ENG 651 Week 1: Rhetoric

Posted on January 11, 2022 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Syllabus
  • Reading Responses (?)
  • Some Kind of Lecture Thing
  • Talking About Corder
  • For Next Class

Syllabus

Let’s take a quick peek.

Reading Responses

Due to my messaging snafu, I’m unsure how many folks will have read the Herrick and the Lanham–as of 4:40, only one person has posted to the Canvas Discussion forum (thanks Erika–those were great responses). So I’m hoping at least a few other people will be ready to discuss those two readings.

Topology of the Herrick reading:

    1. Rhetoric and Persuasion (pg. 3-5). How does Herrick attempt to nudge our understanding of persuasion?
    2. Rhetoric is Adapted to an Audience (pg. 8-10)
    3. Rhetoric Reveals Human Motives and Rhetoric is Responsive (pg. 10-12)
    4. Rhetoric Addresses Contingent Issues (pg. 15-16)
    5. Rhetoric Tests Ideas (pg. 16-17)
    6. Rhetoric Assists Advocacy (pg. 17-19)
    7. Rhetoric Distributes Power (pg. 19-21)
    8. Rhetoric Discovers Facts and Rhetoric Shapes Knowledge (pg. 21-22)
    9. Rhetoric Builds Community (pg. 22-23)

Some Kind of Lecture Thing

I want to think a bit differently about the two rhetorics Lanham outlines, the Rationalist Platonic/Ramist tradition and the “architectonic” McKeon-ist tradition.

In doing so, I want to work towards a definition of rhetoric.

I consider rhetoric as the study and practice of how we can develop experiences, spaces, collaborations, encounters, through which we help ourselves and others negotiate the disequilibrium produced by difference in order to potentially foster more productive collaboration, negotiation, and change.

Rhetoric seeks a way to inhabit the world that recognizes the dangers like lie in our selfish, powerful, and often unconscious desire for security, comfort, and mastery.

Corder Discussion

My standard array of questions:

  • What challenge does Corder issue that problematizes all rhetoric, but especially positivistic rhetoric?
  • Explicate what Corder means by “narrative.” What are some other words we might use in its place? (Hint: I think Corder is rhetorically avoiding one charged term)
  • Why is Corder opposed to framing Rogers as a model for *all* argument? (His critique of Maxine Hairston, which involves one of the greatest “shade” sentences in the history of academia)
  • What dimension(s) does Corder add to argument that is/are often ignored?
  • What is the meaning(s) of the anecdote Corder uses later in the essay? Why include it? What claim/idea does it support?
  • Why does Corder use the word “love”? In what way is Corder’s approach to rhetoric like “love”? [That’s a really interesting terministic choice. I have a few ideas that I’ll share with you in class, but I am interested in how you interpret his decision. Note that I think this is *by far* the hardest question]

Homework

      • Miller, C. R. (1979). A humanistic rationale for technical writing. College English, 610–617.
      • Clark, Dave. (2004). Is professional writing relevant?
      • Fadde and Sullivan. (2013). Designing communication for collaboration across engineering cultures.

The Miller and the Clark move us from thinking about rhetorical theory to professional/technical writing–from its humble beginning seeking legitimacy from literature faculty, while simultaneously attempting to identify and explicate its intellectual foundations, to wrestling with the theory/practice divide and how to make application and service-learning something more than “charity work” (for those who have taken 301–the Clark piece haunts me a bit–I know it will be something I think about as we work with non-profits this semester).

While the Fadde and Sullivan speak to cross-cultural situations, their methods of audience awareness, attendance to local power configurations, and action deliberation are relevant to virtually any rhetorical situation. Let me suggest you read carefully the narrative piece in the beginning, because I’m going to ask you to compose a few emails in next week’s class.

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ENG 231 1.T: Welcome, Rhetoric & Procedurality

Posted on January 11, 2022 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Syllabus
  • WTF is Rhetoric?
  • Ian Bogost and Procedurality
  • Homework

Syllabus

I sort of have one.

WTF is(n’t) Rhetoric?

Here we go again.

Levinas:
“Ontology, which reduces the other to the same, promotes freedom–the freedom that is the identification of the same, not allowing itself to be alienated by the other.”

“We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics. ” (Totality and Infinity 42-43; “freedom” in direct conflict with “responsibility/obligation”)

Davis:
“An ethics of decision in a world that has lost its criteria for responsible action begins with straining to hear the excess that gets drowned out, sacrificied for the clarity of One voice, One call, One legitimate position.”
(Breaking Up at Totality 19)

Hyde:
“Rhetoric facilitates acknowledgement by transforming space and time into dwelling places where people can feel at home with each other, engage in collaborative deliberation, and know together ways of resolving disputed concerns. […] The rhetor is an architect, a builder of dwelling places, homes, habitats, where the caress of others is a welcoming occurrence.”

Cavarero:
Thinking and speaking are different activities. Thinking wants to be timeless […] furthermore, it is always solitary, even when it takes place between several people […] As Maria Zambrano notes, too, “logos proceeds without any other opposition than what it, in order to better show itself, poses to itself.”

Speaking, on the contrary […] does not know in advance where it is going, and it entrusts itself to the unpredictable nature of what the interlocutors say. In short, thought is as solitary as speech is relational.

Vitanza:
My position is, especially in the next chapter, that we are not at home in our world/whirl of language. Any and every attempt to assume that we are has or will have created for human beings dangerous situations. (Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, 157

Now it is crucial to understand that, for Heidegger, all that “we speak” by way of logos/language, or “speaking/saying” is perpetually an act of concealing/unconcealing. For Heidegger, this Being/essence cannot be realized, completely revealed or unconcealed. Any and every attempt to unconceal or answer definitively is to perpetrate an act of violence on Being and on human being. (NSHoR, 177)

Rickert:
Dwelling places us in the insight that rhetoric, being worldly, cannot be understood solely as human doing and that persuasion gains its bearings from an affectability that emerges with our material environments both prior to and alongside the human…

Kristeva:
To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts. (Strangers to Ourselves)

Constructive end point / foundations of rhetorical analysis of a video game:

  • Game: What is the *purpose* of this text? What statement does it *intend* to make about our world, society, human condition, struggles?
  • Player: How do you relate to the game’s intended purpose? Does it resonate with you?
  • Speaker: Who are they trying to be? What voice/style do they assume? How do they position themselves in relation to genre/audience?

Now we will complicate this by adding a procedural layer to our questioning.

Ian Bogost and Procedurality

The first way we will analyze games this semester stems from Ian Bogost’s theory of procedural rhetoric. Bogost seeks to add procedural rhetoric to its other dominant traditions–oral/written rhetoric and visual rhetoric (which has gained increasing importance in the late 20th and early 21st centuries). Given the messy diatribe that preceded this paragraph, let’s just say that Bogost tends to define rhetoric as “influence,” close to persuasion, but recognizing non-rational and non-conscious dimensions to rhetoric. That is, we are being “persuaded” at almost every point in our lives by forces explicit and implicit (for instance, the ways that desks are arranged in rows are “persuading” you to accept my authority etc etc). Bogost believes video games are extraordinary good at this kind of passive, non-conscious persuasion. Let’s figure out why.

Homework

Your first assignment is due before Thursday’s class. Read Bogost’s 2017 article “The Rhetoric of Video Games” (.pdf in the files section of Canvas).

I’m curious to learn you perception of this article–do you understand what Bogost is talking about? Do you find this article difficult to follow?–and so I’m going to ask you to reflect on a few questions. You can write your answers directly in Canvas or submit them as a Google Doc / Word docx.

These responses are meant to prime you for Thursday’s discussion. I’m hoping everyone comes to class Thursday with something to contribute (so you don’t have to be super happy with every response below, but you should be ready to share one of them).

  • Question #1: Find me the line where Bogost defines procedural rhetoric. Try putting it in your own words.
  • Question #2: Is there a term/part of this article you don’t understand or want me to address in detail? And/or is there a part of this article with which you disagree?
  • Question #3: What do you make of Bogost’s analysis of Take Back Illinois and Bully?
  • Question #4: Can you think of a time when a game did something interesting procedurally? What game? What did it do? Or can you think of a game in which the procedures and mechanics lack any kind of meaningful relationship to the argument/purpose/theme?
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ENG 301 1.T: Welcome / Job Ads

Posted on January 10, 2022 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Syllabus
  • Ross 1240 Computer Lab
  • Project One Overview
  • Email Assignment
  • Brumberger and Lauer Assignment

Syllabus Review

Yeah, sure, starting with the syllabus is cliche. But this course probably works a bit differently than others you’ve taken for a couple of reasons. First, because I use labor-based grading. Second, because this course is designed less as a vehicle to teach you something, and more as a vehicle for you to develop a skill.

Ross 1240 Computer Lab

Starting next week, we’ll be meeting every Thursday in the Ross 1240 computer lab. Tuesday’s we’ll continue to meet here in CAND 0240.

Brumberger and Lauer on Jobs

Our first project is rooted Eva Brumberger and Claire Lauer’s article “The Evolution of Technical Communication: An Analysis of Industry Job Postings.” I developed this project in conjunction with research I conducted as I was developing professional writing courses for UNC’s Writing minor. I was charged with developing 3 courses that would help both Writing minors and English majors be better prepared for the job market. This charge led me to research job advertisements for English majors, and Brumberger and Lauer (2015) stands as the most recent and comprehensive study I found.

However, their article focuses on “technical communication.” This designation can have many meanings–sometimes it is merely a synonym for professional writing. But not in their case–they use it (as do I) in the more precise sense of developing documentation (instruction manuals), product testing (usability reports), and working with scientific experts to communicate scientific/technical knowledge. Our department doesn’t have someone with those specializations–so as much as I appreciate their research, I wanted something a bit more relevant to a smaller department. Their research speaks more to folks at large research institutions with Professional and Technical Writing major, more specialized faculty, and software licenses such as MadCap Flare or Adobe RoboHelp. We are a much smaller department with 5 tenure-track faculty (and none of us, I think, would claim Professional or Technical writing as a core specialization–we have experts in Rhetorical Theory, Public Rhetorics, Cultural Rhetorics, Compositionists, etc). So the question that drove my own research, which you will learn to recreate, is: what skills, technologies, characteristics can UNC focus on to maximize your preparation for today’s job market?

In answering that question, I’ve turned my attention to Professional Writing jobs outside of technical writing. During my research, I came across a specialized job listing site–mediabistro.com. From their “About Us” page:

Mediabistro is the premier media job listings site and career destination for savvy media professionals. Whether you’re searching for new job opportunities, striving to advance your career, or looking to learn new skills and develop valuable expertise, we are here to strengthen and support your professional journey. We have the tools and resources to help you navigate your own path and find career happiness.

In addition to job postings, mediabistro.com offers resume services and courses on professionalization and personal brand building. Rather than turning to a more popular site like monster.com, I used mediabistro.com because it focuses specifically on jobs involving writing and communication.

I spent the month of June 2018 scanning every job ad posted to mediabistro.com. I filtered out jobs that:

  • Called for experience in television production (especially those that required years of on-air experience)
  • Called for extensive experience as a field journalist (although I retained jobs open to those without journalistic experience; a few jobs were looking for bloggers or content contributers)
  • Required degrees in finance or accounting
  • Required extensive experience with Google Ads and/or other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) softwares (Salesforce was particularly popular)
  • Required applicants bring a client log with them
  • Required management or hiring experience (the term management is quite slippery in adverts; sometimes it means “manage a team” and clearly indicates the need for leadership experience. Sometimes it means “manage our twitter account” and isn’t, per se, a leadership position)
  • Required backend coding skills
  • Required extensive graphic design portfolios (I did retain entry level graphic design jobs)
  • Required 5 or more years of experience
  • Telemarketing jobs, part-time jobs, or unpaid internships

After filtering out these jobs, I was left with a corpus of 375 jobs.

Over the next two weeks, you will “code” 20 jobs from this corpus. We will talk about qualitative coding in class on Wednesday. In addition to familiarizing you with the job market, and the tech, skills, and characteristics for which employers seek, you will also learn a staple Professional writing/ qualitative research method: corpus coding (and a few methods that go with it, such as norming a coding scheme and ensuring the reliability and validity of data).

Here are the stages / parts of the Job Analysis Project (which we will be working on for approximately the next month).

Job Corpus. This is the collection of job ads (from June 2018) from which you will choose 20. Then you will code those job ads.

Job Coding Scheme. Here is a link to the coding scheme. I have slightly modified the scheme used by Brumberger and Lauer. After we read Brumberger and Lauer, I spend two classes coding ads a class (norming sessions). This familiarizes them with coding and qualitative research methods. When there is disagreement on a code, we take a class vote.

Collective Job Code Spreadsheet. Students highlight text in the google doc job ads and insert their codes as comments so that other students can review them. The more students that input codes, the better! This creates the data they need for their report. So, after students code a job ad (inserting comments in the Google Doc), they should insert a link to that document (from the corpus) into the spreadsheet (the job title) and put their codes into the spreadsheet too. (I know this sounds complicated, but I can probably show you this in 3 minutes).

Personal Research Data Spreadsheet. Students make their own, personal copy of that file. They then select the jobs from the spreadsheet that they want to use in their report and make another spreadsheet that they can use to produce graphs. I do this in Google Sheets, you could also probably do it in Excel (Sheets is just more convenient to share and easier, IMO, to use). If you need help turning tabular data into a graph, I can show you quickly (it literally just takes a right-click, then playing around with some menu features for labeling axis and formatting).

Job Report Rubric. Because professional writing is so different than academic writing, I spend a lot of time familiarizing y’all with the rubric. We do this by assessing papers as a class and comparing our evaluations. Below are some sample papers; we will use the rubric to score some sample reports before we finally draft, share, and revise the final reports. Trust me, you can do this.

So, that’s a lot of stuff–but like I said, that will comprise nearly the first month of class and I’ll be here to walk you through every step.

Let’s try coding a job advertisement or two.

Homework For Thursday / Tuesday

For your first assignment, I would like you to send me an introductory email following the formatting rules for email found in the Alred, Brusaw, and Oliu’s Handbook of Technical Writing (ABO). [Why ABO?]

When writing an email to a faculty member, it is helpful to consult this chart [especially if you don’t know how faculty rank works / you don’t know a lot about who is teaching your class].

DO NOT USE CANVAS TO SEND ME THIS EMAIL. I cannot reliably respond to emails sent via Canvas, nor can I include them in emails to our community partners. So, part of this exercise is asking you to send me an email from your preferred email address, one that you check regularly.

My email address is marc.santos@unco.edu.

Your email should do a few things:

  • introduces yourself (and your academic/professional trajectory, major? minor? what year? future plans?)
  • explains your interest in the course (what are you hoping to learn? why are you here?)
  • details any professional or creative writing experience you have
  • details any social media or graphic design experience you have (including software proficiencies). Personal social media experience counts, too
  • asks me a question (about the class, about myself, about the job market, the writing minor, or about life, liberty, and/or the pursuit of happiness)

Also note the Brumberger and Lauer, “The Evolution of Technical Communication: An Analysis of Industry Job Postings” assignment in Canvas. The Canvas assignment has details on the reading response post (you can find the Brumberger and Lauer reading in the files section of Canvas). We will talk about the discussion posts in class on Thursday–the reading and discussion post are due next Tuesday.

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ENG 328 15.W: Final Thoughts

Posted on December 1, 2021 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Let me start this with something fun.

This semester I have–I think–done a pretty good job of introducing you to the fundamentals of visual design. I have presented design in terms of a set of rules: rule regarding typography, spacing, alignment, color, contrast, etc. I do this in large part because rules are teachable. I can reduce something infinite, complex, contradictory, affective, subjective to a set of finite principles. There is an intoxicating gravity to this movement from the infinite variety to the fixed list. As a writing instructor, as a design instructor, it is easy to get drunk on control. But, as a theorist, a philosopher, a rhetorician, I have spent my life in suspicion of this very desire–the desire for control, the desire to quell the other in the form of the same. Similitude becomes a demand. Let me share two quotes, the first from Victor Vitanza, the second from Julia Kristeva.

  • “We are not at home in our world/whirl of language. And every attempt to assume that we are has or will have created for human beings dangerous situations. […] Any and every attempt to unconceal or answer definitively [the question of what is [human] B/being] is to perpetrate and act of violence on Being and on human being
  • “To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts”

Postmodernism in two sentences:
The desire to *know* what something *is*.
The resistance to invite the strange.

I think, in this class at least, I am aware of the insecurity that haunts me: I am not an artist, but rather one who attempts to unconceal art, to pin it down into something “knowable” (in a different philosophical language: to transform the infinite into the ontological, the knowable, to make the nomad live in a home). To make the other the same. To erase differance in the name of the universe. One reason I ended the Helvetica documentary with the discussion of Carlson–a designer who didn’t set out to break rules, but rather simply set out to express.

I end on what might perhaps feel an excessively philosophical note. If I have a critique of this class, it is that amongst the rush to teach both design principles and technological tools, I haven’t quite figure out how to incorporate rhetorical theory. That remains a challenge. And, unlike past semesters, I didn’t really have an “avant garde” challenge in this class. I haven’t asked you to make me a map that isn’t a map, to make me a mystory or a MEmorial, to push beyond established genres and–to borrow from Nietzsche–design with a hammer.

To be a designer isn’t necessarily to follow rules (although, rhetorically speaking, the rules will rule, will always, already influence judgement; we disseminate without control over how a work will be received and–if educated–aware and sensitive to the many ways it will be mis/read). To be a designer is to design, to create, to express, to write perhaps without care, but more likely with suspicion, of what we are told is right.

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ENG 301 15: Resumes and Cover Letters

Posted on November 30, 2021 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Resume Review
  • Fundamentals of Cover Letters
  • Homework

Cover Letters

The ABO entry for “Application Cover Letters” [pp. 36-41] identifies 3-4 purposes for your cover letter:

  • Introduce you as a candidate with the skills that can contribute to the particular organization
  • Explain what particular job interests you (or why you are interested in the advertised position
  • Illustrate via specific examples qualifications in your resume that match the position
  • Signify your desire/availability for an interview (this is a phatic closing gesture)

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing things in that order. But you might. It is tricky–you are playing a kind of meta-game with a reader (since the rhetorical purpose of your document is super obvious: GIVE ME A JOB). The game concerns how skillfully/subtly you can perform within this charged situation. You want to consider tone–how do you come off as someone who is hard-working and professional while also not sounding too formal and/or stiff? Unless the job advertisement and your online research suggests that they are a formal environment. Essentially, how good are you at reading the room?

Here’s what the cover letter shouldn’t do: it shouldn’t just summarize your resume. It should select one or two skills from the resume and flush them out, providing context and details. Bottom line: TURN A GREAT ACCOMPLISHMENT INTO A STORY. Don’t tell me you have experience researching grants, tell me how you partnered with the ARC of Weld County to identify and research, using both the State of Colorado and the Foundation Center databases, 13 specific grants for non-profit organizations focused on children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Or how you worked with a team of designers to produce flyers for both print and digital distribution for 8 upcoming events. Mock ups of these flyers are available on your website. Whatever. Aristotle reminds us that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end–a problem, your solution, and a measurement/assessment of the results.

The cover letter is your opportunity to tell a story about the best work you’ve done. Caveat: the best work that is relative to the position. It is an opportunity to show a few awesome things (the resume is your opportunity to tell them about all the things).

The three examples in the ABO book aren’t bad. But I feel like they could be better. They could provide more details about what someone has done (in some places they feel a bit too much like someone is narrating a resume).

But the ABO advice for the final paragraph is fine. Let’s look at those final paragraphs.

Let’s look at a few sample letters.

Another sample.

Homework

Your last assignment for the semester is to produce a resume and cover letter for a specific job or internship.

You will see the following assignments in Canvas:

  • Week 15: Resume Draft
  • Week 15: Cover Letter Draft [due by 9:00am]
  • Week 16: Final Job Materials [due Tuesday, Dec 7th at midnight]
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ENG 328 15.M: From Helvetica to a CD Cover

Posted on November 29, 2021 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Something Awesome Reminder (Friday’s Class)
  • Crucible Cover Review
  • Helvetica and the “Final Exam”

Something Awesome Reminder

Remember that we are meeting to share products on Friday (I made a magnet for a group of gaming friends).

IIRC: I need to order at least one gluten-free pizza.

Crucible Cover Review

I was extremely impressed by the overall quality of your work. There were several submissions worthy of publication; the Crucible staff debated several designs.

One of the things I love about teaching this class is how easy it is your you (and me) to see your growth over the course of the semester. Let’s take a look at a few designs that demonstrate that growth.

Helvetica and the “Final Exam”

Plan, on Monday we will watch a 30 minute portion of the Helvetica documentary.

Links:

On Wednesday, I will ask you to design a cover for a contemporary song (think of the square Apple Music or Spotify image).As an example, we’ll discuss Of Monsters and Men’s song “Alligator” from their album Fever Dream. A quick heurisitic:

  • What adjectives come to mind as you listen to the music? How would you describe the music?
  • Any key lyrics that get repeated?
  • Is the song about something?
  • Does looking at their album covers / other song covers provide inspiration?

Important: this is not a final exam. It is meant to be a fun, stress-free activity, one that allows us to exercise the design principles we’ve worked on these last few months. If you pass in a cover at the end of Wednesday’s class, then you get an A! (I’m thinking this might make a good mini-exercise the next time I teach the class?)

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ENG 225 15.M: Final Class Notes

Posted on November 29, 2021 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Labor Based Grading
  • Lightning Talks
  • Draft Feedback
  • Homework

Labor Based Grading

I wanted to remind you that this course uses labor-based grading. Your grade in Canvas is your “base grade.” Next week I will add bonus points to your grade based on what additional labor you have completed.

Here’s the additional labor activities available:

  • Submitting a revision of Project 1 (due December 8th). Reward: I will raise the Canvas grade to 25/25
  • Visiting office hours (check to see if this has been awarded) (2 points)
  • Visiting the Writing Center (you can still schedule an appointment to go over the revision of your final paper) (2 points)
  • Attendance bonus (2 points, will calculate soon)
  • Making consistent and meaningful contributions to class discussions (2 points, already awarded)

Lightning Talks

Resources:

  • Sign Up
  • Template [make a copy, submit link to Canvas]

For our final two class sessions, you will give 4-5 minute lightning talks on your final paper. If you are uncomfortable giving a “talk,” then you are welcome (and encouraged) to read a paper–a five minute talk is about 400 words.

I’ve created a barebones Google Slide template for your presentations. Feel free to add slides, change font/layout/colors, etc. Also, screen shots are awesome in a presentation (remember that Powerpoint is Evil)–you want your slides to contain concise points that you explain to us. Don’t put *too* much writing on a slide–you want the slides to highlight the main points of your talk.

My general expectation is that you will revise your longer paper down to about 3-4 pages double-spaced and have that somewhat memorized. So, again, reading a paper that is accompanied by a presentation is fine.

Sign ups.

Draft Feedback

I want to highlight a two issues I saw with papers.

General instructions:
Go through the document and click the checkmark to accept any additions (ADD) or deletions (DELETE) I made. Look at them first, so you can see what I’ve changed. Be careful not to delete the questions/longer comments until you have read and addressed them.

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ENG 301 13.R: Wrapping Up PRTC / Quick Hits on Resumes

Posted on November 18, 2021 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Postmortem Reminder / Link
  • Uploading Materials and PRTC Final Memo
  • PRTC Scheel’s Materials [Bob Response]
  • PRTC Final Memo
  • Job Search and Resumes

Current Energy Level

This sums it up.

Postmortem Reminder

Remember to complete the PRTC project reflection form / self-assessment.

Uploading Final Materials & Final Memo

I have created a Final Materials drive folder.

We’ll be doing a lot of work in this document today.

Scheels Materials

Let’s upload that material and then share some stuff on social media.

Where to Find a Job

Resumes

An old lecture.

Once again, my template.

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ENG 225 12.M: From Secondary Research to Primary Research

Posted on November 8, 2021 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Conference Sign Up / Reminder
  • Writing Center Reminder
  • Research Synthesis
  • Play Your Game / Gather Your Data
  • Rubric Reviewing Past Papers
  • Homework

Conference Sign Up / Reminder

Remember that we are NOT meeting for class next week; I will be meeting with each of you for 20 minutes to discuss your paper progress and provide feedback. Make sure you sign up for a conference.

So far, only 4 people have signed up for a conference. The conference represents a week’s worth of class and labor, and I will weigh it appropriately in Canvas.

Note that there is an assignment to turn your work into Canvas, preferably 24 hours before your conference so that I have time to read it *before* we meet.

Writing Center Reminder

Another reminder: the syllabus rewards you for doing extra-labor. This includes bringing drafts of papers to the writing lab. I will give you extra points for bringing a draft of this project to the Writing Center even if you also visited it during project 1. More visits is good! They can help you plan out your paper, write out your methodology section, or brainstorm ideas for your discussion section.

If you plan on visiting the Writing Center, you can print out last week’s class notes as an assignment sheet.

In particular, remember the layout of the final paper:

  • Introduction: Articulates the problem that generated the research question(s). Poses the research questions clearly. Lays out the thesis: which is the answers to the research questions.
  • Literature Review: This reviews previous research on your topic. As I’ll show below, there’s a lot of ways to “group” this research; you should organize this section around ideas, not around individual articles: that is, make sure your paragraphs open with a strong topic sentence that makes a claim about what/how researchers/scholars are discussing (something). Then group and discuss which scholars are doing that work (and how they are doing it–brief descriptions of methods, findings, and discussion, concise synthesis of your research annotations). See below for more information.
  • Methodology: This section generally needs to do 3-4 things (in our case, most of you will only do two of them). I will go over these below.
  • Data / Findings / Discussion: Sometimes you will see these sections separated–especially in the hard sciences where your data can be presented as numbers, graphs, and tables. Some of you are working on papers that involve this kind of research (Jade, Ainsley, Chris). In these papers, you will see one section for Data (or Findings) and another section for Discussion, in which you compare your findings to previous studies in the literature review (noting what agrees and what disagrees with previous findings), you highlight and explain unexpected findings, and you suggest the impact of these findings (what they mean for the field, or what changes they suggest are necessary to our world–note that sometimes this happens in the conclusion).
  • Conclusion: I think conclusions are quite hard to write; they have to summarize the entire paper (which, REMEMBER, the introduction should do) and either end emphasizing a change (if you did not do this in the discussion), a hope, a direction for future studies (say, what you would do next or what you would have done differently if you could start over or had more time).

Play Your Game / Gather Your Data

There’s not too much to explain here: this week is dedicated to playing your game and/or conducting your research. Whatever you do, please submit some work to Canvas by Saturday the 13th at midnight to the assignment “Week 12: Gaming Journal / Primary Research Methodology and Data.”

Reviewing the Rubric and Assessing Some Papers

Let me review a few of my most fundamental pedagogical assumptions:

  • Writing is not natural (abstract)
  • Writing is really hard (audience?)
  • Every writing situation is (somewhat) unique and thus (somewhat) disorienting
  • Every writing instructor has specific expectations (academic writing is kind of the worst of all writing)
  • Learning to write well requires we develop the capacity to move beyond ourselves and imagine how a range of others might receive our words
  • Writing cannot be taught
  • Writing can be learned
  • One of the best ways you can learn to write is by examining the structure and organization used by other writers (in the words of Robert Pinsky, to learn to read like a good chef eats)
  • My approach to this examination involves “grade norming,” asking you to assess papers written by other students. The goal is to familiarize you with a wide range of principles that I (and a lot of other instructors, whether explicitly or implicitly) will use to evaluate your work. Hypothesis: the better you get at evaluating other people’s writing, the better you will be at evaluating and revising your own writing before you turn it in

Here’s a link to the rubric.

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ENG 328 11.W: Crucible Design Project

Posted on November 3, 2021 by insignificantwrangler@gmail.com

Today’s Plan:

  • Crucible Design Project Expectations
  • Crucible Design Project Resources
  • Crucible Design Project Team Formation
  • Homework

Hey Marc!

Next time:

  • Table of Contents construction from day one, think about setting the paragraph style and then what to do about author names (see email with auto-toc instructions and spacing / dots)

Crucible Design Project Expectations

Final Deliverable:

  • .indd and .pdf file of your Fall 2021 Crucible
  • Final due date (absolutely no late exceptions: Friday, November 19th by 1:15pm [Crucible Folk])

Grading Rubric/Design Checklist:

  • Content (particularly tricky things:)
    • Formatting a Table of Contents [look at 2019 and 2020 examples for layout]
    • Page Numbers
    • Image Credits
    • Crucible logo (back cover)
    • Title Page (follow comment instructions. sigh)
    • Dodd-Pheromone Trails-concrete poem
    • The Current- Dylisia Jae: two column layout (we can adjust line height
    • Cellular Death- Katrina Johns-concrete poem
    • Baggage: do NOT use an ugly image, write it out
  • Typography
    • Font selection and balance [mix at least two different fonts / title / author / body copy]
    • Font size [Crucible folk: 10pt?]/ kerning? / Use a modular scale [I’ll be paying attention to how your typography scales]
    • Leading/Line spacing [note: the higher your x-height, the more you should try bumping your leading up; generally leading is set between 1.2 and 1.5–also, the more leading, the more pages, the higher the cost of production]
    • Line length (how many characters per line? Be sure for print not web)
    • Deal with Orphans
  • Other Design
    • Backgrounds and bleeds (zine format: we’re paying for color printing with [crucible folk?] full bleeds–make sure your design takes advantage of this throughout the document)
    • Strategic use of color / Developing a color scheme [more than just images should be in color]

Crucible Resources

Crucible Project resource folder

Note on covertemplate.pdf: you can open this in Photoshop or Illustrator. Create a new layer and lock the template layer. Design your cover, then delete the original image.

Anticipating a few questions:

Homework

Uh… start doing your thing?

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