During today’s class, you will have 30 minutes to work on this assignment.

While you are working on the assignment, I will assign where you will be sitting. After the assignment is completed, you may return to your normal seats.

At your new seat for the assignment, login to Google Drive, navigate to your shared folder, one team member should create a new document with the title “action memo,” and everyone else should join that document.

By typing on the page and/or using the chat option (in the upper right side of the tool bar in Google Docs, next to the icons of your team members editing the document), collaboratively write a memo detailing what you as a team need to revise and accomplish before the end of the project. You might want to look at your documents in other tabs and the feedback that you received during Wednesday’s class, too.

Your memo should have a name block addressed to Professor Ellis. It’s subject should be “Action Plan.”

You may write your memo’s contents as a bulleted or numbered list.

You have 30 minutes, so you will want to exhaust all possibilities and make your memo as detailed as possible and as useful to yourselves as possible.

On the memo, you can include information about who should be responsible for specific tasks.

Talking is not permitted.

For this part of the project, you will be providing feedback to another team and memorializing your feedback in a memo signed by all members of your team.

Each team will exchange their printed documents (brochure and instruction manual) with another team. We will exchange documents in this manner: teams 1 and 2; and teams 3 and 4.

After receiving the documents, your team should create a new memo in your shared Google Drive folder. Create a header that includes to (the other team’s name), cc (Professor Ellis), from (your team name followed by all of your full names), today’s date, and subject (Document Testing Report).

In the body of your memo, you will record a 400 word minimum response evaluating the two documents.

Create sections with these titles: “Methodology,” “Brochure,” and “Owner’s Manual.”

In the “Methodology” section, write how your team intends to evaluate each of the documents. You will decide this during a brief conversation with the team you are exchanging documents with. Consider how they might be useful for the intended audience. Some dimensions of usefulness to consider include: readability, design, organization, information content, and suitability for the audience. What feedback will be most useful to your team? Communicate this to the other team and agree on a set of metrics in your methodology. Record this in your memo.

In the “Brochure and “Owner’s Manual” sections, discuss these three things based on your selected methodology metrics: 1) what works well in the document, 2) what does not work well in the document, and 3) suggestions for improving the document. These two sections should involve the bulk of your writing so that the reports are useful documents for the team whose documents you are evaluating.

Through discussion and cooperative writing, your team will export your document testing report as a PDF and email it to the team’s representative and Professor Ellis (jellis @ citytech cuny edu).

If you complete any summary memos for the three extra credit readings, please post them here as separate comments (one comment for each reading that you summarize).

For today’s class, you read about the challenges of working remotely with a team and for a particular audience (Rice-Bailey, “Remote Technical Communicators: Accessing Audiences and Working on Project Teams,” s3-3). Spend the first ten minutes writing a summary memo of your reading and discuss how you would address the challenges of working remotely with a team.

For today’s class, you read an article (Emanuel, “The Executive Summary: A Key to Effective Communication,” s8) about how to develop executive summaries and how you might repurpose them in various ways to meet your needs as communicators. Spend the first ten minutes of class writing your summary of today’s reading. Think about and discuss how the way Emanuel discusses the executive summary might be beneficial in your own research and writing.

For today’s beginning of class writing, write a summary memo on your reading of the excerpt on instructions from Anderson’s Technical Communication (Anderson, “Writing Reader-Centered Instructions” excerpt, instructions-bw) during the first ten minutes of class. Who are you designing instructions for? What components do effective instructions need? How might you employ these techniques on your team’s owner’s manual?

For today’s class, you read Amy D. Ladd, “Developing Effective Marketing Materials: Brochure Design Considerations,” https://ag.tennessee.edu/cpa/Information%20Sheets/cpa179.pdf, and looked at Google Docs > Template Gallery > Brochures, https://drive.google.com/templates?category=7&q=brochure&sort=rating&view=public&urp=https://www.google.com&pli=1&ddrp=1#. During the first ten minutes of today’s class, write a brief summary memo based on your reading by Ladd. Think about how your proposed deliverables serve the specific needs of marketing your client’s product and fulfilling the needs of your client’s customers. In this way, you have more than one audience for your deliverables. We will discuss others during class.

For today’s class, you read Megan L. Bruch, “Advertising 101,” https://ag.tennessee.edu/cpa/Information%20Sheets/cpa111.pdf. Before we discuss this reading and how it relates to part of the technical writing that your team is doing on the upcoming documents, spend the first ten minutes of class writing a summary of the reading. Also, write some examples of your favorite advertising (print, web, TV) that communicate technical information. We will discuss these.

For today’s class, you read Ann Rockley’s “The Impact of Single Sourcing and Technology,” http://rockley.com/articles/Single_Sourcing_and_Technology.pdf. We’ve discussed single sourcing during class before. It is the generation, categorization, and targeted use of content to create different kinds of documents for a variety of different audiences. It is an efficient use of workplace time and resources to communicate more effectively with employees, customers, clients, organizations, and others. In addition to writing a brief summary memo of your reading, how might you apply single sourcing techniques to the development of some of your project two deliverables?

For today’s class, you read Mark Easterby-Smith, Richard Thorpe, and Paul R. Jackson, “Introducing Management and Business Research,” from Management Research, https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/47623_Easterby_Smith.pdf. Considering the fact that your current research-component of the final project is an on-going draft, I selected this reading as something to inform your revision of the draft with additional research and analysis as we move forward with the project. Spend the first ten minutes of class writing a summary memo about your reading and post it as a comment to this blog entry.