Analyzing Writing Practices Project
Project Overview
This project is designed to help you examine the ways you will be expected to participate in writing practices in your chosen field or career area. In many ways, this project is similar to a lab project in that its primary goal is to help you build knowledge about a specific type of writing - a genre - by researching it as both a written product and as the result of organizational work practices. It should be a hands-on learning situation for you, though your primary goal is not to produce an instance the genre itself but to build an understanding of how an the genre works.There are several important assumptions that we will begin with in this project. They are presented here as a way to clarify why this project is designed the way it is:
- Assumption: Writing and Research Practices Will Be Important in Your Professional Lives
This assumption is supported, first of all, by the fact of your enrollment in the course. For most of you this course is a part of your curriculum, which means that someone thinks it is an important part of your professional training. In this project, you will be encouraged to discover just how important writing in the genre you choose is to your particular profession. - Assumption: Writing and Research Practices Are Flexible and Vary Widely Across Organizational Contexts
Every organization has slightly different ideas and guidelines about writin. Some of these are quite formal and explicit, while others are less explicit and function like "common sense." And while there is no magic set of universal rules that apply to every writing situation, we can learn what kinds of rules seem to be in place in a specific situation. That's one of your goals in this project. - Assumption: While Writing Varies Across
Contexts, There Are Strategies That Will Help Prepare You to Write
in Any Situation<
Writers often feel lost when faced with any new writing situation because they have learned the specific conventions and assumptions of one writing community, only to be faced with different conventions and assumptions in a new writing community. This happens quite a bit when students make the transition from writing for academic classes to writing for their workplaces. This project will help you to be more aware of your own writing community and how the expectations of that community may differ from other writing communities. - Assumption: Not all Writing Professionals
are Professional Writers
Depending on your chosen field, you may put a different value on writing than others in this class. For those of you planning to go on to jobs in new media development, for example, writing will be a necessary part of your education and professional experience. Others may write routinely, but will rarely be involved in producing high-stakes client-oriented print documents. This project will ask you to consider where you think you fit in this range of emphasis on writing.
Choosing a Genre to Research
Because this project asks you to writing practices in your chosen career area, you should choose a genre to analyze that lies within your career area. The aim is to identify a work context that you may someday find yourself a member of.Judging from previous semesters, I have found the following criteria to be useful in selecting a genre to study:
- Choose a genre that you expect to be involved with in some way in the future.
- Choose a specific site to study the genre in action. And pick one that is interesting to you. This project works best when you genuinely want to find out how a particular genre works from a behind the scenes way. If you just choose a site to satisfy the requirement, but aren't that excited about it, you're research on this project will suffer. If you have trouble deciding on a site, come and talk with me early on.
Deliverables (Required Products)
- Genre Analysis Report
This is a report on the genre, its features, and the writing practices involved in producing it in your chosen organization. You will collect and analyze samples of your chosen genre. You will also talk to people who write and/or use this genre as part of their work. To aid your analysis, you should also collect templates and oral & written "guides" that are meant to help writers in your chosen context learn and follow production guidelines. This report will be 3-5 pages, following the genre analysis template. - List of Research Questions To assist with your analysis, you'll be supplied with a set of basic research questions to begin your inquiry. These Genre Analysis Questions will provide you with a starting point. You should modify these to suit your specific project and interests.
- GA report draft, reviewer comments, and revision plan Keep these "process documents" as a way of documenting your progress. You'll post everything to your project page when you finish this project.