Shifting Voice In New Writing Spaces Assignment

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Level: Can be customized for writers at all levels and disciplines. 

Context: This assignment focuses on recognizing the shift in rhetorical strategies when writing within different media and writing spaces, particularly within academic, professional, and online modes.

Assignment:

It’s natural for us to change how we speak to different audiences within different contexts – the diction and tone of how we’d talk to a good friend is different from how we’d address an employer, a professor, a grandparent, etc. However, when we are asked to make the same shifts in our writing voices, many of us struggle to adapt to varying audiences. In the AWWE interview with a Content Manager and Contributing Editor for a lifestyle blog, we hear about how many of us learn to write a specific kind of “college” academic writing in school, but sometimes struggle to write engagingly and authentically in less formal spaces:

I’ve done so much academic writing my entire education and most of my career , it’s really hard for me to be conversational in writing and […] lot of the comments that I get in terms of edits [are to] actually make this less stuffy? How can we make it less academic sounding, how can we make it sound less boring ? You know how can we make it seem like you’re talking to your friend? And I really struggle with that. […] But it’s a totally different kind of writing than I’m used to. So you know I have trouble grasping that part of it. Like, you know it’s it’s very informal writing, I should say . It’s conversational, you know, there’s –you know, abbreviations and, and […] little phrases that people, the kids, nowadays  use. But then, it’s like, you know, for me it’s like well can I take it as seriously as I take say the [New York] Times of The Atlantic or something like that? Like what –you know, what’s real and what’s better? And there is no better really. It’s more in terms of you know are you able to write for your audience?

For this assignment, you will select three writing sources related to your discipline. One will be a scholarly journal article, one will be a trade magazine or professional blog article, and the third will be a top post on a subreddit related to your field. For example, in Psychology, you might select the scholarly journal Developmental Psychology; for your trade magazine article source, you may visit Psychology Today Magazine, and for a subreddit source, you may visit a top post on r/psychology.  If you are interested in a field like Finance, you might instead opt for visiting The Journal of Corporate FinanceForbes Magazine, and r/personalfinance, respectively. Note: for the reddit post, you should choose a top rated post (sort by Top) in the sub’s history and also read some of the most upvoted comments. This is one metric we can use to determine “effectiveness” or success of writing in that mode.

Next, for each of these three sources, you will be asked to analyze the tone and style of writing that is generally accepted within each of these writing spaces.

Consider:

Scholarly Journal

  1. How would you describe the typical structure of an article/post here?
  2. How would you describe the overall tone of the writing? Is it formal? Informal? 
  3. Do you notice any kind of specialized terms or jargon being used? If so, what are those terms?
  4. Do you find this easy or enjoyable to read? Why or why not?
  5. Who do you think the audience for this piece is? How can you tell? Are there any words/ideas expressed here that you don’t understand?
  6. What do you think about the author (who they are, their interests and qualifications) based on the way that they’ve written this piece?

Trade Journal

  1. How would you describe the typical structure of an article/post here?
  2. How would you describe the overall tone of the writing? Is it formal? Informal? 
  3. Do you notice any kind of specialized terms or jargon being used? If so, what are those terms?
  4. Do you find this easy or enjoyable to read? Why or why not?
  5. Who do you think the audience for this piece is? How can you tell? Are there any words/ideas expressed here that you don’t understand?
  6. What do you think about the author (who they are, their interests and qualifications) based on the way that they’ve written this piece?

Subreddit

  1. How would you describe the typical structure of an article/post here?
  2. How would you describe the overall tone of the writing? Is it formal? Informal? 
  3. Do you notice any kind of specialized terms or jargon being used? If so, what are those terms?
  4. Do you find this easy or enjoyable to read? Why or why not?
  5. Who do you think the audience for this piece is? How can you tell? Are there any words/ideas expressed here that you don’t understand?
  6. What do you think about the author (who they are, their interests and qualifications) based on the way that they’ve written this piece?

Overall

  1. What are the biggest differences you notice between this source and the other sources?
  2. What are the biggest similarities (if any) that you notice?
  3. What do you think is most important to consider when writing in formal contexts?
  4. What do you think is most important to consider when writing in informal online contexts?
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Reflection Prompt: Emotion and Writing Process

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Reflection Prompt: Emotion and Writing Process

Level: Developed for use with first-year writers.

Context: This short reflective prompt asks students to consider a quote from a writer in the archive in context with their own writing process.

Assignment:

It’s no surprise that significant research has been done about emotion and affect as they pertain to writing. Writing can be extremely emotional! One workplace writer in the Archive of Workplace Writing Experiences, a former Grant Writer, says of her writing, “I agonized over it, but I was pleased with the result of my agony.”

A lot of writers feel this agony or something like it. For many, the writing process is one of ups and downs. Emotional hurdles—like fear of failure, frustration that the writing doesn’t seem to be “working,” and even, sometimes, boredom—are very real challenges for most writers, and ones we have to grapple with particularly as we develop as college writers. And yet, most of us ultimately hope to feel, as this Grant Writer did, as though the agony was worth it once we have a successful finished writing project.

Write about your own writing process and the emotions that tend to accompany it. How do you feel about writing? What sorts of feelings come up when you are assigned a writing project? Excitement? Fear? Dread? Curiosity? How do these feelings change (or not) as you plan, draft, and revise? Have you ever felt the “agony” this writer describes? Describe your most successful writing project. How did your emotions evolve along with the project? Do you have (or can you imagine) strategies to help you use your emotions effectively or usefully when it comes to your writing?

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Authenticity in Social Media Activity

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Level: Can be customized for writers at all levels.

Context: This activity asks students to consider the concept of “authenticity” in social media writing, and in their writing more broadly. Through this activity, students will learn to identify and interpret writing “personas,” personal and business, as well as consider goals and purposes in online writing. It also asks students to grapple with their own online personas and representations. Instructors might ask start the conversation in class by asking students how they interpret the two quotes below. The individual writing and reflection piece can either take place immediately after this discussion in class or can be assigned as homework.

Assignment:

The topic of “authenticity” is one that troubles many writers, particularly those writing online. Two of the interviews in the Archive of Workplace Writing Experiences mention the struggle of being “authentic” on social media:

A Freelance Illustrator states:

“I try to really write from the heart and connect with my audience, and along with that comes the writing that I do on Twitter and Instagram, both social media writing, but I try my best to be relatable and to be authentic instead of somebody that is just trying to sell herself. So I would say that is my most important writing, trying to forge a connection with another person just by being who I am, without manicuring myself.”

A Business Development Director at a creative agency explains that:

“…we all know what social media looks like, and we know what the popular people on social media post and the copy they write, and you just try to mimic something that looks and feels authentic to you, and is still obviously, you know, lighthearted.”

Considering the quotes above, as well as your own social media experience, answer the questions below:

  1. What does the concept of “authenticity” on social media mean to you?
  • Why do you think these two writers place importance on trying to craft authenticity? Why is “achieving authenticity” challenging?
  • Many writers have an online writing “persona,” which may or may not represent them truthfully as they are in real life. How would you describe your own social media persona? What does your online persona’ life look like, and does it adequately represent your own? What does your persona care, as evidenced by how and why you post?
  • Businesses also, ideally, craft a “persona” related to their brand that they work to show consistently online. This persona may be formal and business-like or it may be more casual, appearing to interact “like a friend.” Find a brand that you follow or interact with on social media. How would you describe the “persona” of this organization? How did you come to that conclusion? (You might cite here language, tone, images, etc.)
  • Using this same organization’s feed, can you determine the audiences you think they’re trying to reach? How can you tell?
  • What purposes (yes, multiple!) do you think they’re working to achieve? What clues you in to these goals?
  • Would you say that the brand is “authentic” online? Why or why not?
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Social Media Analysis Assignment

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Level: Can be customized for writers at all levels.

Context: This assignment focuses on social media, and on asking students to consider audience, purpose, and medium more specifically. This could be done as an in-class assignment, alone or in groups, or as a homework assignment.

Assignment:

Social media is a new writing genre that organizations have had to learn how to create in the past decade or so. Some do social media extremely well, and some, of course, really don’t. In the AWWE interview with a Director of Business Development at a creative agency, we hear a reflection about both the importance of social media and the fact that he feels the agency doesn’t designate adequate resources to it:

“I believe in the power of [social media], and I would even say that we should invest 100 times more in it than we do, but at this point, it’s meant to be like a fact checker, kind of like a check box. One, it’s just meant to show a little personality. If someone we’re already in conversation with us or in the early stages of vetting and they happen to likes Instagram and uses it heavily, if they were to check us out it’s visually engaging, it shows some personality, it’s consistently showing our brand, like we, it’s consistently designed, all which I do in an app in about five minutes a day. We show our culture a little bit, and it’s meant to be more smart sarcasm and wit, is kind of the energy and vibe that we give off outwardly, I don’t know if that’s necessarily like the type of people we are, but it’s usually energizing, it has a little bit of a wit to it. And when I’m writing, it’s pretty plain, you know, we’re leveraging some type of quotes, or writing about a client and keeping it short and sweet, and just really trying to boost people’s awareness in our active community of what that is, and then I think over time, it could lead to more organic reach. But it’s pretty straightforward, it doesn’t, I don’t have a ton of input, I think I’ve, we all know what social media looks like, and we know what the popular people on social media post and the copy they write, and you just try to mimic something that looks and feels authentic to you, and is still obviously, you know, lighthearted.”

Like many organizations, this interviewee’s company struggles to successful write for and utilize write social media. Summarize his perspective in answering the following questions:

  1. How does the Director of Business Development view social media as it is currently used in his organization?
  • What types of posts does he currently write?
  • When he says he’s trying “to mimic something that looks and feels authentic,” what do you think he means?

The interviewee states that he mimics “what the popular people on social media post.” Many organizations do this—look to other, perhaps bigger or more successful organizations in their field—for inspiration and guidance for their online communications. To get a sense of how this is done and to learn to better analyze social media texts (and all texts), please follow the instructions below:

  1. Choose an industry you’re interested in, either personally or professionally. (You might choose, for instance, the industry of yoga, restaurants, banking, or aerospace).
  • Within your chosen industry, choose two different organizations that have an overlapping social media presence. (Meaning that they utilize at least one of the same platforms; they’re both on Twitter or Facebook, for example.)
  • On the platform they both use, examine their social media presence over the past month to two months and answer the following questions:

For organization #1:

  • Describe the tone and language used.
  • Who do you think their audience or audiences are? How can you tell? What assumptions is the writer of the post making about their audiences?
  • What do you think their top two or three primary purposes are on social media? (For instance, they may be looking, first, to “sell,” but they might also want to display themselves as an “organization who cares,” or as a particularly reliable brand.)
  • Find a post that you think is particularly successful or unsuccessful. Describe the post and why you think it succeeded or failed (be sure to contextualize this with the audiences and purposes you note above.)

For organization #2:

  • Describe the tone and language used.
  • Who do you think their audience or audiences are? How can you tell? What assumptions is the writer of the post making about their audiences?
  • What do you think their top two or three primary purposes are on social media? (For instance, they may be looking, first, to “sell,” but they might also want to display themselves as an “organization who cares,” or as a particularly reliable brand.)
  • Find a post that you think is particularly successful or unsuccessful. Describe the post and why you think it succeeded or failed (be sure to contextualize this with the audiences and purposes you note above.)
  • Which organization do you think is more successful in achieving their purposes and reaching their target audiences? Why?

What advice would you give the less successful organization?

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Contextualizing Figures and Visual Data

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Level: Can be customized for writers at all levels.

Context: This assignment focuses on visualized and graphical information and on asking students to consider how their audience (and that audience’s knowledge base and identity) shapes the way in which information is presented, explained, and contextualized. This could be done as an in-class assignment, alone or in groups, or as a homework assignment.

Assignment:

Often we see information or data presented to us in a visual form—tables, figures, charts, graphs, etc. It is vital that data be communicated clearly in order for that information to be both understood and taken seriously. In the AWWE interview with a Lab Manager at the National Institute of Health, we hear about the importance of clarity and consideration of audience when writing successful captions and other text about graphical data:

If your figures don’t reinforce what the writing says and if the writing doesn’t match up with the figures, then you’re never going to get it published. […] So actually what becomes the most important writing is actually the captions for the pictures. The thing that actually describes what you’re looking at – that needs to be letter perfect. […] A successful caption makes the figure seem as not busy as possible. The worst thing you want is a lot of pictures and a very little bit of explanation, so it just looks like a busy figure. ‘Cause the risk you run with science is people just tune out. If there’s a bunch of figures with a bunch of subfigures and the caption doesn’t thoroughly explain them, or explain them in a way that’s intuitive, then they’ll just gloss over it, and then you’ve lost most of your impact. […] I’ve learned a lot about writing captions in this job, because we do have these beautiful pictures, and that’s kind of the bait. It gets people to look at the paper. And so you’ll have a beautiful picture of a neuron– our neuron is actually beautiful, it has this sinusoidal curve, like an s, so it’s very easy to find when you’re looking at a bunch of neurons in a brain, so that’s useful, but also it just makes for some great pictures. So you have that, beautiful green or red or green/red/yellow neuron against a black background – gorgeous – and then next to that, you’ll have a plot, or you’ll have some numbers. So you’ve got the bait, […], and it’s all about constructing that so that the reader enjoys it and doesn’t get bogged down by too much information.

In this interview, we see several important elements to consider when writing about graphical data:

  1. Is my caption/writing accurately expressing the information/data shown on the chart/graph/table?
  2. Do I have too many figures/subfigures without enough proper explanation and contextualization of the data? Is it clear what this all means?
  3. Have I considered my audience (what they know, how they are likely to see/understand the graphics presented, their level of interest, etc) in how I’ve written about this data?

The interviewee is writing captions and text about visual data in scholarly articles written to other scientists, or experts in that field. Their knowledge of that particular audience and genre drives a lot of the decisions made in their writing. To get a sense of how different audiences can shape and direct our own writing choices in this mode, please follow the instructions below:

  1. Choose a graphical data source: a chart, graph, infographic, table, etc from a reputable research institution. For example, you might visit the graphics page of the Bureau of Labor Statistics or something similar.
  2. Read the data source closely and make sure you have a firm understanding of what the source is expressing.
  3. For each of the three different audiences respond to the following questions:

Writing for Experts in the Field:

  • Compose an appropriate one to two sentence caption that accurately expresses the figure itself and the data/information included in the chosen graphic.
  • Compose some accompanying text (about 40-50 words) that highlights any important relationships, data points, or features of the graphic.
  • Describe how the audience (Experts) influenced the information you chose to include. How did knowing the audience affect your word choice and your tone?
  • Based on this audience, what do you think a caption and the accompanying text you composed were meant to achieve (purpose)? How did you go about achieving that purpose?

Someone in your Peer Group:

  • Compose an appropriate one to two sentence caption that accurately expresses the figure itself and the data/information included in the chosen graphic.
  • Compose some accompanying text (about 40-50 words) which highlights any important relationships, data points, or features of the graphic.
  • Describe how the audience (Peers) influenced the information you chose to include. How did knowing the audience affect your word choice and your tone?
  • Based on this audience, what do you think a caption and the accompanying text you composed were meant to achieve (purpose)? How did you go about achieving that purpose?

Someone Who May be Skeptical of the Data:

  • Compose an appropriate one to two sentence caption that accurately expresses the figure itself and the data/information included in the chosen graphic.
  • Compose some accompanying text (about 40-50 words) which highlights any important relationships, data points, or features of the graphic.
  • Describe how the audience (Skeptics) influenced the information you chose to include. How did knowing the audience affect your word choice and your tone?
  • Based on this audience, what do you think a caption and the accompanying text you composed were meant to achieve (purpose)? How did you go about achieving that purpose?
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Technical Delivery Manager

Sciences

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Marketing Manager

Business, Sciences

SPEAKER:             Could you please state your job title and the kind of organization where you work?

SPEAKER:             I am a marketing manager for a healthcare system.

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Director of Customer Support

Business

Director of Customer Support

32:20

 

Q: So would you please state your job title and where you currently work?

 

A: Okay. My job title is I’m director of customer service, or customer support, and the name of the company that I work for is called Global Phone or GPhone.

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Labor & Delivery Nurse

Sciences, uncategorized

Labor & Delivery Nurse

33:17

Q: Would you please state your job title, and where you currently work? And I know, you know, we talked just before starting to record, about how you just transitioned jobs, so if you could just give us the context for your old work versus your new work?

 

A: Okay. My old job title was as a registered nurse, I recently graduated from Frontier Nursing University with my masters in nurse midwifery. So my new job title is as a nurse midwife, but I’m going to be speaking I think to my last position as a registered nurse with Inova Alexandria Hospital on labor and delivery.

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Human Rights & Discrimination Lawyer

Law & Law Enforcement

Human Rights and Discrimination Lawyer

21:43

 

Q: Would you please state your job title, where you currently work, and how long it’s been since you graduated college?

 

A: I’m a lawyer, I work for a government agency called the Human Rights Legal Support Center, and I graduated in 2012, so that would be six years ago.

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