PROFESSIONAL WRITING

Assignment in TECH 394: Industrial Project Management (Jule Scarborough)

Formal Paper: Develop a paper about projects, teams, and/or project leadership; develop issues and solutions in greater depth. What strategies, techniques, processes should be used to have a more successful project or team? Draw conclusions and describe effective project management and effective project management teams. End with very specific recommendations to guide your project team. Use APA writing style manual. Identify all sources in the paper's text using APA style format. Writing skills are seriously graded on this product. See writing rubric, Paper Outline & rubric, Group Process.

Paper Outline:

Click here to see > a sample student paper.

ALTERNATIVE WRITING

Assignment in ENGL 592: Nonfiction Writing (Brad Peters)

Experimental Paper: We’ve talked about the importance of considering different types of readers and their potential reactions to we write. In connection, we’ve also discussed different kinds of approaches to a text (feminist, deconstruction, expressivist, archetypal, African American, psychoanalytical, new historical, queer theory, social construction, new critical, reader response, current-traditionalist, cultural studies, etc.). Write a concise summary of what you’ve learned about these kinds of theories and what they reveal about different types of approaches to reading. Try to use a creative format. For instance, you might write a free-verse poem along the lines of Wallace Stevens’ “!3 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Or you might imitate a parable, such as the four blind men describing an elephant (each over-generalizes, when he touches a different part of the elephant’s body). Give your summary a title. Sarcasm is allowed, within limits.

You’ll begin this summary in class. Write for 10-15 minutes, and then we’ll share what each of us comes up with in small groups. For next week, you will post the final version of your summary on the course WebBoard, and we’ll decide what we can learn from them collectively. You should also add a paragraph of reflection to your summary, explaining why you chose a particular format and what you learned.

A creative format that accurately summarizes at least seven approaches (along with several insightful, reflective remarks) will earn 10 points. More may get you 15.

Example:

A Public Reading and some Interpretive Theorists

      While sharing his new work in a public reading, a writer gestures wildly during a climactic moment and stabs himself with a pencil. “OW!” he yells.
      “Oh, what a terrible accident!” the expressivist in the crowd says. “I feel your pain.”
      “We all feel your pain, we all know your pain--and you know ours,” three social constructionists agree. “But it’s only relative.”
      A current-traditionalist mutters to himself: “It would have been more correct to say ‘Ouch.’ What a hack.”
      “Obviously,” a new historicist announces, “The writer has been deeply influenced by the confessional poets. Maybe too much so.”
      “Where in the text? Where in the text?” a new critic sharply retorts.
      “I think it’s all about pain,” an advocate of reader response objects.
      “Pain and anger,” another adds.
      “Pain, male rage, and repressed phallocentrism,” a feminist suggests.
      “But male rage and phallocentrism turned against himself? Hmmm, “ muses the queer theorist.
      “He’s evidently engaging in a self-immolating jouissance between the moi and the unconscious mOther,” a Lancanian psychoanalyst asserts.
      An African Americanist raps: “If you be a brotha, den I feel for ya man/ If you be a whitey, I jus’ feel what I can/ Don’ forget‘cha kharma/ What’cha do is what’ll harm ya.”
      “There is no kharma, there is no text, there is no author!” a deconstructionist cries out.
       And she’s right. The writer has left the room to get a bandaid.

Reflective Paragraph

      This assignment made me think of a joke that I won’t repeat here. The original joke implied that stereotypes all have an uncomfortable grain of truth in them. And I wanted to practice a little dialogue, too. The trick was to get each character’s quotation to represent a theoretical approach accurately and concisely, and make it somehow tie together so I could convey what I understand about each theory, without it being a boring list of definitions. I’ve read a little Lacanian theory, for instance, and although I can hardly figure out any of it, I believe I’ve imitated the jargon well. (I LOVE the fact that I know what self-immolation means.) As for the others, I think I’ve represented what they’d say. I’m sure the current-traditionalist would miss the point completely and sound like sour grapes. And I don’t think I left out a cultural studies perspective, because this whole dialogue could be seen as an exercise in cultural studies. And for once, I give credit to a deconstructionist’s perspective, because the punch line totally depends on what she says. I’m a little worried about the rap. It makes a social commentary from what I think could be an African Americanist point of view, but was I too sarcastic, offensive, or just plain clumsy? That brings up another question. Can any written work, any speech, or any response escape its built-in biases? The thing I think I managed to do best was realize through each of the speakers in this joke that there are so many ways that a piece of writing (or even just a logical yelp of pain) can be understood--or misunderstood. It depends on what the listener or reader brings to it. Our background references are all so different and individualized. Come to think of it, my joke would probably make no sense to a reader who was unfamiliar with the theories we’ve discussed in this class. Maybe a reader would also have to know the original joke I’m imitating, to see the point I’m trying to make. There’s something cult-like about theory, isn’t there?