Month: August 2021

I am working my way through your research portfolios and will be getting you some feedback as soon as I can. While you’re waiting for that, please review the  unit 3 assignment sheet and get started on the week’s readings, a couple of texts on building healthy cultures within an organization that look rather different from the essays/articles we’ve been reading.

Our focus is on genre this week and next. To refresh, “genre” refers to the sort of reasonable responses we make to recurring writing situation–need to reach out to a prospective client? a formal business letter can be a good way to initiate contact. Need to show what you know to a teacher on an exam? a 5-paragraph essay might get the job done. Need to impress a potential employer? An organized, clean, easy-to-read resume is a good plan. Have to make a sales pitch? A snazzy Prezi might be just the thing. Genres take shape because we find them to be helpful, audience-centered ways to accomplish a particular kind of communication task. The demands of the writing situation dictate the sort of genres that might be appropriate. As you move toward presenting your research, it’s time to explore possible genres for that work.

For this week’s discussion, please respond to both of the questions below. Categorize your posts as “Discussions/Homework,” and tag them with “weekof8/9,” “unit3,” “genre,” and [your name].

1. Notice the practical focus of both of this week’s readings (these aren’t just about sharing information for curiosity’s sake but rather about rendering it usable for a particular audience and purpose). Select one of this week’s readings to focus on, and examine how the authors do that–how do they process what they’ve learned to make it actionable for a reader? what readers? what writing/rhetorical strategies do you see them employing to make this information usable for their readers? Be specific and analytical–why do you think they go about it in this way? How effective do you think it is for that particular audience?
2. It’s time to start imagining the possibilities for your own research writing in Unit 3–given what you want to discuss, for what purpose, and to whom, what are some of the options for you? What kinds of texts would this sort of reader be likely to engage with? where/when/on what platform do you see them getting this info? what kinds of expectations would your readers have about

• level of detail
• writing style
• length of text
• time spent reading
• citation method
• types of evidence/sources

Your response work might carry over a little into next week–you can either respond to their answers to #2 above, or read through a couple of your classmates’ project proposals after they’re due on Sunday, 8/15. Either way, please comment on at least 3 of them.  Try to offer up your suggestions for what forms their work might take, given the parameters they’ve outlined.

In this article, Alison Wynn (a researcher at Stanford) summarizes her own recent article, in which she analyzed the findings of a year-long case study of a Silicon Valley tech company’s gender equality initiative.

As is typically the case with summaries, an author is trying to do justice to the original text (representing it for what it is), while also working toward their own distinct purpose. Here, for Wynn, that is bottom-lining the findings for a different audience and objective–trying to open up a new kind of conversation around the role that organizations (and not just individuals) must play.

Pay attention to how she works with research in here. Within this article, Wynn provides a lot of linked resources, which function both as a sort of bibliography (here are some of the sources I’m working with…) and as a reading list for those who want more (if you think this is interesting, check this out….). Consider the first one, which links to this article, itself a compendium of a whole bunch of different sources.

Giving her readers access to this lets Wynn build upon that informational foundation without taking up a lot of space in her text. It also gives interested readers a lot more to work with (and a lot more reason to trust Wynn as knowing her stuff). Each of you will follow up on one of the other resources she links and give us a sense of what’s in there and how it’s valuable (both to Wynn and to us, readers who might be looking to use this new knowledge).

Also pay attention as you read to her section headings–she’s setting up a careful logical chain. These headings are kind of like breadcrumbs (think Hansel and Gretel) for the reader to follow 

We can learn from that, of course, about a way to organize our ideas to make them as usable as possible for our readers. As we head into Unit 3, that’s going to be an important consideration–not just writing for ourselves or for me (a teacher reader), but for an audience who needs to hear what you have to say and needs to be able to act on it or make use of it in some way.

Once you’ve read through Wynn’s article, follow up on your assigned link (see the announcement on Blackboard for those assignments). Then, post your responses to these 2 questions (everyone should answer both):

1. Give us a capsule summary of the linked article/resource that you explored. What is it? what’s in there? what’s valuable about it? what does it add to Wynn’s article?
2. Who do you think would most benefit from reading this article, and why? (in other words, who do you think her target audience is or ought to be?) Select one passage (a sentence or two) from the article, and explain why you think this segment would work especially well for that group of readers. Please quote the passage in your response.