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Professional Texts

Amy and I have been working, and here are some points of our discussions:

Our tentative title is "Visual Rhetoric and Professional Texts: Designing Professional and Technical Texts at Purdue University."

We will be sending out an email to the PW listserv requesting samples of visually aesthetic documents (white papers, reports, memos, proposals, resumes, and cover letters). We will be attaching a permission slip to use student work to this email.

We will be working with David to obtain space for our website on the PW page.

We will be meeting on Saturday to determine the structure of the website and what resources, links, and information to include. On the website, we plan to include samples of successful visual documents and tutorials for the programs to produce them.

Submitted by Morgan S. on Thu, 2007-02-08 11:58.
Morgan S.'s blog

Week 8 Update
Morgan S.'s picture
Submitted by Morgan S. on Sat, 2007-03-03 12:18.

Amy and I have met again to begin constructing tutorials for both InDesign and Publisher.

We are still trying to obtain samples of our documents from 420/421 instructors. We have 1 resume sample, 1 memo sample, and 2 white paper samples. More samples wanted!

Our next step is to begin annotating the samples and designing the webspace for the project.


Week 7 Update
Morgan S.'s picture
Submitted by Morgan S. on Tue, 2007-02-20 11:33.

Amy and I have spoken with David about acquiring space on the PW page and also about the ways we can manipulate Drupal to create new page designs. He gave us a new way to conceptualize the project: seeing it as a professional writing spinoff of the OWL. In this vein, we could establish the format and headings of the website, and, as projects develop and alter, future 505M classes could continue uploading information and resources into the site.

We envision our website acting as a companion site to 420/421 course websites that is continually revised and made useful and usable. Presently, we plan to have headings for Business Documents (which will include white papers, proposals, and reports), Job Search (including resumes and cover letters), and Tutorials (for Publisher, InDesign, and Quark).

We have received some responses back from instructors in the department about providing us with samples of documents for our project.


Must. Learn. CSS.
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Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-02-20 11:36.

Our next job, which we will undertake this weekend, will be to spend some quality time with Drupal and CSS. We need to have the structure and theme of our book set in the next two weeks so that we can begin adding our own content.