Daily Message Aug. 31

Good Day,

Other than some technical issues with WebCampus last night, things seem to be perking along fairly trouble-free today.

If you had trouble posting or uploading to the discussion boards or roster in WebCampus last night, give it another try today. If you created your professional introduction in Word and you'd like to preserve your formatting, you can always save your document as an .rtf file, and then just attach it. Attachments are kind of a pain, I know, but may be a better option than fighting with the HTML creator in WC.


If you haven't started drafting your analytic memo, turn your attention to that soon.

That said, the rest of today's message is really in the form of a lecture (or amplification of thoughts from last week's reading), rather than nuts-and-bolts housekeeping matters.

Less jumping through hoops, more critical thinking

I want to repeat an idea that you should already have in your mind (based on the Background Reading) in the Course Introduction module, but I want to put it in the context of document design.

For most of you, writing – especially academic writing – has primarily been about content and words on the page: if you expressed the ideas “correctly” or if you regurgitated appropriately, you would get a good grade. But with this course, you need to begin thinking about “writing” in more complex ways. You need to see the larger text in terms of the visual, as well, and you need to make appropriate choices according to your understanding of your own process and the rhetorical situation.

This means that you not only need to anticipate what your reader and the situation calls for textually, but also how that information should look on the page and how it can be presented in the most effective way.

Most of you have not been pre-conditioned to think about writing in this way. The type of writing you do in college -- from freshman composition to advanced classes in your major -- mostly rewards you for jumping through the hoop, hitting your mark,  and spitting back the proper responses; you're rarely rewarded for thinking about why you're doing what you're doing. Professional writing -- whether you're working in the software industry, healthcare, engineering or some other field -- requires you to think critically about what you're writing, why you're writing it, and what the optimal method of delivery is before you type word one. And it requires you reconceive of writing as something beyond putting words on paper.

It’s easier to think of a more overtly visual space – imagine Facebook or Myspace – for posting introductions to require some thought about how the visual dimension contributes to the overall message. However, even plain text in an online discussion space or the printed text of a memo on a sheet of paper communicates visually as well as textually.

I’m hoping that as you approach work in this class, you think about the questions the assignment is pushing you to contemplate (as opposed to just doing the assignment). For example, what advantages would you have in one context (informal profile directly to the discussion space) over the other (more formal introduction, memo to instructor)? How should you see the formal introduction posted to a discussion board as a “visual” document? Seeing Facebook as a visual context is easy. Seeing the visual nature of traditional text-based documents (like a memo) is something else entirely.

I want you to begin thinking in these ways and laying these skills on top of the ones that you are currently developing.

As always, let me know if you have questions or concerns. And, I'm going to add some free discussion spaces today for our modules. If you have provocative questions (and I find all questions about the subject matter of this class to be provocative) or intriguing examples of document design, try posting them to one of those spaces.

Have a great day!

Julie