Objectives. At the end of this week, students will be able to:

• Identify key information and resources in the syllabus and navigate Blackboard to access course content.
• Explain the skills and qualities required in technical writing and the characteristics of a technical document (1)
• Define rhetorical situation and rhetorical analysis. (1, 2)

[For instructors: You can build a survey in Blackboard, and in the first week it can serve two purposes: 1) to help you get to know your students and their experience and interests, and 2) to give them incentive to look through your syllabus and identify some key information. Blackboard surveys are anonymous so this will not be an assignment that enters points automatically into the gradebook. However, you can ask for their names as I have done, and enter points manually.

Revise these questions to whatever information is important to you, or whichever areas of your syllabus you want to be sure they read. In a Blackboard survey or quiz, you can pick the types of questions that best serve your purpose: fill in the blanks, short answer, multiple choice, true/false, etc. Keep it relatively short and easy. It is not the most important thing you’ll have students do this first week, but it is a way to get them to engage with the course and its structure, and to give you some info.

Here are 13 questions that I’ve used. These are for an online course, so attendance and other classroom policies are not covered. You could revise as you need.]

I'd like to know more about you so I can better focus the course to your needs, and I need to confirm that you've read the course requirements and know how to locate that information. So here is a survey to help me. Complete the questions and submit. The more detail you give me, the better…on the questions that allow that.

1. My name is
2. I am from
3. My discipline or major is
4. My intended career or field of interest is
5. What other composition or writing courses have you taken and where?
6. What doe you expect, and what would you most like to learn, from this course?
7. How do you expect to use this information in your field or career?
8. According to the syllabus, when should reading assignments be completed?
9. What percentage of your final grade is determined by the 4 major assignments?
10. Where will conferences and office hours be held?
11. What are your instructor’s office hours?
12. What is the policy on late assignment submissions?
13. Who do you contact if you witness discrimination or sexual harassment?

[For instructors: I have made a PowerPoint that leads students through an overview of the course and how it works. This is particularly useful for online sections because it stands in for that first class session where you might stand up front and go over the syllabus. You can narrate the PowerPoint if you’d like by recording your own voiceover explanation of each slide. That would be a wonderful way to let students hear from you. Even for classroom sections, it is helpful to have a simplified, more visual version of the syllabus that students can refer to. You may edit this with your own information. You’ll see the highlighted areas that are left blank for you, but you can change other aspects as well, according to your syllabus and course design. And please change the photos and design to something that communicates your personality and style, if you like.]

see the attached PowerPoint

[For instructor: I have students complete this exercise and post their findings in a small group Discussion Board. I assign groups for each major assignment unit, so they can work on these activities in their small group. When you build groups in Blackboard, each group has access to its own Blog, Discussion Board, Wiki, and email list. You can also put yourself into each group so you can observe and participate if you want.

For this exercise, and most weekly exercises for online sections, I would have them submit their answers by Friday midnight, and then respond to their peers’ posts by Sunday midnight. In Discussion Board, you can set the forum so that each student must submit their own post before they can see anyone else’s. This is a good practice.]

In Practical strategies in Technical Communications, Chapter One p. 15, complete Exercise 3. “Using a job site such as Indeed.com or Monster.com, locate three job ads for people in your academic major. In each ad, identify references to writing and communications skills, and then identify references to professional attitudes and work habits. Be prepared to share your findings with the class.”

In this case you are sharing to your group’s discussion board. In your post, please make two lists, first the references in your ads to writing and communications skills, and secondly the references to attitudes and work habits. Then write at least one well developed paragraph on the new understanding and connections this information gives you concerning what your field values and what will contribute to future success. I recommend you write every post in a Word document and then copy and paste it into the Discussion Board forum text box. If you type directly into Discussion Board your work might be lost, plus it’s good to have a saved copy that you can access offline.

Please submit your post by Friday midnight. You will not be able to see your peers’ posts until you have submitted your own. By Sunday midnight, read your peers’ posts and respond to each with your own insights, at least three sentences per comment. This length requirement is minimum and intended to help you contribute something of substance. So please write real sentences with real content.

Here are examples of decent comments to posts in another course, not for this particular exercise, so don’t worry if you don’t understand what they are talking about. Just notice how they make their own observations and also ask questions that might stimulate the poster to think further or provide direction for revision:

“Good work, xxxx. You are digging deeper into why and how this community produces the discourse it does, and what the motivations and results are. It's important to know that the area directors write the newsletters, and emails, and to consider how their position and responsibilities shapes the writing. And looking at the requirements for participants to sign an agreement about illegal activities–why do you think they require that when they probably know it is not enforceable? What does that process do for the organization?”

“It's interesting that you noticed the expectation of the audience to have a certain level of knowledge, therefore many things would not be explained. Also, the awareness that there will be a variety of opinions or reactions to a coach's or player's statements or critiques of the game is important. How does that shape their statements, do you think? Do they qualify their opinions? Are they sometimes defensive? So they address the “naysayers” as is done many kinds of writing, per They Say/I Say?”

[For instructors: you can use the Blog feature in Blackboard for students to post things for the entire class to read, but not necessarily for interaction or discussion or workshop. There is the opportunity to comment on Blogs, but it's not designed for long comments or discussion. So you might ask students to read these posts, but not necessarily make extensive comment. Seeing these pieces of writing will help them become aware of how other students approach writing tasks, get to know some of their peers, and feel part of the online class. This also works for a face-to-face class because students can refer back to these introductions if they forget someone, and some are more willing to post than to speak up in class. Instruct them in the Weekly Lesson how to find the course Blog in the Blackboard menu, and how to post their own blog. You could also use Discussion Board for this if you prefer. Here are the instructions I would write at the top of the Blog itself.]

Please type your blog posts in a Word document, save, and then copy and paste into the Blog textbox to avoid losing your content.

For your introduction, write in paragraph form, in your “voice” or style, so that we can get to know who you are. Tell us the usual helpful information about yourself: where you are from, your major, your year at U of A, what you plan to do when you graduate. And then tell us the good stuff: at least two things about yourself that are interesting or unusual or important for someone to know about you. After you have posted, you’ll be able to get to know your classmates from their introductions.

Objectives. At the end of this week, students will be able to:

• Identify audience, purpose, and scope in a rhetorical situation (1, 2)
• Analyze a short document (2)
• Conduct online research to obtain targeted documents (3)
• Generate a draft for a specific audience, based on methods taught (4)

[For instructors: The reason for including this process in the discussion board is so that students can help each other identify appropriate documents and learn from each other how to look at writing from their field. This is one reason that putting students from the same or related disciplines into groups for this first unit could be helpful. This process has several parts and will take clear explanation:

• Research to identify documents from your discipline.
• Post documents to your group Discussion Board with brief explanation.
• Respond to your peers’ selections through comments on Discussion Board.

You can include explanation in the Weekly Lesson, as well as instruction in the Discussion Board forum.]

This activity will contribute to Assignment #1 and prepare you to begin drafting. It has several steps, so follow directions closely. Those steps are:

• Research to identify three documents from your discipline.
• Post those documents to your group Discussion Board with a brief explanation.
• Respond to your peers’ selections through comments on Discussion Board.

Step 1: To find your documents, do a simple online search for writing in your discipline. You will likely find style guides for that field and I have posted several examples of these in Blackboard. Style guides usually provide a list of frequently used genres for the discipline, such as patient reports, lab reports, press releases, market analyses, newsletters, business letters, proposals, formal reports, white papers, and so on. You can also find examples by searching websites or googling the genre and field, such as public health reports. This is not in depth academic research; you can do it by exploring the internet for examples of writing. But it’s still valuable in giving you exposure to communications in your field.

Once you have identified two or three genres or types of writing that interest you or seem most important in your field, find examples of those genres in the style guides, websites, or publications you have located online.

Step 2: Write a brief explanation of your selections, and list the sources with citations, in the citation style common to your discipline. Your explanation should include what you consider your field or discipline, how you identified these genres and documents as commonly used, and why you think they are important for someone learning to write in your field. Paste that explanation into your post on the Group Discussion Board forum, and attach the saved pdfs or other files, or include the links to the online documents. Post by Wednesday midnight.

Step 3: Look over the selections posted by your peers, consider whether these are appropriate genres and examples and whether they will be good subjects for analysis. You may also make observations on how you might assess the rhetorical situations and analyze those texts. Give each peer your observations in a comment. It would be helpful to post your comments to each peer by Friday night. Then questions can be asked, and corrections made, if necessary, to selections.

Via comments, your group may also continue the discussion with ideas on what these collected documents say about writing in your related disciplines. What is valued, what style and language is typically used and what differs from genre to genre? This is a place to give input and learn from your peers in the initial stage of Assignment #1. The more thoroughly you interact here, the more easily you will be able to begin drafting the analysis of these documents. Complete the discussion by Sunday midnight.

[For instructors: This is an opportunity for students to practice analysis of a brief document, and for you to give feedback that will help them approach Assignment #1 with more understanding. This should be a short piece of writing in which they include the crucial elements: summary of content, assessment of rhetorical context, analysis of writer’s strategies, and evaluation of how appropriate or successful these strategies are given the purpose and audience. In the analysis, you can have students focus on just a few elements, like purpose, audience and scope, in order to make this more manageable in the short time that they have. They should be able to complete this in an hour or so.

Note: This reading is the diversity selection for this unit, likely a different perspective for most students and can provide opportunity for discussion, if you should choose to facilitate that. Or you can have them comment on the cultural perspective in their blog post.]

Standing Rock press release

This week’s Course Blog is a practice analysis to help prepare you for Assignment #1. A reading is posted in the Weekly Lesson, “Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman Mike Faith Pushes Back Against DAPL False Claims,” (the file is called Standing Rock Press Release). The genre is a press release, so you can start by looking up what that is, why it is used, who writes it and who reads it. That will give you a basis for determining the rhetorical situation of this specific piece. Here is what your analysis should include:

• Brief summary of the contents or subject of the writing.
• Rhetorical situation: purpose, audience, and scope.
• Description of the writers’ strategies, format, and structure. Why does he write as he does?
• Assessment of whether these strategies are effective, given the purpose, and how they are effective.

Remember, an analysis should address how and why, not simply summarize content and list strategies. Your blog post should be no less than 1 page in length and is due Friday midnight. Be sure to read some of your peers’ blogs and respond to at least two. You can learn a lot by seeing how other writers’ respond to this task, and they can learn from your input.

Objectives. At the end of this week, students will be able to:

• Develop analysis of a text (1, 2, 4)
• Evaluate and critique peer writing (1, 2, 5)
• Describe the components of the writing process (4)

[For instructors: This week is peer review and conferences on Assignment #1. The conferences held now will give you an early acquaintance with your students and opportunity for intervention, but you can schedule this later on if you choose.

The instructions for peer review are carried out on the Discussion Board for the small groups in which they have been working during this initial unit. There are other ways to conduct this, and you may choose other methods like Google docs or the peer review in McMillan’s Achieve. The Blackboard Discussion Board is readily available to them and to you, so I have incorporated that tool. It is recommended that you provide a specific system or questionnaire to guide their feedback. An example is provided below. In Blackboard, an optional reading can be posted as a pdf: “Responding—Really Responding—to Other Student’s Writing” by Richard Straub. This reading can give students direction in the type of feedback that is valuable, and could guide you in designing a prompt or guide for their review.

Responding to other Students' Writing

Conferences work well in Collaborate Ultra, again readily available in Blackboard, but you could use Zoom or some other platform if you choose. Have students sign up for conference times via a Google doc or other system calendar. List the specific times that you want to be available to conference. You can use your office hours for this purpose during these conference weeks. Post the sign up sheet the week before so that students are ready with drafts early in the week, if that is what your schedule calls for.

I include these activities in the Collaboration portion of my grade distribution because there needs to be incentive for students to participate…or some will not. These are important elements for their success. All writers benefit from feedback, especially during the writing process while they have opportunity to revise and put recommendation into practice. Your feedback, one on one in conference, may well be one of the most valuable aspects of the course for many students.]

By Wednesday midnight, post your draft of Assignment #1 to the peer review forum in your Group Discussion Board. Attach the document to your post, as you would attach a document to an email.

Thursday and Friday, read your peers’ papers and complete the attached peer review form, and attach it back to your comment on their post:

Peer Review – Assignment #1 Rhetorical Analysis

Writer:

Reviewer:

1. Comment on the organization of the analysis. Does the order and organization lead you logically through the analysis of the texts? Are the expected components present, per the assignment?
2. What adjustments to the organization would make this analysis more effective?
3. Comment on the content. How complete or effective are the summaries and the assessments of the rhetorical situations of the selected texts? Do these elements set up the analysis so that you as reader understand it? Is the analysis adequately supported by examples and quotes from the texts? Where is that support lacking?
4. How clear is the writing and how smooth are transitions from one topic or section to another? Where are there errors or clarity issues that need to be corrected—mark these. How effective is the structure of sections, paragraphs and sentences?
5. Give the writer any concerns or commendations you have about their assessment of these documents, analysis of the writing, and what it says about the discipline.
6. What is the main thing they can do in revision to make this paper more effective?
7. Remember Richard Straub’s article, and that you are responding as a reader. Make an overall comment on your impression of the paper in the Discussion Board comment box. Be specific. Give feedback that will be helpful, not that is easiest and friendliest. Your goal is to help your peers make their writing better. Even if you are not expert, you are a reader and can share your experience as a reader. That is valuable.

Please sign up on the Google Doc, posted in the Weekly lesson, for a conference at one of the available times, Monday through Wednesday.

Before your scheduled conference, submit your draft to Blackboard in the 1st Draft Submission link in the Weekly Lesson folder. Do not come to conference without a draft submitted, or we will not be able to discuss your progress in the assignment. Each conference will last 15-20 minutes. We can also cover any aspects of the course or your own writing that you would like to discuss.

Objectives. At the end of this week, students will be able to:

• Identify useful aspects of critique to apply, and revise a draft (2, 4, 5)
• Plan an organizational strategy with headings and cohesive paragraphs (4, 5)
• Create a correct citation for in-text and references page (3)
• Demonstrate effective rhetorical analysis (2)

[For instructors: Even though this is a 3000-level course, it can be helpful to review citation and document styles. I have included a citation activity using PowerPoint slides with sources to cite. My answers are in MLA style, but I would allow students to use whatever style they typically use in their major. You could also do a research activity here instead, or in addition to this in which they find the sources and then cite them. I hear from faculty in other colleges who are frustrated with students’ lack of ability to cite or use sources correctly, so apparently this is still an issue even after they move on into the courses in their majors.

I’ve included some complex citation problems that require information on multiple slides: online articles for which students need to identify the publication, publisher and date of publication, a photograph for which the creator and original website must be found, an article within a collection for which the article and the larger text must be acknowledged. You can certainly replace these sources with your own choices. I will post the PowerPoint with the source slides in the Weekly Lesson folder where all Groups can access it. I want them to collaborate and arrive at consensus on the correct citations, then submit their list of citations to the submission link. I make this a group submission so only one student needs to submit for all. After they have submitted, I would make available the PowerPoint with answers for them to check.]

See the Power Point for the Citation activity in the Week 4 weekly lesson folder. Notice that there are six sources, but some sources have multiple slides because you will need additional information, more than you can see on a single slide. To determine how to make a correct citation for a Works Cited or References page, see Appendix Part A in PSTC, pp 448-481 for MLA or APA styles, or Purdue Owl (link in Weekly Lesson folder), libraries.uark.edu, or other reliable source. Your group does not have to use MLA style if MLA is not used by your major. Pick the citation style that you will using In the future, and practice that (but everyone in the group should cite in the same style). After you have made your citations, copy and paste them into the Group Discussion Board forum for this activity, by Wednesday midnight.

Then, consult with your peers and determine by consensus the correct citation for each source. Have one group member put those selected citations into a Word Document. Put your citation style at the top of the document along with the group member names and submit it to the Citation Activity Assignment link in the Week 4 folder by Friday midnight. This is a group assignment so only one member needs to submit. Once all groups have submitted their citation list, I will post my MLA answers in a separate PowerPoint to the Week 4 folder.

[For instructors: Chapter 6 in PSTC handles stylistic issues like organization, coherence, syntax, and grammar. I break these sections and exercises up and cover them over a period of weeks with time to practice the principles and skills. These exercises for Unit 1 are on organization, paragraph structure and coherence. A brief recorded lecture or lesson on these topics, with an emphasis on writing for the reader, would be helpful. Students have a lot to do this week, so I modified certain exercises to allow short answers rather than entire paragraphs for each part.]

Complete this week’s reading in PSTC Chapter 6, and then do exercises 1-7 in a Word document. In exercises 2, 3, and 4, you do not need to write an entire paragraph for each answer. Simply revise the titles, headings and lists, and give your reason in a sentence or two. Submit your document to the PSTC Ch 6 Exercises submission link in the Week 4 folder.