- Brief Introduction
- Beginning of Class Writing Assignment
- Click on the heading of this blog post title above–“Week 5,” scroll down to the comment area, and write at least 250 words in response to this week’s readings. You can summarize the readings, you can relate the readings to your own experience or something else you have read or learned about, etc. Any writing of 250 words or more that are related to the readings are fair game for this weekly assignment at the beginning of class.
- Post your comment after 15 minutes even if you don’t reach the 250 word minimum threshold.
- Why we are doing this: It helps you organize your thoughts before discussion and it gives you regular writing practice.
- Discuss the readings assigned for Week 5.
- Discuss internships
- Where is everyone at in work or applications?
- Write It Forward
- Weekly Log
- Remember to add an entry to your logbook for each week until the end of the semester and keep all of your logs in a single file (Google Doc, Word docx, OpenOffice odf, etc.). Include the first date of a given week for each entry at the top of the page. Write at least 250 words about your current or past experience as appropriate. For example, if you are currently in an internship, your logs should record your experiences, thoughts, challenges, solutions, etc. that you find significant each week. Or, if you have completed your internship, your logs can be about experiences, projects, interactions with people in the workplace, challenges, solutions, etc. based on your past experience. And, if you are continuing in a new internship for additional experience, you can write about that, too. The point is to write at least 250 words per entry with one entry per week about your experience in the internship.
- Why we are doing this: It helps you articulate your work experience so that you may better reflect on, consider, remember, and act on those experiences as you transition into the workplace. Additionally, it gives you extra writing practice, which research shows will automatically improve your writing ability.
- Review readings and homework for next week.
“Single Sourcing and the Technical Communication Career Path ” is about the craftsman model,effective design, technical communication career path and hope it may redine the junior and senior writer. Technical communication is a one-person operation. If there were 7 more writers put on the job they would not equate the experience with the number of tolls they know.
The craftsman model makes it common to fall into a trap and the modern single-sources can’t be handcrafted. It mentions that being a good manager and senior technical writer should be two different career paths. A single-sourcing environment needs distinction between the junior and senior levels that currently exists because the difference lies in the one who questions and the one who answers “How do I do this?” Junior position do the writing and gain experience. The mid-level position should be mentored by the senior person. The senior position can move their primary focus in different directions. It seems that there is due diligence that should be eminent from those who hone the skills and ability to carry out/execute the duties required.
The New York Times article speaks of a African-American and Mexican-American woman who works as a scientist and professor. Her family didn’t have a college education but showed how hard work, math and science are in life. In grad school she was told she has poor work ethic and when she introspected she realized it was not due to laziness but rather an indirect notion that she was to make research questions and publish the findings. Overall, it is important to have support for someone who can be an uplifting mentor and advocate. No group should be overlooked. At times the path we have envisioned might seem to be fading away however, with persistence and integrity it can pave a better, stronger path. This is something that you need to be persistent on. In my personal experience, things didn’t go exactly as planned but it led to a platform that I ultimately was in search of. Now I will be able to combine both degrees affiliated with City Tech to send out/convey messages about health care to a larger audience through different means/channels.
In “Single Sourcing and the Technical Communication Career Path”, Albers discusses the differences, advantages, and disadvantages between single sourcing and the craftsman model. One thing that stuck out to me most in this piece was the emphasis on being a master of one trade rather than a jack of all trades. Specializing in one specific topic allows for single sourcing writing. Single sourcing writing is when an author does not go back to edit his work or add new pieces of new content after being published. It is done, sumbited, and delivered to the audience without any editing after publishing. I strongly consider being specialized in a specific topic to be more important rather than know of many because of the content one can create from it. If you are well spoken, can communicate clearly, and make it easy for all to read then I see single sourcing writing is a strong career path for most.
The article “Single Sourcing and the Technical Communication Career Path” by Michael J. Albers talks about how works written can be not effective and single sourcing and its future in technical writing. If too many people work on something, they all will likely write something in their style. It would take work to put everything together nicely. Team environments make sure everyone is on board and the craftsman model should be used. Sometimes the right number of people are not hired and there might be too many or too little people hired. There are differences between junior people, mid-level people and senior people. The senior people deal with the plans and talk to people to make things work. Junior people start out by writing stuff and they are the ones that do the actual writing. Mid-level people learn more about the job and do more organizing or helping seniors. Senior level people dictate how everything goes. Juniors aspire to become seniors. Effective work made with single sourcing cannot happen with several people doing their own thing and then putting their work together. The future of effective technical communication is about designing good information systems. Developing those systems will need fundamental recreation.
The article “Her Scientific Discovery: Support” by Anjelica L. Gonzalez talks about how support can help someone and how her experience as a women and minority has shaped her career and experiences. The movie “Hidden Figures” talks about three African American women who were crucial in the Apollo 11 space mission. That movie resonated with Anjelica because there aren’t more people like her in her area of work. She is a scientist and professor. Some people hadn’t seen someone like her succeed in the area in which she succeeded. Scientists, mathematicians and engineers are usually white men. Seeing someone like them who has succeeded gives people confidence that they can succeed too. There are low numbers of women and minorities in the sciences. Sometimes women are dismissed and ignored and not even given a chance which needs to change. Efforts in helping minorities and women are there but more should be done to give people a chance. “Talented women enroll in challenging science courses with the goal of learning all they can to excel in a technical career and yet the institutional support they need is unavailable.”
programmed inequality – Mar Hicks
In the article ‘Her Scientific Discovery: Support’, I learned the importance of setting precedents, and becoming the person you want to see. Her experiences and hardships as a woman of color was partially because she didn’t have another woman like her to show her the way, other students knew what to do and what was expected of them because they had people telling them. Her professor considered her lazy because she wasn’t aware of the extra curricular activities other students were doing, however she knew she was hardworking and as motivated as her non colored peers.
In the article ‘Single sourcing and the technical communication career path’ it discussed the growing field of technical communications and the dynamic between single sourcing and specialization. The article discussed how other fields have specialized teams or groups to work on one thing, however writers are still relatively independent. That needs to change in order to work on large and detailed documentation. The author also writes about how technical writers are considered Jack of all trades but masters of none, however that may be a problem as the field grows and the growing technical fields.