at hand; but, and this is a big but, you can make small, continuous improvements to whichever processes is in place. Literally, one's focus isn't on the end product, but on the doing or the work necessary to a task. You practice and perfect the doing of a task, not the product of the task. The upshot is they created the notion of continual small improvements to process or Kaizen. It's quite literally a continuous focus of improving how the task is done and assuming that a good process will produce a good product which can compete.
There are some additional flourishes. Kaizen rewards workers who come up with a means to improve how their task is done. It creates time in a production schedule to have regular meetings of the workers, management, and sales folks to discuss process and product. The idea is everyone needs to understand the big picture, so they can understand their part. In any event, small groups meet to make decisions about which improvements to process to implement and to judge if a change in process is an improvement or not. There's also the notion of low hanging fruit vs. high hanging fruit. That is, one always begins work on a process from the process already in place. This process already allows you to receive some gain or, to use the Kaizen metaphor, pick the lowest hanging fruit. As you make improvements, you add to your gains by being able to pick the lowest hanging fruit and some higher hanging fruit. The upshot is your return in the investment of improving process is always increased return.
Kaizen can be applied to any process, from coding to writing to your morning routine. Let's talk about writing. You currently use a series of processes when you write. As you write and revise your inventory of WPA Outcomes, think how you produce writing currently and give these processes your attention. Break writing down into the steps you follow as you produce. For instance, how do you proofread? How do you draft? Do you build in time for revision? We'll be discussing how composition and rhetoric has broken down the task of writing and making speeches, but my goal here is to just give you some language for thinking about the processes you use as you create and write. I encourage you to think about processes in the work you do or want to do. Once you begin noticing the steps you follow and can accept the notion of improving how you produce through making small, continuous changes in these processes, you'll be half-way to becoming a writer.
Write if you have questions, comments, or observations.
If you do a quick google of "Kaizen," you'll learn it's the industrial management philosophy which led to Japan being the technological and industrial powerhouse it is. This way of approaching process brings together the best of Western ideas about motion study and efficiency and Japanese notions of how communities and individuals work. It's one of a handful of the most powerful ideas to emerge from the 20th C, and it came into being at the end of WWII.
The US wanted to build a working democracy out of the wreckage of Japan at the end of WWII. Japanese industry was geared up for war, and the US had learned from how it had handled Germany at the end of WWI that for democracy to work, you had to have a certain amount of wealth flowing through out a viable economy; so, the US sent in some of our best industrial engineers to help Japan to build a consumer industrial base.
These folks were well grounded in how to set up a factory to mass produce, but they didn't have a clue as to how Japanese culture functions. The upshot was they tried to impose the latest 1930s/'40s motion and process theory and failed miserably. Japanese culture sees work holistically. It tends to see the individual as part of a community, and the function of work not so much as a means of producing a product but as a means of maintaining the viability of the community and the pride and sense of status of the individual within the community. Luckily, the Japanese were able to work with the well intentioned Americans to come up with a theory of industrial process which combined the best of both ways of working.
From the US, they took the notion of process, that is, when you do something over and over (like writing a sentence, paragraph, or email), you tend to follow the same steps and tend to need the same stuff. If you break down such repeatable activities into set steps, you can focus on one aspect of the process at a time and work to improve its efficiency. You might, for instance, make sure the tools you need for a task are at your workstation instead of stored across the room, saving you the time needed to get up, loose your train of thought, and go across the room to get a pencil or keyboard. The idea is as you improve the efficiency of the individual steps, you improve the overall efficiency of the process and your ability to compete.
Now American thought tended to think of process efficiency as a means to an end. You get a factory up to a certain level of productivity per man hour, and you can compete. The Japanese had the brilliant insight---based on Zen notions of work based meditation--that one never reaches a perfect process; instead, one can just improve the process at hand; but, and this is a big but, you can make small, continuous improvements to whichever processes is in place. Literally, one's focus isn't on the end product, but on the doing or the work necessary to a task. You practice and perfect the doing of a task, not the product of the task. The upshot is they created the notion of continual small improvements to process or Kaizen. It's quite literally a continuous focus of improving how the task is done and assuming that a good process will produce a good product which can compete.
There are some additional flourishes. Kaizen rewards workers who come up with a means to improve how their task is done. It creates time in a production schedule to have regular meetings of the workers, management, and sales folks to discuss process and product. The idea is everyone needs to understand the big picture, so they can understand their part. In any event, small groups meet to make decisions about which improvements to process to implement and to judge if a change in process is an improvement or not. There's also the notion of low hanging fruit vs. high hanging fruit. That is, one always begins work on a process from the process already in place. This process already allows you to receive some gain or, to use the Kaizen metaphor, pick the lowest hanging fruit. As you make improvements, you add to your gains by being able to pick the lowest hanging fruit and some higher hanging fruit. The upshot is your return in the investment of improving process is always increased return.
Kaizen can be applied to any process, from coding to writing to your morning routine. Let's talk about writing. You currently use a series of processes when you write. As you write and revise your inventory of WPA Outcomes, think how you produce writing currently and give these processes your attention. Break writing down into the steps you follow as you produce. For instance, how do you proofread? How do you draft? Do you build in time for revision? We'll be discussing how composition and rhetoric has broken down the task of writing and making speeches, but my goal here is to just give you some language for thinking about the processes you use as you create and write. I encourage you to think about processes in the work you do or want to do. Once you begin noticing the steps you follow and can accept the notion of improving how you produce through making small, continuous changes in these processes, you'll be half-way to becoming a writer.
Write if you have questions, comments, or observations.
Rhetoric, Discourse Communities, and What Makes Writing Good?
Writing involves you in producing a product. The product is called a text. Now texts can be approached and understood differently via any of the nodes on the author/audience/message triangle. Like the whole author/audience/message triangle and the rhetorical situation it models, texts exist in culture, community, and society. Culture, community, and society are subtly different ways of thinking about groups.
Communities are groups which come together for various purposes. Those of us who study writing spend a lot of time talking about discourse communities. At the simplest level, discourse communities are groups of folks who share a discourse or conversation. The discourse can be oral, written, printed, digitized, etc. Folks may or may not meet in order to share a discourse. Those of us in this class constitute a discourse community. We share guidelines to make talking to one another easier, things like this blog, email, or the Q&A section of the class blackboard site. We share expectations about the subject matter and content of our discourse. Think, for instance, how odd it would be if I suddenly started sending you posts about, say, sailing. We share expectations about what constitutes a reasonable investment of time in this discourse. Would you, for instance, accept ten emails about writing a day, all on different aspects of writing and requiring, in sum, several hours to process? There are discourses, like novels, newspapers, trade journals, RSS feeds, etc., where such an investment of time and energy pay back and are expected. You get the idea.
A discourse community is a group which comes together to hold a conversation and shares expectations about matters such as content, format, kinds and numbers of communications, ideas of evidence, a power structure among its members, genres in which communication will happen, etc. et etc.
Discourse communities are often governed by the attitudes of the societies in which they are embedded. Societies are groups of communities. These various communities share to some degree experiences, knowledge, rituals, technologies (ritualized ways of doing things), tools, and ways of looking at and understanding the world. For example, consider the American society. We share a government, a technological infrastructure, many (but not the same) attitudes, etc.
Now, think for a moment about how our discouse community is embedded in and governed by our society. We come together within an institution--the college--which reflects and is governed by many of the attitudes of society. Education as a means of obtaining and improving one's social status is a good example, but others would include how this class is structured, the basic notion of student and teacher, our roles...I could go one, but one last word about society: many times, when you talk about culture--the American culture, for instance--what you're really talking about is society. Culture is best thought of as the world view, knowledge base, and practices shared by a community or society. Cultures can interpenatrate different societies, but a society would be impossible to construct without, at some level, a shared base of cultural practice.
OK, here's the breakdown so far: communication is limited by the accepted practices of the society in which it takes place. Most communication happens among specific subgroups within a society called discourse communities, and discourse communities develop a set of shared expectations and practices--that is, a culture specific to that discourse community. Write if you have questions, as you just got thrown an overview of the basic terms in the sociology of communication.
What does all this have to do with good writing? For a hint, take a moment and read the following quote: "Often the accurate answer to a usage question begins, 'It depends.' And what it depends on most often is where you are, who you are, who your listeners or readers are, and what your purpose in speaking or writing is" (Kenneth G. Wilson, usage writer).
The reason why professors shouldn't offer easy answers for what constitutes good writing is these answers are specific to the rules of discourse and society in which the writing is embedded. What constitutes good writing depends on the culture of the discourse community in which the writing takes place, and--most importantly--it depends on the rhetorical situation in which the writing takes place.
Good writing is, hence, a relative term. What is good writing for the author may not be
good writing to their audience. Good writing in one discourse community may not be good writing in another. Good writing in one society usually isn't good writing in another.
Keeping all of the above in mind, my own working definition of what constitutes good writing is defined from the author's point of view on the rhetorical triangle. That is, good writing is that which effectively accomplishes the author's intended goals. Notice this definition still is relative to the rhetorical situation, discourse community, and social expectations in which it takes place, but I can imagine a rhetorical situation where I wasn't a member of my audience's discourse community and didn't share the culture or society of the person with whom I want to communicate and where I am still able to achieve my intended goals.
From the author's perspective, all that matters are intentions and goals, that is, your purpose. This is another reason we have the notion of the discourse community. It makes our lives as author's easier. It's easier to learn the practices and assumptions of the discourse communities of which we are a member than it is to learn the practices and assumptions of every person with whom we want to communicate. If we have a good idea of the expectations of the discourse community with whom we want to communicate, we can cubbyhole this a whole set of readers. Because people are endlessly variable, we won't understand well enough to know exactly how each member will interpret us, but, by-in-large, we will know well enough to do what we intend with the audiences as a whole.
Communities are groups which come together for various purposes. Those of us who study writing spend a lot of time talking about discourse communities. At the simplest level, discourse communities are groups of folks who share a discourse or conversation. The discourse can be oral, written, printed, digitized, etc. Folks may or may not meet in order to share a discourse. Those of us in this class constitute a discourse community. We share guidelines to make talking to one another easier, things like this blog, email, or the Q&A section of the class blackboard site. We share expectations about the subject matter and content of our discourse. Think, for instance, how odd it would be if I suddenly started sending you posts about, say, sailing. We share expectations about what constitutes a reasonable investment of time in this discourse. Would you, for instance, accept ten emails about writing a day, all on different aspects of writing and requiring, in sum, several hours to process? There are discourses, like novels, newspapers, trade journals, RSS feeds, etc., where such an investment of time and energy pay back and are expected. You get the idea.
A discourse community is a group which comes together to hold a conversation and shares expectations about matters such as content, format, kinds and numbers of communications, ideas of evidence, a power structure among its members, genres in which communication will happen, etc. et etc.
Discourse communities are often governed by the attitudes of the societies in which they are embedded. Societies are groups of communities. These various communities share to some degree experiences, knowledge, rituals, technologies (ritualized ways of doing things), tools, and ways of looking at and understanding the world. For example, consider the American society. We share a government, a technological infrastructure, many (but not the same) attitudes, etc.
Now, think for a moment about how our discouse community is embedded in and governed by our society. We come together within an institution--the college--which reflects and is governed by many of the attitudes of society. Education as a means of obtaining and improving one's social status is a good example, but others would include how this class is structured, the basic notion of student and teacher, our roles...I could go one, but one last word about society: many times, when you talk about culture--the American culture, for instance--what you're really talking about is society. Culture is best thought of as the world view, knowledge base, and practices shared by a community or society. Cultures can interpenatrate different societies, but a society would be impossible to construct without, at some level, a shared base of cultural practice.
OK, here's the breakdown so far: communication is limited by the accepted practices of the society in which it takes place. Most communication happens among specific subgroups within a society called discourse communities, and discourse communities develop a set of shared expectations and practices--that is, a culture specific to that discourse community. Write if you have questions, as you just got thrown an overview of the basic terms in the sociology of communication.
What does all this have to do with good writing? For a hint, take a moment and read the following quote: "Often the accurate answer to a usage question begins, 'It depends.' And what it depends on most often is where you are, who you are, who your listeners or readers are, and what your purpose in speaking or writing is" (Kenneth G. Wilson, usage writer).
The reason why professors shouldn't offer easy answers for what constitutes good writing is these answers are specific to the rules of discourse and society in which the writing is embedded. What constitutes good writing depends on the culture of the discourse community in which the writing takes place, and--most importantly--it depends on the rhetorical situation in which the writing takes place.
Good writing is, hence, a relative term. What is good writing for the author may not be
good writing to their audience. Good writing in one discourse community may not be good writing in another. Good writing in one society usually isn't good writing in another.
Keeping all of the above in mind, my own working definition of what constitutes good writing is defined from the author's point of view on the rhetorical triangle. That is, good writing is that which effectively accomplishes the author's intended goals. Notice this definition still is relative to the rhetorical situation, discourse community, and social expectations in which it takes place, but I can imagine a rhetorical situation where I wasn't a member of my audience's discourse community and didn't share the culture or society of the person with whom I want to communicate and where I am still able to achieve my intended goals.
From the author's perspective, all that matters are intentions and goals, that is, your purpose. This is another reason we have the notion of the discourse community. It makes our lives as author's easier. It's easier to learn the practices and assumptions of the discourse communities of which we are a member than it is to learn the practices and assumptions of every person with whom we want to communicate. If we have a good idea of the expectations of the discourse community with whom we want to communicate, we can cubbyhole this a whole set of readers. Because people are endlessly variable, we won't understand well enough to know exactly how each member will interpret us, but, by-in-large, we will know well enough to do what we intend with the audiences as a whole.
Rhetoical Appeals: Ethos, Logos, Pathos and How These Appeals Work in Games
The article I asked you to read in the last post mentions how Aristotle divided how an author/speaker/writer can make appeals to their readers/audience/readers into three kinds of appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos?
Logos deals with appeals to the head through logic and ideas. Pathos deals with appeals to the heart or emotions. Here, think of how the media or a politician will simplify a difficult, complex problem by using a single person or family to represent it. Appeals through pathos have become so common, they've entered popular culture through such phrases as, "He's the poster boy for...."
Ethos deals with how authors get their audience to identify with them. In many ways, it's the most difficult but effective of the kinds of appeals. Ethos is the root word for ethics, the study of how individuals in groups behave in an acceptable manner, and ethnic group, literally a group of people who identify with one another. How people identify you as part of a group includes everything from word choice to clothing to body posture; so, ethos deals with how you use the various channels of information people will see of you to signal, I am one of you (or not).
Most of you are into gaming. I know next to nothing about the industry or individual games. Most of the games I play involve me in setting up a backgammon, go, or chess board, or they are traditional Cherokee or Navajo games. However, I have learned to look at the games I play in terms of rhetoric, and I try to figure out why they are so popular using the tools rhetoric give me. It's a good technique for understanding games and how they work in terms of doing cultural work (more on this last concept later). The classic games, like go, chess or Monopoly, reproduce in simplified form the social structures and conventions of their culture. The upshot is folks will identify with a game, play it, and make it popular, because they appeal to many in the culture through a kind of unconscious ethos.
For an example, think about musical chairs. Musical chairs keeps getting played, not just because it is fun, but because it reproduces much of the ethos of modern western culture. There is competition for resources. The resources are becoming more and more scarce. Those willing to compete have a better chance of securing access to the desired resources. Sometimes you are unlucky and cannot, no matter how competitive you are, secure access to the desired resources; so, most folks learn to be "good sports" about loosing. There is only one winner. In short, musical chairs is a perfect capitalist game. It reproduces in simplified form the basic "need" to compete to secure scare resources and gain status through securing them.
Monopoly is in essence the same game played through a real estate metaphor.
Logos deals with appeals to the head through logic and ideas. Pathos deals with appeals to the heart or emotions. Here, think of how the media or a politician will simplify a difficult, complex problem by using a single person or family to represent it. Appeals through pathos have become so common, they've entered popular culture through such phrases as, "He's the poster boy for...."
Ethos deals with how authors get their audience to identify with them. In many ways, it's the most difficult but effective of the kinds of appeals. Ethos is the root word for ethics, the study of how individuals in groups behave in an acceptable manner, and ethnic group, literally a group of people who identify with one another. How people identify you as part of a group includes everything from word choice to clothing to body posture; so, ethos deals with how you use the various channels of information people will see of you to signal, I am one of you (or not).
Most of you are into gaming. I know next to nothing about the industry or individual games. Most of the games I play involve me in setting up a backgammon, go, or chess board, or they are traditional Cherokee or Navajo games. However, I have learned to look at the games I play in terms of rhetoric, and I try to figure out why they are so popular using the tools rhetoric give me. It's a good technique for understanding games and how they work in terms of doing cultural work (more on this last concept later). The classic games, like go, chess or Monopoly, reproduce in simplified form the social structures and conventions of their culture. The upshot is folks will identify with a game, play it, and make it popular, because they appeal to many in the culture through a kind of unconscious ethos.
For an example, think about musical chairs. Musical chairs keeps getting played, not just because it is fun, but because it reproduces much of the ethos of modern western culture. There is competition for resources. The resources are becoming more and more scarce. Those willing to compete have a better chance of securing access to the desired resources. Sometimes you are unlucky and cannot, no matter how competitive you are, secure access to the desired resources; so, most folks learn to be "good sports" about loosing. There is only one winner. In short, musical chairs is a perfect capitalist game. It reproduces in simplified form the basic "need" to compete to secure scare resources and gain status through securing them.
Monopoly is in essence the same game played through a real estate metaphor.
An Overview of Rhetorical Situation and a Reading Assignment
Your first reading assignment is here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/43674/rhetorical_triangle.html
It's a short overview of topics which will come up again and again in this class, topics like: rhetoric, rhetorical triangle, author, message, audience. Motley, the author of the article, uses the terms, writer, subject, and reader, but the terms author, message, and audience are interchangeable. The main point is this triangle gives those who think about rhetoric (read: you, now you're in this class) a convenient way to break down and analyze any situation where people are using language or language like behavior to try and do things.
Every text has an author. Every author has intentions, an agenda, or a set of goals for his text. This set of goals is called a rhetorical purpose. Every text is encoded by the author in such a way that they believe their audience can understand the author's intentions. This encoded text is the message. If communication is to happen, texts also have audiences, and not always the ones the author intents. What we'll be talking about in this class is how to encode messages in such a way you, the author, have the effects on your audiences which you intent.
This way of breaking down communication is not limited to just writing. Rhetoric applies every time you use a system of communication and address someone else to achieve some end. Rhetoric is why we know not to wear bathing suits to most job interviews. The way people dress, the gadgets they own, the places they live, their body language, almost everything which reflects a person's intentions involves rhetoric. For example, the way people dress involves them in a rich language of nuance and suggestion. Suits mean. Tee shirts mean. The difference between a rhetor, that is, a user of rhetoric, and everyone else is the rhetor is aware he or she is going through life sending out messages, being read, and interpreted by most everyone he or she meets. The rhetor tries to take command of the various messages s/he sends and encodes them in ways the audiences s/he wants to affect will be affected.
One last term, and I'll end this post. Noise. Modern communication theory evolved out of the traditions of rhetoric. One way to think of the rhetorical triangle is as follows:
sender ====================> receiver
In between the sender and receiver is a signal which contains information. The sender needs to encode the message in such a way the receiver can decode it. In between the sender and the receiver is both the message and noise. If you've ever driven a long distance with an FM radio station on and heard it slowly fade into static, then you've experienced noise getting in the way of the signal. Noise is entropy and/or Murphey at work in the world. Noise is all the stuff which gets in the way of the receiver getting the message the sender encodes in the signal. There are ways to work around noise, but there is no way to get rid of it entirely. This is one reason why folks don't understand you completely when you write. Writing is a good technology, but it has severe limitations and inherent noise. Noise in writing can come from such factors as a person's culture, background, politics, gender, ...well, you get the idea. Noise is why when you say a word, the receiver will not understand 100% of what you mean. Noise is always there. One of the things we'll speak about in the class is how to overcome noise.
Here's one of the things you need to know: noise is always there, but we usually manage to make spoken and written communication do what we want anyway.
It's a short overview of topics which will come up again and again in this class, topics like: rhetoric, rhetorical triangle, author, message, audience. Motley, the author of the article, uses the terms, writer, subject, and reader, but the terms author, message, and audience are interchangeable. The main point is this triangle gives those who think about rhetoric (read: you, now you're in this class) a convenient way to break down and analyze any situation where people are using language or language like behavior to try and do things.
Every text has an author. Every author has intentions, an agenda, or a set of goals for his text. This set of goals is called a rhetorical purpose. Every text is encoded by the author in such a way that they believe their audience can understand the author's intentions. This encoded text is the message. If communication is to happen, texts also have audiences, and not always the ones the author intents. What we'll be talking about in this class is how to encode messages in such a way you, the author, have the effects on your audiences which you intent.
This way of breaking down communication is not limited to just writing. Rhetoric applies every time you use a system of communication and address someone else to achieve some end. Rhetoric is why we know not to wear bathing suits to most job interviews. The way people dress, the gadgets they own, the places they live, their body language, almost everything which reflects a person's intentions involves rhetoric. For example, the way people dress involves them in a rich language of nuance and suggestion. Suits mean. Tee shirts mean. The difference between a rhetor, that is, a user of rhetoric, and everyone else is the rhetor is aware he or she is going through life sending out messages, being read, and interpreted by most everyone he or she meets. The rhetor tries to take command of the various messages s/he sends and encodes them in ways the audiences s/he wants to affect will be affected.
One last term, and I'll end this post. Noise. Modern communication theory evolved out of the traditions of rhetoric. One way to think of the rhetorical triangle is as follows:
sender ====================> receiver
In between the sender and receiver is a signal which contains information. The sender needs to encode the message in such a way the receiver can decode it. In between the sender and the receiver is both the message and noise. If you've ever driven a long distance with an FM radio station on and heard it slowly fade into static, then you've experienced noise getting in the way of the signal. Noise is entropy and/or Murphey at work in the world. Noise is all the stuff which gets in the way of the receiver getting the message the sender encodes in the signal. There are ways to work around noise, but there is no way to get rid of it entirely. This is one reason why folks don't understand you completely when you write. Writing is a good technology, but it has severe limitations and inherent noise. Noise in writing can come from such factors as a person's culture, background, politics, gender, ...well, you get the idea. Noise is why when you say a word, the receiver will not understand 100% of what you mean. Noise is always there. One of the things we'll speak about in the class is how to overcome noise.
Here's one of the things you need to know: noise is always there, but we usually manage to make spoken and written communication do what we want anyway.
Process in Your Own Writing: Prewriting. Assignment.
The fact you got very little direction in producing the first draft of your essay performing a rhetorical analysis of a game was intentional, as was the creation of the frustration you experiences in trying to produce a text without knowing your audience's expectations. I apologize for both, but I've found a little frustration at the beginning goes a long way toward teaching some essential concepts about the writing process and the author/audience relationship.
In fact, one of the hardest things to get students to notice is that their own writing isn't driven just driven by their own purposes but by the desire to meet the expectation of their audience. When you write for a professor, this is why you want to know how long your professor expects a paper to be. This is why you want to know what format the professor expects. This is why you want to interact with your professor and get to know them well enough to know the moves you make in writing and the claims you want to champion don't piss him or her off and, hence, compromise your grade. I hope my lack of direction has made you consciously aware of how much you depend on knowledge of your audience as you write.
Knowing your audience and their expectations is the first step in the writing process, that is, in pre-writing. Pre-writing involves you in making all the decisions necessary to write prior to getting started in drafting a text. In pre-writing, you figure out who your audience(s) is and how to appeal to their desires and needs while meeting your own. You figure out what your desires and needs (your purpose for writing) are. You figure out what you can say, and you figure out how to organize what you can say and what you need to find out and communicate to make the text you produce have the effects on your audience you intent.
Writers get nervous if they don't know how to answer these basic questions, but beginning writers rarely think of making these questions conscious. Writing without such knowledge makes you conscious of the need. Now to get the lesson to register at a gut level.
Until further notice, I want you to make it a conscious part of your writing process to answer the following questions:
Who is my audience?
What topic am I writing on?
What effects do I want to have on my audience? [One way to think of this questions is as a series of sub-questions: 1) What do I want my audience thinking, believing, feeling or doing after reading my text?, or 2) What is my purpose(s) in writing this text?, or 3) Do I want to instruct, persuade, inform, entertain or some combination of all four?]
What genre am I writing in? [Genre answers questions about length, format, topics, how to use evidence. More on this later.]
What can I say? [You can answer this last with a list, a free write, a mind map, or an outline. Again, more on these techniques later.]
How do I organize what I say? [This question gets to specific tactics of organization, like, chronological, less to most important, comparison and contrast, functional vs. formal definition, etc.]
Where to answer these questions:
Set up a blog using google blogger. Name your blog using the following template: FirstNameLateNameENG101Metadiscourse. Make sure to make your blog available to me and the rest of the class. I'll set up a google doc and share it with the class to distribute blog addresses, but for right now, just set up your blog and begin posting. Your blog will be the place where you will write about writing, and this writing can form a part of your portfolio evidence.
In composition, we call thinking about and writing about writing, metadiscourse. Translate: discourse about discourse. The notion is to make your knowledge of writing a conscious conversation which can be examined, added to, and improved. In this assignment, you're developing a conscious set of questions to answer prior to drafting.
For each formal assignment in the class, include an entry in your blog which answers the questions above.
Write if you have questions.
Steve
In fact, one of the hardest things to get students to notice is that their own writing isn't driven just driven by their own purposes but by the desire to meet the expectation of their audience. When you write for a professor, this is why you want to know how long your professor expects a paper to be. This is why you want to know what format the professor expects. This is why you want to interact with your professor and get to know them well enough to know the moves you make in writing and the claims you want to champion don't piss him or her off and, hence, compromise your grade. I hope my lack of direction has made you consciously aware of how much you depend on knowledge of your audience as you write.
Knowing your audience and their expectations is the first step in the writing process, that is, in pre-writing. Pre-writing involves you in making all the decisions necessary to write prior to getting started in drafting a text. In pre-writing, you figure out who your audience(s) is and how to appeal to their desires and needs while meeting your own. You figure out what your desires and needs (your purpose for writing) are. You figure out what you can say, and you figure out how to organize what you can say and what you need to find out and communicate to make the text you produce have the effects on your audience you intent.
Writers get nervous if they don't know how to answer these basic questions, but beginning writers rarely think of making these questions conscious. Writing without such knowledge makes you conscious of the need. Now to get the lesson to register at a gut level.
Until further notice, I want you to make it a conscious part of your writing process to answer the following questions:
Who is my audience?
What topic am I writing on?
What effects do I want to have on my audience? [One way to think of this questions is as a series of sub-questions: 1) What do I want my audience thinking, believing, feeling or doing after reading my text?, or 2) What is my purpose(s) in writing this text?, or 3) Do I want to instruct, persuade, inform, entertain or some combination of all four?]
What genre am I writing in? [Genre answers questions about length, format, topics, how to use evidence. More on this later.]
What can I say? [You can answer this last with a list, a free write, a mind map, or an outline. Again, more on these techniques later.]
How do I organize what I say? [This question gets to specific tactics of organization, like, chronological, less to most important, comparison and contrast, functional vs. formal definition, etc.]
Where to answer these questions:
Set up a blog using google blogger. Name your blog using the following template: FirstNameLateNameENG101Metadiscourse. Make sure to make your blog available to me and the rest of the class. I'll set up a google doc and share it with the class to distribute blog addresses, but for right now, just set up your blog and begin posting. Your blog will be the place where you will write about writing, and this writing can form a part of your portfolio evidence.
In composition, we call thinking about and writing about writing, metadiscourse. Translate: discourse about discourse. The notion is to make your knowledge of writing a conscious conversation which can be examined, added to, and improved. In this assignment, you're developing a conscious set of questions to answer prior to drafting.
For each formal assignment in the class, include an entry in your blog which answers the questions above.
Write if you have questions.
Steve
Kaizen: Get the Process Right, and Everything Else Will Work.
At the end of World War II, the economy of Japan was in shambles. The Allies had won the war, but winning the peace looked like a more difficult proposition. Folks remembered what had happened in Germany following the peace of World War I. Germany was penalized. We'd provided no help in rebuilding the economy and let the country stew in its own juices. After all, they were the enemy? Right? Run away inflation, Hitler, and scapegoating were the result. No one wanted a repeat, but no one understood how to rebuild a country either. What did we do? We looked for industrial experts. Japan's (and modern Germany's) position as world powers and economic power houses was the result.
At the conclusion of WWII, the current vogue in industrial management was time and motion study. During the war, specialists in the field had had a lot of practice, and the success of US industry in shifting toward producing the stuff of war was proof that time and motion study combined with the factory model of industrial production was a very, very powerful combination. Specialists in the field took the complex and seemingly simple and identified the steps involved. They then identified what steps had to be done and what was "wasted" motion. Through each of these understandings, they improved processes.
The QWERTY keyboard is a good example of how the time and motion study combine to make the human/machine interface more effective. The QWERTY keyboard was set up using early ides about time and motion studies. Wikipedia describes the history as:
The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised and created in the 1860s by the creator of the first modern typewriter, Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor who lived in Milwaukee. Originally, the characters on the typewriters he invented were arranged alphabetically, set on the end of a metal bar which struck the paper when its key was pressed. However, once an operator had learned to type at speed, the bars attached to letters that lay close together on the keyboard became entangled with one another, forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars, and also frequently blotting the document.[1] A business associate of Sholes, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to speed up typing by preventing common pairs of typebars from striking the platen at the same time and sticking together.
The keyboard most of you use to interact with the computer was the result. The layout of the keys is designed to solve a problem in a human/mechanical interface--a problem which disappeared long ago. We continue to use the QWERTY layout, because learning to type using it requires a fairly heavy investment in time and energy, and it's the way things have been done for 150 years. Note there are better, more effectual ways to design a keyboard to ease the job of a typist getting English text into a computer, but we still use the QWERTY. Why? Answering this question goes a long way toward your developing a more complex idea of how processes work in human communities, so I'm going to take a moment to provide an answer before returning to the story of time and motion study, industrial management, Kaizen, and your becoming a better writer.
The short answer to why we continue to use the QWERTY keyboard is that it's the way most folks have learned to type. It took a long time for those of us who touch type to gain the skill. It works pretty well, that is, I can type faster than I can think and compose prose. To convince me to change over to a new method of text entry, you have to make the case (persuade me) the new method is worth the trouble of learning it. You have to make the case the new method will make my life sufficiently easier to warrant the investment in time and energy to make the change, you have to justify the capital investment needed to put new keyboards on most desks and retrain the workforce, and you have to overcome the "it's tradition" factor. The "it's tradition" factor is one reason that substantial changes in social practice happen along generational lines, that is, the young tend to have less invested in having learned a particular method of doing something, so they are less likely to resist a new, "better" method on the grounds the work doesn't have sufficient payoff. The young also have the task of establishing an identity different from their parents' and forming social communities outside of the family. The rebellion involved in adopting a new method of doing something, hence, has more appeal to the young. Catastrophe also sets up the conditions through which change will be accepted.
Loosing the war was one such catastrophe for Japan, so while they didn't exactly welcome Western experts into each factory, they saw the necessity of adopting new methods of industrial production. However, the problem involved in getting the Japanese to adopt the new methods of more effective factory labor design involved more than simply making the case that it worked, there was also a less obvious cultural conflict inherent in time and motion, process based industrial management. Those of us in the West had had centuries to adapt our society to the demands of the industrial revolution and, more importantly, to adapt industry and technology to the demands of society. One such compromise had to do with the place of the worker in a western factory.
In western factories, an individual does the same task repeatedly. They move one piece of a widget to another line. They attach one piece of the widget, and the next person down the line attaches the next. Such isolated sub-steps in a process work perfectly with time and motion study. Think about it. If you can identify a way for the individual to use less motion and effort to attach their piece of a widget, you can speed up the whole line. In a similar way, you can identify choke points, that is, points in the process where a single step or group of steps slows down overall production. Once identified, you can apply the know how of mechanical design to automate the task, break it down into more steps, or otherwise make it more effective, and you can make the whole line or the whole process more efficient.
In western culture, we've gotten used to "doing our job," that is, doing our bit of an overall project or doing our job on the line. The idea of single craftspersons doing all the steps involved in producing a product is the exception, not the rule. In the 1940s, the Japanese, however, were just coming out of feudal, crafts based society. Their workers were used to being involved in understanding products as wholes and not parts. They were also used to thinking of work as an end rather than a means. For example, think of Zen meditation practices built around specific kinds of work, like sweeping. Finally, they were used to thinking of communities and not individuals as the center of social and individual action. The upshot was that they adapted process based, time and motion study to the norms of their society. Kaizen was the result.
The notion of "low hanging fruit" is a classic metaphor from the industrial management philosophy of Kaizen. Kiazen also provides some useful language when teaching process, teaching process theory, running a writing program, or teaching folks to become better writers. The basic tenets are:
At the conclusion of WWII, the current vogue in industrial management was time and motion study. During the war, specialists in the field had had a lot of practice, and the success of US industry in shifting toward producing the stuff of war was proof that time and motion study combined with the factory model of industrial production was a very, very powerful combination. Specialists in the field took the complex and seemingly simple and identified the steps involved. They then identified what steps had to be done and what was "wasted" motion. Through each of these understandings, they improved processes.
The QWERTY keyboard is a good example of how the time and motion study combine to make the human/machine interface more effective. The QWERTY keyboard was set up using early ides about time and motion studies. Wikipedia describes the history as:
The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised and created in the 1860s by the creator of the first modern typewriter, Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor who lived in Milwaukee. Originally, the characters on the typewriters he invented were arranged alphabetically, set on the end of a metal bar which struck the paper when its key was pressed. However, once an operator had learned to type at speed, the bars attached to letters that lay close together on the keyboard became entangled with one another, forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars, and also frequently blotting the document.[1] A business associate of Sholes, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to speed up typing by preventing common pairs of typebars from striking the platen at the same time and sticking together.
The keyboard most of you use to interact with the computer was the result. The layout of the keys is designed to solve a problem in a human/mechanical interface--a problem which disappeared long ago. We continue to use the QWERTY layout, because learning to type using it requires a fairly heavy investment in time and energy, and it's the way things have been done for 150 years. Note there are better, more effectual ways to design a keyboard to ease the job of a typist getting English text into a computer, but we still use the QWERTY. Why? Answering this question goes a long way toward your developing a more complex idea of how processes work in human communities, so I'm going to take a moment to provide an answer before returning to the story of time and motion study, industrial management, Kaizen, and your becoming a better writer.
The short answer to why we continue to use the QWERTY keyboard is that it's the way most folks have learned to type. It took a long time for those of us who touch type to gain the skill. It works pretty well, that is, I can type faster than I can think and compose prose. To convince me to change over to a new method of text entry, you have to make the case (persuade me) the new method is worth the trouble of learning it. You have to make the case the new method will make my life sufficiently easier to warrant the investment in time and energy to make the change, you have to justify the capital investment needed to put new keyboards on most desks and retrain the workforce, and you have to overcome the "it's tradition" factor. The "it's tradition" factor is one reason that substantial changes in social practice happen along generational lines, that is, the young tend to have less invested in having learned a particular method of doing something, so they are less likely to resist a new, "better" method on the grounds the work doesn't have sufficient payoff. The young also have the task of establishing an identity different from their parents' and forming social communities outside of the family. The rebellion involved in adopting a new method of doing something, hence, has more appeal to the young. Catastrophe also sets up the conditions through which change will be accepted.
Loosing the war was one such catastrophe for Japan, so while they didn't exactly welcome Western experts into each factory, they saw the necessity of adopting new methods of industrial production. However, the problem involved in getting the Japanese to adopt the new methods of more effective factory labor design involved more than simply making the case that it worked, there was also a less obvious cultural conflict inherent in time and motion, process based industrial management. Those of us in the West had had centuries to adapt our society to the demands of the industrial revolution and, more importantly, to adapt industry and technology to the demands of society. One such compromise had to do with the place of the worker in a western factory.
In western factories, an individual does the same task repeatedly. They move one piece of a widget to another line. They attach one piece of the widget, and the next person down the line attaches the next. Such isolated sub-steps in a process work perfectly with time and motion study. Think about it. If you can identify a way for the individual to use less motion and effort to attach their piece of a widget, you can speed up the whole line. In a similar way, you can identify choke points, that is, points in the process where a single step or group of steps slows down overall production. Once identified, you can apply the know how of mechanical design to automate the task, break it down into more steps, or otherwise make it more effective, and you can make the whole line or the whole process more efficient.
In western culture, we've gotten used to "doing our job," that is, doing our bit of an overall project or doing our job on the line. The idea of single craftspersons doing all the steps involved in producing a product is the exception, not the rule. In the 1940s, the Japanese, however, were just coming out of feudal, crafts based society. Their workers were used to being involved in understanding products as wholes and not parts. They were also used to thinking of work as an end rather than a means. For example, think of Zen meditation practices built around specific kinds of work, like sweeping. Finally, they were used to thinking of communities and not individuals as the center of social and individual action. The upshot was that they adapted process based, time and motion study to the norms of their society. Kaizen was the result.
The notion of "low hanging fruit" is a classic metaphor from the industrial management philosophy of Kaizen. Kiazen also provides some useful language when teaching process, teaching process theory, running a writing program, or teaching folks to become better writers. The basic tenets are:
1) Use existing processes, tools, and infrastructure to "pick the lowest hanging fruit." [NB: Little if any additional investments in capital intensive remachining and work force training are needed.]
2) Use groups made up of management and workers to examine goals, products and existing processes. [NB Tap into the knowledge and skills set of those who do the work and those who have a larger picture, all the while helping to build a better community.]
3) Identify *small* changes in process which might provide a more efficient process or better product.
4) Use the group to identify which changes in process will be made.
5) Implement change(s).
6) Use the group to evaluate changes.
7) If the changes are deemed effective, maintain changes as part of a new process.
8) Rinse and repeat.
9) Pick higher fruits as the changes in process accumulate.
Kaizen is a merging of western process theory and Japanese belief about how work and the worker fit into community and life. Kaizen is accredited for the success and rebirth of the Japanese economy following WWII. They started with what they had--picking the lowest fruit--and used the power of community to create processes governed by the notion one makes small changes over time, changes accumulate, and better process makes better process.
Here's how all this fits into a writing class and your becoming a better writer. Think of yourself as a writer in the process of becoming. You want to use your existing skill and knowledge set about writing, how to write, and how to do things with words to produce texts which accomplish your ends. You pick the lowest hanging fruits, but you also know that your current process and knowledge set isn't the most effective. To borrow a metaphor from the QWERTY keyboard, your writing process does well enough, but it could be more effective at doing its job.
The Kaizen of the writing process begins here. You make a commitment to improving the processes, tricks, and techniques you use to produce effective texts. You articulate your process, and you then articulate a possible improvement in your process. You make the changes necessary to implement this one improvement, and you then evaluate the change. If the change you've made makes your writing more effective, both in terms of it accomplishing your purposes for writing and/or in making the job of writing easier, then you keep the change as part of your process.
You are already involved in this process. You are taking an inventory of yourself as a writer (that is, responding to the WPA Outcomes and updating your understanding as new concepts, like Kaizen writing are introduced). This week, you'll be writing a paper describing a process you use in creating a product tied to the work you're already doing or hope to do. This paper is to get you used to the notion that process is one key to improvement, and you begin the process of change by getting a handle on the processes you already use.
Quite literally, you are discovering and beginning the Kaizen (the process of small continuous improvement) of your own writing and learning how to apply Kaizen to other aspects of your professional and personal life. Once you get your head around the fact that this class is about process and not product, that is, discovery of the process involved in creating a text and making your process more effective, then you're a long way toward getting the content of the course.
Week 3: Process, Overview of the Week
Week Three: Process
I’m hoping you’ll take this as an opportunity to discuss a process which is used the field you’re hoping to go into and your experiences in the field. One of the great things about UAT is most of us are geeks. I’m a rhetoric and English geek. By geek I mean someone who is very knowledgeable and passionate about a specific field of human endeavor. So far, it’s been my experience that most students here already know a great deal about the fields they hope to study and many have already done a lot of coding, game design, etc. If this assumption is wrong in your specific case, get in touch with me, and we’ll speak about how to modify the assignment so it will be of use to you and help me teach the notion of process in communication.
If all goes well, I’ll build on your discussions of process to teach you how to put process theory to work in your own lives and specifically in your writing and in becoming a better writer.
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