Week 13 – What Was Old Will Be New Again

ENG 2700 teaches you a completely new way of envisioning your writing and your writing projects.  But many of the insights that you learn in this class will not directly serve you when you again must write a manuscript of an essay of a certain length in your next class.  How will you use what you learn in ENG 2700 to adapt to these writing environments anew?  Has anything really changed?

Week 12 – No Blog This Week

Lucky.

Week 11 – miVersa (a Tool for Young Teams)?

After playing around with miVersa consider whether work teams composed of young professionals would use this tool.  If not, why not?  If so, why, and what other applications would they want miVersa to communicate with and how?  In other words, how would it integrate into your overall workflow?

Week 10 – Beginning to Think Outside of the Class

After watching the pilot episode of From Hear To There, consider how you would “promote” this show to a specific American market (be sure to describe what audience you are writing about).  In other words, why should anyone care?  What does it offer?  What is unique about it and what relevance is that?  What is the essence of this show for the people you would be writing toward?

For more information, you can see the Facebook page for From Hear To There below:

https://www.facebook.com/pts.victory

Week 9 – Planning for Change

This week’s reflective blog post is about change.  You have completed your first major project for the course.  Presuming that you found the midterm project to be challenging, and that you have already assessed your strengths and weaknesses on this project, what do you want to change about how you approach the course?

In two short weeks, you will be assigned your final project.  Will you change how you work as a writer for this upcoming project?  If so, what and why?  What do you expect to achieve with these changes?

Week 8 – Assessing Strengths and Weaknesses

Now that you are coming to the end of your first major project in ENG 2700, it’s time to reflect on your progress.  What have you found that you are good at in this new way of writing?  What was most difficult for you?  What do you need to improve as you move forward?  Are you particularly proud of any portion of your work?  Does any part of it frustrate you?

Share your narrative of success and failure.

Week 7 – Coming to Grips with ENG 2700

Write something about your experience in 2700.  Is it what you thought it would be?  If not, what is different?  What is the “bigger picture” that you see forming during your time here?  Is any part of the class more useful than other parts?

The floor is yours.  Write.

Week 6 – Making Connections

Once you have completed your Quicker and Dirtier report, write about your experience here.  What was it like writing from a position of induction, rather than deduction?  Did any particular part of the process give you more trouble than others?  Was it a valuable exercise?  If so, why?  If not, why not?

Week 5 – Your Writing Process, In Situ?

You have entered Week 5, or the end of the first third of our course.  During this time, we have covered (and re-covered) many of the abstractions associated with beginning theories of audience, cultural context, ethics, and process.  And, we have begun to apply these concepts to our own work.

Soon, theory will yield to practice, and we will begin designing larger writing projects, that require more complex realizations of these ideas we have discussed.  You have already written about your own writing process the first week of class.  Here is a chance for you to revisit that process and reflect again about how you write.

For your Week 5 Reflective Blog, write 300 words (or so) about your writing process.  Some questions you might want to consider as you compose your response are:

• Do you feel like you are the same writer that you were a month ago?  If so, who is that writer?  If not, what has changed?
• Do you think about writing the same way?  If so, how do you think about writing?  If not, what has changed?
• Are you approaching your writing projects (big and/or small) the same way as you were before the start of the semester?  If not, what are you doing differently?
• Are you thinking about your writing process and whether it is changing?  If so, what are your thoughts?

As you write, you may choose to respond to the questions that are most relevant to your own thinking, or go in a different direction completely.

Week 4 – Statement of Professional Ethics

Within our careers, and in our lives, we must serve as our own arbiters of what actions we consider necessary and just to take.  While many professions have statements of professional ethics, these statements represent the profession, and those whom it serves, as a whole.

For your journal entry, you will compose a statement of ethics that represents *you* and the person who you want to be in your career.  As part of your statement, you will want to include:

a) A preamble, where you articulate the importance of your ethical stance and what truth values it is rooted in.

b) Concrete and descriptive actions, values, or ideals that will guide your judgement as a professional.

c) A closing, where you articulate the value of your ethical stance to  your profession and the world.

Your statement should be between 200 and 300 words.  Remember, build linearity into your ethics statement as you write.  Don’t expect it to appear as if by magic.

Week 3 – Meta-Analysis of Audience — Challenge #1

Claim

Thinking about audience in an analytical way provides a communicator with the means of better understanding the messages they encounter in their lives.

Succinctly articulating what is learned from thinking about audience in an analytical way is what provides a communicator with a path forward to improve the reception of their own messages.

Evidence

This week’s blog will be an opportunity for you to briefly analyze the intended audience(s) of an already published technical document.  To do this, you will find a product instruction or manual and complete the analysis of it linked to here.

Once you have completed your analysis, write 300 words presenting and contextualizing your results.  Discuss what you have discovered and why it is relevant to audience, our larger discussion about communications, or life.  The context  that you use to frame your findings is up to you as the writer.

Results

Stay tuned….

Week 2 – Connecting Culture to Communication

To be effective communicators in the world, we must understand our own communications background, including how communication works in the culture in which we were raised. Respond to the questions below in a composed response of approximately 300 words.

Note, you should compose your response in paragraphs, not as a numbered list.

1. What types and styles of communication are valued in your home culture(s) (e.g., ethnic, religious, community, and family)?

2. What traits are considered to be good communication in these cultures?

3. What traits are undesirable in communication?

As you write, be specific, and give relevant examples to illustrate your points.