Midterm Portfolio Evaluation:
Team Intro & Reflection
Creative Scenario & Reflection
Reading Journal
Procedure Proposal & Reflection
Procedure
Sarah Rumbley:
Team Intro:
Nice job with the helpful and enthusiastic tone – great job covering a broad range of experience, and trying to encapsulate those experiences briefly. You’re also doing a good job of making links between the experiences and 424 –
Areas you could still develop:
I don’t really see you consider what technical communication really is or means anywhere – how any of these experiences, or different ones, position you as a evaluating the different positions of writer and audience and packaging knowledge (break down, chunking, repackaging, etc.) for such different levels of understanding – or at least not explicitly. Connecting the journalism reference to reading level could do that, but “reading level” isn’t necessarily a good way to describe audience position objectively – be careful with hierarchical characterizations. And along those lines, the showing vs. telling is a good standard writing cliché, but to develop that, you might think about what you’re saying with “evidence as the basis of everything” – it is all still being “reported” – that is, represented in language – good journalism (well some forms of it) makes the effort to “just present the facts” but writing can’t present the reality of anything – one still has to transform reality into a written re-presentation of it. So if journalism taught the methods of excising explicit reference to the fact that things are “reported” – tech comm is getting you to consider and analyze such practices of “packaging” – and along different lines.
The start of the Argumentative section seems a bit confusing. You drop the “one person can argue” statement immediately. Probably should explain what you mean here – are you talking about how argument is a means of developing your thinking? A way of knowing?
Nice start to your portfolio as is.
Reflection:
Nice start here explaining the thinking behind the different versions. Well done. But to revise this to be more helpful to the memo user (boss looking to see how course concepts were employed) you will want to reorganize it from a chronological set-up to a concept-based one – more like arguing the application of concepts in a heading, followed by paragraphs that offer examples of changes and relate them to our principles.
Creative Scenario:
You had me laughing hard when you talked about your brother just letting you lecture to him and why. And then I was very happy to hear your vacillation between thinking you had rhetoric locked down and seeming confused by it. This is actually a very good sign.