- Brief Introduction
- Beginning of Class Writing Assignment
- Click on the title of this blog post, “Week 15,” 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.
- Some helpful info:
- Discuss Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” and Magyar’s presentation on SF for Technical Communicators.
- Look around for models and examples of portfolios by other professionals in the field to continue revising and improving your own portfolio in the future after our class ends. These are some examples doing different things in each website/portfolio:
- Open discussion.
- To submit your final work in the class:
- Send a brief, professional email to Prof. Ellis that includes a link to your Professional Portfolio (Shared Google Doc or OpenLab ePortfolio–make sure it is viewable by someone who is not you!) and a link or attached file for your Weekly Logbook.
- Professional Portfolio
- Your resume and a generic cover letter can also be a part of your portfolio.
- Include links to other places where you are visible online, such as LinkedIn and other social media networks.
- 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.
- Professional Portfolio
- Send a brief, professional email to Prof. Ellis that includes a link to your Professional Portfolio (Shared Google Doc or OpenLab ePortfolio–make sure it is viewable by someone who is not you!) and a link or attached file for your Weekly Logbook.
- As Garrison Keillor says, “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.”
The article on the truth of fact discussed writing and how the nuances behind are different to each individual and culture. It also talked about memories and technology. The remem was a technology that is interactive and records your daily life for you to remember and recall. This changes the way the mind evolves and how people develop, as mentioned in the article, just as how the way the daughter was not as proficient in writing as her father was with just a keyboard. In the other narrative, the missionary, taught Jijingi, how to write, but to him just spoken to written word wasn’t an easy translation. The spacing and the grammar wasn’t exactly how he spoke his language, the missionary could not explain that to him either.
The reading on science fiction discusses what sci-fi is, it talks about how the modern meaning has become our world following our rules. Sci-fi is as mentioned in the article more in dept and discusses intellectual and critical content. I learned that Sci-fi works to challenge new thoughts and fields. I also learned that Sci-fi also uses new languages, and terms that require linguistic analysis to develop.
“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” by Ted Chiang starts with a brief introduction into his daughter Nicole, and the idea of not having to teach children how to read and write which is unfathomable – at least to me. This idea concerns me especially as someone who is near completion with their Professional and Technical Writer. The term lifelog comes up as a way one can document their life and its ability to complete a photo album. Another interesting concept brought up is the Remem’ algorithms which can search a copious amount of material in a short time span. It can monitor your conversation for past events and then proceed to display the video on the lower life corner of your field vision. Jijingi’s interest remained in writing and his father assumed it would keep the Europeans happy. There was a different herd from a native speaker and foreigner to the language. The author states that with the argument with Nicole’s perspective a trial of recording was done but yet another story was created – it’s something one should try out and judge.
“The Science Fiction for Technical Communicators” article’s intended purpose is for technical writers to emphasize the task of aiding communication between two unknown groups. Science fiction is an ambiguous term and is said to have started in pulp fiction from literature, film, TV, radio, comics, book and magazine illustrations. Despite the arguments that science fiction can be traced back to Greece or earliest mythology he believes that Science Fiction is highly diverse. Works can sometimes overlap.
People reading Science Fiction are all humans and it can encourage engagement and a deeper link. It allows us to show ourselves from the outside. The justifications, excuses, and guilty pleasures section imbibes how it is good for you.
PTW means learning and constant being curious about other genres.
Science fiction for technical communicators is an article about how science fiction can be used by technical communicators. Technical communicators need to be able to communicate since we often help people with things that are alien. Science fiction’s definition is ambiguous and is disputed. Examples are Star Wars, Star Trek, Brave New World, and 1984. A good idea of what is science fiction is “a good, simple, semi-accurate rule of thumb: If the story is set in a universe that follows the same rules as ours, it’s science fiction. If it’s set in a universe that doesn’t follow our rules, it’s fantasy. Or in other words, science fiction is about what could be but isn’t; fantasy is about what couldn’t be.” Through the kind of reading that is science fiction, we learn about how we perceive each other, and how we interact. We see varieties and complexities of communication. Serious science fiction is hard to understand because it is too intellectual. There is a term “abeyance” which is a technique by which the author drops a term or idea into the story as if it were a perfectly normal everyday thing, but doesn’t explain it to the reader until later. This is something that can be associated with science fiction as well as words to be taken literally. Reading science fiction “shows us ourselves from the outside”.
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang is an article about the use of a new search tool Remem, his discoveries of his past, and a story about Tiv that isn’t precisely accurate. Remem was used by people to find what they are looking for that is past. It can show you videos of the past including conversations. The author used Remen to view some videos. One time when using Remem he accidently found out that he was the one who said hurtful words to his daughter and not the other way around. Finding out about the truth of his past led him to realize that he was wrong and to apologize to his daughter who he is likely to be rebuilding a relationship with. The story about Tiv was based on actual facts but a narrative was made up. There was a dispute in in 1941 about who the Shangev clan should join with and the genealogy was being fought over with people claiming different parentages. The story is told to “make a case for the truth”.