Week 4: rain garden refinements
Here is Monday's OHitS/AMA document. Recall that tonight you have a prewriting draft due in Eli Review. I will open a next task for that work Tuesday morning. Please be on time. You do not have to be "perfect." Ask for the feedback you need. Ask a question or two. In the next task, we review each other's work.
This week, our writing craft lessons concern documentation, citation, and ethical practices about using the work, words, and documents of others. Here are some examples of citation practices you are familiar with:
Common knowledge: information shared by members of a specific discourse community
Discourse communities: classifications range from
- institutions, municipalities, regions, countries, civilization,
- a particular race, language-speakers, ethnic group, faith community, political unit,
- academic discipline, trade or artisan guild, professional association.
Note how citation information helps the audience evaluate information, trust the statements and the writer/speaker who makes these claims.
Green tea is good for you.
Drink green tea for the health benefits, says Dr. Andrew Weil, author of Spontaneous Healing. Emerging evidence suggests that the polyphenols in this beverage may offer protection from free radicals.
According to a recent FDA analysis of peer reviewed medical journals, green tea does not offer appreciable protections against breast cancer or prostate cancer (FDA Press Release, 2005)
Here are some helpful, short readings about citation practices:
- Our fact-checking practices are part of our research and invention for documents as well as how we read and trust. Grammar Girl's 3 minute read/audio file is a good overview.
- Spend ten minutes on the web reminding yourself about what common knowledge is. Consider, based on the Grammar Girl link above if you trust these sources. And, ask yourself if the definitions lead you to concrete steps on when information is common knowledge and when it is not. Hint: depends on the rhetorical triangle of audience, context, purpose, as well as level of detail and relative newness of information. Now, read this short web presentation "What is Common Knowledge" at the OWL at Purdue U. Check out the additional links within OWL.
See you MWF in our OHitS/AMA locations to learn more about this important thinking and writing skill. We will discuss this contextually about the rain garden memo. This is our work this week.
Marybeth Shea
REDID LINK! SEEMS TO WORK NOW (mea culpa; technology is great except when it is not).
See you here (OHitS/AMA) for elaborated discussion on citation as a way to help Jane trust your information and face the meeting with confidence.
Reread Monday's information. Let's talk about bioretention knowledge as common knowledge.
TIME: Because rain gardens as an environmental tool date from the early 90s, the time that this working concept is within culture, this is the primary basis for the knowledge being common. One test of common knowledge is the age+diffusion into culture.
Another check is GENERAL DISCUSSION quality; rain garden are based on existing gardening and agricultural knowledge (fits the time test above, also). Within general discussion though, you can use specific information where a source is helpful. For example, consider these two examples:
Rain gardens are cost effective.
Rain gardens, according to a 2029 report by the Low Impact Development Center, cost between $2.5 and 7.5 per square foot, compared to $27 per square foot, when using conventional pipling systems.
I think you would trust sentence two more, right? Now, do we need a citation for sentence two? Depend. Here the CONTEXT and LEVEL of FORMALITY helps us decide. In a science research article, we would need a parenthetical cite PLUS a bibliographic entry later in the document. For a newspaper? The sentence includes details that you could use to search on: who, what, where.
HOWEVER, audiences in digital environments are supported by referral links, so that they can click into a good source. This is the part of context -- our powerful hypertext tools -- that supports use of curated, referral links.
Bottom line:
- I want you to practice citation in this memo.
- Para 1 does NOT need a cite.
- Paras 2-3 can use a few referral inks
- Only para 4, the evaluation para needs a formal citation.
OK: reread Monday's guidance. Think about how this discussion can help you with other document in school and in work. Visit today in the document linked about to ask questions.
For Friday, you have a review task in Eli Review due on Friday. Open NOW.
Marybeth Shea
See you today, for your questions in Friday's OHitS/AMA.
Recall that you have a Eli Review task tonight. BE ON TIME for each other. Recall that you can negotiate with me about extensions for the final version that I grade. But, we need to be on time for each other, so that the giving and receiving process can benefit YOU and others.
Let's review technical aspects of paragraphs. Read these two MSWord handouts and consider this isual metaphor of the OVERALL job of paragraphs within a technical document. Note, that the muffin tray visual does not account for the cognitive wedge strategy of shorter to longer paragraphs, at the beginning of the document, especially.
Paragraph Definitiosn: think Architectures (one page)
Paragraphs with a Purpose (longish, with sample paragraphs I will start to discuss in Office Hours in the Sky)
Note: these guidance documents are somewhat general and do not bear directly on the rain garden memo. However, we are always learning. And, your rain garden memo uses paragraphs.
One of Aristotle's canons for writing is ARRANGEMENT. The order and "chunking" of information matters very much for reader cognition and receptivity to what you write. Chunking IS related to cognitive wedge framing of a document.
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