• Workplace Observation Report
• Usability Materials
• Usability Report
  

• Newsletter Stories
• Professionalization Report
• In-Class Presentation
• Participation

The Workplace Observation Report assignment is based on Jim Henry’s Writing Workplace Cultures. Over the first three weeks of class, you will submit drafts, questions and musings to the electronic discussion list in preparation for the final Workplace Observation Report, submitted in the form of a 750-1250 word memo that describes people, context, technology and interactions of a particular workplace. Identify and describe this workplace. Describe the interactions among people, institution, technology as well as physical and cultural space. Students are strongly encouraged to think about their relationship to this workplace and how that knowledge affects their interpretation. For instance, how might observations change if you are employed at this workplace? Interning? Or just visiting? What information might not be available to you that is available to others? How does your place in the organization’s power structure affect your observations? Students will need to locate and describe appropriate workplace environments during the first week of the semester: use your workplace, internship site, or a local business office. Students should consider off-campus locations such as the Tippecanoe Court House, the West Lafayette BMV office, or contact the United Way or other local non-profit organizations in need of volunteers.

top

Usability materials, as described in Ruben, are due February 19.

top

Your report needs to be a sophisticated document that acts as both technical report and proposal recommendation. Articulating the research process constitutes the first goal for this document. Your second goal is to report your findings in the form of recommendations to the team or company that created the original design. Remember that you are making knowledge in this report. Your audience will likely be skeptical about your findings: on the job, your report will be read by different audiences, particularly management and the original designers of the product you have tested. For management, your goal is to convince them that your findings are based on meaningful inquiry. For the design team, you have to offer changes that may strike this audience as either unnecessarily or cosmetic. Effectively addressing these readers is no easy feat, and requires rhetorical agility: your report must establish your value in the design and redesign process, your ethos, as well as propose meaningful and valuable advice, the project’s logos. You may need to appeal to more than your audience’s reason: develop an argument based in feeling, in pathos, and hence complete the rhetorical triangle: ethos, logos, pathos.

top

Newsletter stories are short (500-750 word) reports on current issues and events of interest to professional writing students. Stories should reflect the range of interests of professional writers and may be summaries of ongoing research, trends in the workplace, descriptions and reviews of useful texts and tools, as well as opportunities for professional development. I can be helpful locating issues of interest, particularly for technical writers. As we will be studying usability as a class, you will want to find another issue such as accessibility, information design, information architecture, ISO compliance, globalization & internationalization, digitization, the postindustrial workplace, workplace ethics, knowledge management, single-sourcing or another issue that you find appealing and/or potentially valuable as you prepare to become a working professional writer. Your newsletter story should be written in a journalistic style and should be describe the issue, its stakeholders, and the potential significance it may play in the lives of professional writers. This document should be written for an audience of professional writing students much like yourselves. Newsletter stories can, with further research, develop into the core of professionalization reports.

top

Readings in the second half of the semester, particularly Faber, develop themes of professionalization, expertise, and the meaning of work in postindustrial culture. The professionalization report is important not simply to identify a trend, idea or workplace practice but is instead an opportunity to explore what it means to become a professional. Faber describes sites where writers “become professional,” and where new definitions of work and participation are being developed and applied. The challenge of creating this document is to consider the issues of professionalism, expertise and identity in a novel way that both presents a position on complex issues and engages the reader in the presentation of this material. This assignment assumes that students are advanced undergraduates or graduate students with an interest in the future of the profession(s) and definition(s) that define professional and technical writers at work. This assignment is designed to engage in sustained exploration of what it may mean to not only become a writer but to become a professional in the 21st century. What is the status of professional writing? Why is it professional? How can we increase our status as professionals? And is increasing status, or power, a desirable goal? What does it mean to be an expert?

top

The class will conclude with a two-day miniconference. Students will present their research findings in brief (5 minute) presentations that contextualize the issue, research and findings offered in the longer Professionalization Reports. Students should prepare some visual representation of their work to share with students and should be prepared to answer questions.

top

top

Please submit assignments when they are due.  Late work is not acceptable.  While I am happy to discuss grading practices and policies and will do my best to explain why students receive certain evaluations, grades are rarely changed.  Please visit me in my office during office hours, and use email to contact me between class meetings.

top

You are expected to be in class every Tuesday and Thursday and to participate in email discussion throughout each week.  Each missed class is significant: communicate with the instructor regarding any missed class time.  After two absences, student grades will be impacted.  Please discuss multiple absences with the instructor.

top