Lesson for Week 4: Day 2
4:2Complete the applying for a job packet and send it to me, and to read chapters 6&7 in Lambrecht. Finish your letter of application and resume and send them to me as email attachments. Try to apply the principles of good structure to the letter and good design to the resume. Make sure you do these things, and then go on into the rest of this lesson.
This lesson introduces the first of two research papers you will write in this course. The three research papers are:
Each of these requires research, though the research is somewhat different in each. Notice that they all emphasize the first cannon of rhetoric, namely invention.
First, look at the discourse in your field assignment. Once you understand the purpose, your role, your reader, and the structure, you will need to plan your project. Look at your syllabus to determine the due date and then map out a schedule by working backward.
Here's a little more explanationation about the report you are to write. Discourse is a general term for language practices. A discourse community is a group of people who interact with each other often, and in the case of your assignment, I'm collapsing the idea of a discourse community with your future professional community. People in different fields develop different language practices. Some use face-to-face discourse predominantly; others use the phone; others email. Some use only short, informal written documents; others use a combination of short and long documents, formal and informal. Some have developed special genres to get their own particular kind of work done. This class is a writing class, so we are particularly interested in the "textual" practices of your field. But it is appropriate talk about the way people speak and about the relationship of speaking to writing in a field to set the context for discussing textual practices. Because textual practices are important for this paper, you should be careful to collect texts, so that you can classify them into genres, and to select a promising document for rhetorical analysis.
Remember, your assignment is to study your future profession's discourse practices, especially as reflected in its written products. (If you are already in your profession, you may report on it.) The report will need to tell the reader something about the profession more generally to give the reader background, but the topic of the report is your profession's discourse. The word "report" is made up of "re," which means again or back, and "port," which means carry. So you are to investigate your profession--by searching for background on the web, by interviewing a professional about her or his discourse, by collecting representative documents from that profession, and by analyzing one of those documents carefully to show an example of written discourse in the field--and to "carry back" that information in the form of a report. You can get a little more of an idea about what I am expecting by looking at the grading rubric (although I don't always fill it out when grading) for this paper and by looking at these fairly successful examples. Most of these are very good; if there is a structural error or section missing, I've noted it.
By the way, these reports are research reports published within in the structure of this class, so you may cite them in your own report if you reference the report and page number. These are student reports, so they don't carry the same authority as a professional researcher's report, but they did real research and turned up real information, so they can be cited as long as you use them for what they are.
The next step in this kind of research is to generate research questions something like the following:
This paper requires you to become somewhat conversant with theories about discourse communities and genre. You might think of this as the literature review for the paper. Creating a literature review is a research project that helps you contribute to a growing body of literature on the study of discourse communities. There are a couple readings linked in this lesson and some more in the next lesson.
For today, please look for material on discourse communities by searching the web. For instance, I went to Google, clicked on "Advanced Search" put in the domain of .edu and the words discourse communities. An important summary by Doug Brent, Faculty of General Studies, University of Calgary, of a noted theorist popped up, Bartholomae on Discourse Communities. You should read it and try following some extra links. You may find other articles or summaries on discourse communities by doing further web searches.
Genre theory is a growing field as this book review of Amy Devitt's book and this call for journal articles shows. Here is a paper that looks at weblogs as a genre. This article is useful to look at because it has a good example of a literature review on genre theory, section 2.1. Here is another rather technical article by David Russell that combines genre theory and activity theory. As you can see, it doesn't take long before you realize that there is a great deal of theory about discourse communities and genres out there. You need to summarize some of it as part of your introduction.
The problem-solving process. You have just been presented with a project that probably looks like a problem. Some rhetorical theorists--Young, Becker, and Pike--have analyzed problem solving; they call it the "process of inquiry." They mark out four stages.
I've found this process helpful because it tells me that my anxiety is normal, that it is constructive. It tells me that preparation up front is important, even if I don't solve my problem. It helps me to have conscious in mental process that I don't quite understand. I come to realize that the murkiness caused by a problem will gradually disappear as I move through these stages.
1. Make an entry in 320web.blogspot.com. It can be on your reading in Lambrecht, or it can be abut the process of writing the job packet, or it can be about your next project.
2. Ponder the project set before you, scan the linked readings above, and draw up a list of to do's with their target dates for completion. Send me that list of to do's either as an email attachment or in the body of an email message. Below is a list of to-do's that I drew up off the top of my head. You may use it if you like, but you need to supply real dates to fit the time frame of the project.