image: Turbomagnetic Research Associates

Course Description and Objectives

Scientific inquiry and projects built around technological development are increasingly social activities, activities that depend on effective communication for growth, unfoldment, and sustainability. Much of this communication takes place online. The art of effective communication on the web depends on community-building technologies comprised of words, images, sound, and, most importantly, links. Communicative performance in these contexts becomes an art of staying in tune with collaborators and new audiences, and learning how to share the most effective protocols and problem-solving strategies across diverse fields. Technical writing proliferates where artists and technicians converge on shared interests and cultivate their own specialized idiom, according the problem that serves as their common attractor state. In this course, students will aquire enhanced capacities for communicative performance in the "infodynamic rhetorics" that emerge from and shape technical writing projects, today. Students will form into writing clusters, tune in on a technical writing situation, and each cluster will produce documentation and technical writing solutions appropriate to the context summoning that cluster's attention.

For starters, we will compose a wiki, a common space where we will share ideas, practice writing, form project teams, and determine social and technical outcomes for our semester's work. By means of a series of informal and formal grading assignments, we will emphasize the importance of rhetorical choices in technical writing, and rehearse traditional narratival, definitional, evaluative, and problem-solving strategies of communication that will help us analyze and build dynamic and accessible web spaces comprised of text, images, and sound.

As we proceed, we will also analyze, learn, and customize the skills of communicative performance that emerge out of peer-to-peer and gaming communities. These filesharing and attention management strategies will help us design user-friendly texts such as user-editable how-to documentation, render evaluations of emerging technologies in fields such as visualization and data compression, and create instructional materials pertaining to the protocols of specific technical tasks. To support such technical writing projects, this course provides an introduction to principles of readability and accessibility of technical writing online, social bookmarking strategies, DAWs, interactive WWW design principles, and simple, repeatable strategies for making sustainable open-ended web presences that inform and make a difference. Along the way, we will also take time to reflect on how we write, so that we can learn from each other. In this way, as our wiki grows, it too will become a common resource for finding, sharing, and weaving new patterns in complex and often-times noisy information ecologies.

By all accounts, we live in an ecosystem under stress and burgeoning with information, and experimenting with multimedia composition (arranging sounds, images, and text) will help you learn techniques of attention management in diverse technical writing scenarios. Information has been defined by cyberneticist Gregory Bateson as the difference that makes a difference, so this course will ask you to refine old techniques and learn new strategies to help you differentiate all of the information you browse and produce. In information rich-contexts notorious for unpredictible network effects, creating patterns that mix sound, image, and text will help us find our writing rhythm in ecologies of continual and often sudden change.

minimum expectations

1. Find and experiment with patterns of argument - which may incorporate text, images, and sound - that most persuasively engage a particular technical context and idiom.

2. Cultivate a manner of working with dynamic and technical information that allows you to dedicate attention to the repeatable and sharable methods you select and employ in diverse composing processes.

3. Arrange and display material to simplify technical information, by leveraging standard formats and by experimenting with more rhetorical patterns of organization, as well.

4. Evaluate and revise our course wiki to be sure that our writing proceeds towards measurable outcomes.

5. Collaborate effectively with your peers as a community of writers who provide feedback on each others’ work, and, in small "bands" working towards common outcomes, create shared and interactive ideation space.

6. Test and experiment with diverse writing adjuncts, as a way to both learn about and compose in diverse media formats; this process should render several specific kinds of documents common to technical, scientific, and other problem-solving domains, such as memos, proposals, progress reports, instructions, and thick-descriptions of technical procedures and products.

Prosody Workshops, Peer-Review, and Response-able Participation

We will dedicate several sessions of ENC 2210 to workshopping our writing as it happens. Because our section of ENC 2210 cannot access a computer lab for every class meeting, each of us must tune into our wiki's recent changes page and revise our wikis daily. Furthermore, in-class participation will depend on staying in tune with our wiki's activity, and it all begins by reading and responding to each others' writing. Although daily blogs, responses to peer blogging, and early versions of working drafts need not be “polished,” our early-and-often uploads should address the issues of the day, as well as address and solicit feedback from your peers. Under no circumstances will I accept a “final” version of a major assignment (the connecting "unit assignments" that thread throughout our course and accrete into final projects) unless I have seen a regular rhetorical process. Also note that if you show up to class on the day an important draft is due without your draft work (or with draft work that is incomplete), this will count as an absence.

Attendance, Participation, and Grades

Attendance in this course is required. While it is understood that emergencies / University-sanctioned activities may arise which result in your missing one or more classes, frequent absences will negatively affect your final grade. As a rule, one or two absences will have little impact on your final grade, assuming you participate enthusiastically when you are in class and realize you are responsible for all material covered during the missed class(es). In the event that your prepared attendance, or lack thereof, becomes a problem, I will ask you to meet with me to discuss our options. These options may include a failing grade or a lower grade than you might have earned had you attended classes regularly. In short: show up prepared to talk and write about the wiki's recent changes.

Participation--timely wiki posts, prepared attendance, and peer-grading performance--will account for 33 and 1/3% of your final grade, unit assignments another 33 and 1/3%, and final projects will fill out the scale.

ENC 2210 rigorously pursues an evaluation process known as peer-grading. Response-able and consistent interaction in wiki will help us create rubrics for each unit assignment, and each student will perform and benefit from multiple evaluations for each unit assignment. The instructor will in turn grade these performances, and will also, where necessary and at his discretion, override any "off-the-mark" peer-assigned grades.

Readings

At first, the calendar syllabus will prime the pump with links and suggested resources, but as our wiki evolves, it will become the primary text. As our wiki grows, refactoring and redesigning the resources we gather for ease of use will garner full writing credit. In addition, we will consult two guidebooks, both available at the Bayboro Bookstore:

*McLoud, Scott (1993). Understanding comics. New York: Kitchen Sink Press.

*Weston, Anthony (2000). A Rulebook for Arguments. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

Tools and Resources

TechWritingTools

Information Management

Please back up everything you write for this course. You should either write your wiki posts in a word processor and save before posting. Or, if you like the feel of writing directly in wiki, cut and paste your work to an open word processing window, saving a back-up version in this way as you proceed. Information technologies carry a trace of instability, so it is always good to have redundancy in your writing process: make copies and put them in different places!

Freedom of Speech and [Cognitive Liberty]

As you will see, classrooms and wikis are both spaces devoted to free inquiry. This is a rhetorical space, one where composers are response-able to each other: they think and write in response to each other, and not to a preconceived notion of each other. Assume the best in those you study with and be generous with your respect, and you will teach them to respond in kind.

[The First Amendment of The United States Constitution]

Religious observance absence policy

Students who find a ENC 2210 meeting time in conflict with a major religious observance must provide notice of the date(s) to the instructor, in writing, by the second class meeting.

Disability access policy

In my capacity as instructor in ENC 2210, I will do everything I can to make fully available the educational resources we use and create in section 691. Any student with a disability should be encouraged to meet with the instructor privately during the first week of class to discuss accommodations. Each student must bring a current Memorandum of Accommodations from the Office of Student Disability.