MbShea@PWP@English@UMCP

NO OFFICE HOURS TODAY! I am at the Gemstone Thesis Conference all afternoon. Go TEAM SILVER.

We have spoken already about the audience analysis work sheet.  I passed out a hard copy, but you can chose the digital version linked in the previous sentence. DUE NEXT FRIDAY in HARD COPY.

For next week, please take some time to consider the last two upcoming small assignments: 

structure and arguments

250-word abstract and (difficult) reader's response 

Back to the audience analysis work sheet:  think about all the "elements of style" choices you have in your tool kit to support your audience with the context and purpose.  Think also on how, taken together, these choices can creature a tone:

• warm and encouraging, yet trustworthy (patient guide)
• neutral and objective tone (aka the voice of science!) (literature review; grad school writing sample)
• lively and engaging (curriculum guide; lay audience communication of technical topic)
• serious and cautionary (safety guide; some SOPs,...public policy communication)
• OTHER?

Tasks for today, writing on your hard copy annotated bibligraphy, address these choices.

Using the image at the topic of this class journal entry, indicate where your document is going regarding

• what to know (review of the literature; exposition; elaborated definition)
• what to do (proposal; guidance; policy document)
• how to do (directions; SOPs, manual; how to)

Tell me a source type you now need to secure, based on the total invention thus far of your annotated bibliography.

• Use Lexis-Nexis
• Use Science Daily or Physics.org

For now, do you think your audience prefers

• natural language citation
• formal, scholarly citation; which type?  (APA, CBE, IEEE, the physics options by subfield -- numbers driving by LaTex?)

Tone?  What tone will you aim for?

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Science Culture:

Excellent ScienceFriday on NPR for us: old science films as a way to understand communication of complexity to lay audiences. Oliver Gaycken of the UMD English Department is featured.

Questioning everything: a way of being and knowing in science. Breaking news on knuckle cracking. (question: how do we source this information? What would Aristotle do?)