CPR Extension and Tone and Audience Assignment

Due to some of the questions regarding CPR, I am extending the deadline until Friday at midnight. If for some reason you didn't complete the assignment, you have the chance to try again.

This first CPR assignment is an all or nothing grade--if you complete the entire process, you receive credit for participation. The assignment is designed to help you understand the process that we will use for each major assignment in the class. So, once you learn the pattern, it will make sense. So, while you are given grades by CPR for the assignment, they are just for your reference for this first assignment. I won't use them to grade you this first time around. Think of this as the warm up to the rest of CPR.

Tone, Audience and Blogs Assignment

I am pleased to see that this early in the semester we are starting to have some questions regarding what is the point of blogging in technical writing. SO, I would like you to read through this entire blog post and respond to some of the issues and points that I raise in a blog post on your blog. This is due by midnight, Tuesday, February 15, as noted on the WebCT calendar.

Take a look at the discussion on Nate's blog. Be sure to read the comments as well (and maybe add one of your own?).

Nathan raises some interesting points. Let me respond to some of them here. You can pick up the conversation on your blog, ok?

Web Delivered Course:
Not every student thrives in a web delivered course. This is about "knowing" yourself. What kind of learner are you? Some students find that they need face to face interaction with their instructor and someone to remind them to complete tasks. These students don't do well in web delivered courses. Ultimately this is just about how you learn--we all learn differently. Other students find that the flexibility of web delivered courses and the fact that they learn best from reading make the web delivered course right. You need to think about how you learn and what the class does and doesn't do.

Multiple Web Pages:
Some of you have concerns about the multiple places that our class is housed. I can tell you that this class simulates the types of tasks that you will be asked to complete on the job. In other words, you will not find a professional job that doesn't ask you to gather data from multiple sources, synthesis and produce an outcome. So, yes, you will need to have multiple screens open to complete tasks. This is similar to working from multiple documents, an email your boss sends, the rules of the organization, a directive that your boss gives you in the hall, and your personal goals to complete a task at work.

Blogging:
What's the point, asks Brandy--Actually she asks "what does Blog have to do with a tech class"? As I mentioned in one of the first posts to my blog, I think blogs can do a couple of things very well.

1. This is a writing course--I notice that Brandy forgot the "writing" part in her post. Perhaps that is why she doesn't see the point in blogging? The only way that you will learn to do something well is to practice. Your blog lets you practice writing and writing often.

2. The blog is an excellent way to get you to think about tone and audience. So, take Nate's entry and the responding comments. Here's what you need to think about. Your instructor reads all the blogs and comments. I'm your boss. What tone should you use? Who is your audience? How public is your entry?

If there is one thing that I want you to learn from this class, it is to control your tone in your writing. All too often people send the angry, first response email. This is the email that immediately responds to a problem or situation. This is a really bad idea for a number of reasons. Ultimately, you send an email, write a letter, write a post, etc. because you want to get something changed or done. If you make the audience angry or annoyed, what is the chance that you will be able to get the audience to do something to change the situation? Probably very little. So, don't use your writing to vent publicly. Instead, you want to wait a bit (until you cool down--I call it the 24 hour rule) and then carefully read through your written response. You want to appear rational and thoughtful, not angry and irrational. You want to convince your reader to do something--what is the best way to approach the audience?

Frustration:
It is not unreasonable to be a bit frustrated. There is a learning curve to the course (as you might see with all courses where you have to work at the material). Once you master the various technology pieces, however, you will see that each piece of the course follows the same pattern. So, the learning curve will level off. I would argue that the technical part of the course title (Technical Writing) is being served by the various technology pieces that you use.