Professional Writing

Writing Excellent Research Papers ASPA student summit ppt

by Patricia Shields

This is the powerpoint for the 2012 American Society for Public Administration Annual Conference - Student Summit, Las Vegas,

This Powerpoint presentation focuses on two organizing tools that should help students write higher quality papers.... more This Powerpoint presentation focuses on two organizing tools that should help students write higher quality papers. The first tool, the Step-by-Step notebook helps the student organize time materials and ideas. This is particularly helpful for the literature review stage of a longer empirical work. The second tool, conceptual frameworks, help organize empirical inquiry by connecting the research purpose, theory, methodology, statistics and presentation of findings. Examples and links to award winning student papers are provided.

Writing from sources: ethnographic insights into business news production

by Tom Van Hout

PhD dissertation, Ghent University, March 2010

Drawing on data collected at the economics newsdesk of De Standaard, a quality newspaper in Belgium, this book... more Drawing on data collected at the economics newsdesk of De Standaard, a quality newspaper in Belgium, this book examines the situated practices of print journalists in their roles as knowledge mediators and creators. How do reporters make sense of the various sources, narratives and frames around them and channel these into one final news story? What is the journalist’s role in the representation of events? How are news articles negotiated between reporters, editors and sources? How do technologies of production mediate the news process? Crucially, what does the journalist actually do while writing?

The first part of this book outlines a theoretical and methodological framework for a linguistic ethnographic approach to news production and describes the fieldwork procedures for collecting data. In the second part, the book presents four empirical chapters that analyze journalism as a field of production, then as materiality, next as literacy and finally as opacity. The third part addresses the ‘So what?’ question by reflecting on the validity, reliability and generalizability of this study from the perspective of linguistic ethnography.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27263832/Writing-From-Sources

Join the REx Collective

by Jenn Fishman

REx editors include Jenn Fishman, Joan Mullin, and Mike Palmquist.

The Research Exchange Index or REx  is designed to recognize local, national, and international writing... more The Research Exchange Index or REx  is designed to recognize local, national, and international writing researchers by periodically collecting and publishing information about the research studies they've conducted. All writing researchers are invited to contribute by uploading information about their work. In addition, writing researchers, teachers, and students are invited to help build and shape REx by joining the editorial collective as an acquisitions editor or an editorial reviewer. To learn more, download the attached paper or contact the REx editors: RExchangeContact@gmail.com.

Technical Documents as Rhetorical Agency

by Nathan R. Johnson

Ecological, Pedagogical Public Rhetoric

by Nathaniel Rivers

Co-authored with Ryan Weber. Accepted for publication in College Composition and Communication December 2011.

Operating within and for a segment of rhetoric and writing studies researchers and practitioners devoted to student... more Operating within and for a segment of rhetoric and writing studies researchers and practitioners devoted to student engagement with local publics, this article articulates an approach to fostering student rhetorical engagement through sustained and rhetorically sophisticated advocacy. The article describes the pedagogy’s goals and theoretical framework and analyzes student samples from a course utilizing this pedagogy. The analysis is particularly focused on the ability of students to successfully adapt their advocacy to different, oftentimes competing, audiences. The article also discusses the outcomes of the course—both its failures and successes—in order to facilitate future attempts to foster meaningful student engagement with local publics.

Some Assembly Required: The Latourian Collective and the Banal Work of Technical and Professional Communication

by Nathaniel Rivers

Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 38.3 (2008): 189-206 [lead article]. Nominated for a NCTE Scientific and Technical Communication Award.

In this article the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of... more In this article the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author positions technical and professional communication not simply as transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the common world in service of the common good, which thoroughly grounds its practice in rhetorical theory. Such a positioning also ascribes value to technical and professional communication without reinscribing the false dichotomy between science and politics.

Non-native English-speaking scientists' successful revision for English-language publication: A discourse analytic and social constructivist study

by Karen Englander

This dissertion became two published papers:
Transformation of the Identities of Nonnative English-Speaking Scientists as a Consequence of the Social Construction of Revision in Journal of Language, Identity and Educaiton, (2009), vol 8, 35-53, and

Revision of scientific manuscripts by nonnative-English-speaking scientists in response to journal editors’ criticism of the language in the Journal of Applied Linguistics (2006), vol 3.2, 129-161.

Working It Out

by Karen Kaiser Lee

" Video for the rest of us? Toward a sustainable process for incorporating video into multimedia composition."

by Patricia Sullivan

co-authored with Peter J. Fadde. Published in D. DeVoss, H. McKee, & R. Selfe, eds., Technological Ecologies and Sustainability: Methods, Modes, and Assessment. Computers & Composition Digital Press and Utah State University Press, 2009.

Long the province of professional media producers, video production and publication suddenly seem to be available to... more Long the province of professional media producers, video production and publication suddenly seem to be available to virtually anybody. But the promise of video in composition comes with challenges, including how teachers with limited video abilities use video in their composition classes and grow a sustainable process of integrating video into multimedia composition. We offer a process for working with video in multimedia composition: ideate, locate, evaluate, and integrate. The complexity of teaching and creating video can be simplified, we argue, by focusing on one or a few components in a limited production process. To particularize the discussion, we consider new curricular tasks that scaffold video composition by providing a training wheels approach (e.g., Primary Access); a repository approach (e.g., An Adventure of the American Mind); and an imitation approach (e.g., following the formats of activism videos on YouTube). Our goal is to point toward sustainable processes for incorporating the powerful, but still difficult to manage, medium of video into multimedia composition—processes particularly useful to students and teachers with limited video experience.