Week 7: coffee cup work continues
Happy Monday.
Let's start with a writing craft lesson on sentence and a strategic choice to name your content immediate, early on in the sentence. Linguists call this approach to avoid empty subjects in your writing. How often? I suggest about 90 percent of the time. We will talk more about this craft choice and where you can "lighten up" within a document or a paragraph. Additionally? Sometimes we have strategic reasons or psychological reasons to use empty subject.
Here is a psychological construction, where you try to not be direct to the point of overplayed critique: If there is something I should know? Please contact me.
Here is a strategic construction, where you are dealing with volatile or dangerous conditions: It is possible that my learned colleague misspoke....(rather than, my colleague misspoke).
What is an empty subject (short Quill web exhibit with examples?
There is, are/was, were?will be
It is/was/will be
The subjects here are "there" and "it". Note that these words are placeholders for specific items. Why not tell the reader now? Recall that the brain in looking for specific content to make sense of the sentence. Think lego!
Now: consider the verbs that pair with these empty subjects: ‘There is/are/will be,' ‘It is/was/will be,’ ‘This is/was/will be.' Empty subjects can occur in present, past, and future tenses. One additional gain when you use direct subjects is that you reduce unnecessary words. Concision is nearly always a virture for readers of non fiction.
Another quick craft lesson on strategic repetition.
Percey used the F54 Pipetting Stilleto at his bench. The F54 Pipetting Stilleto performs two actions at once: puncturing the nuclear membrane and delivering the desired solution of metal ions. This pipetting stilleto is attached to an electron microscope screen, which permits both viewing and recording of the piercing action. It is fast becoming....
Did you notice the "it" in the last sentence fragment? If we use empty subjects, we should wait until later in the paragraph to ensure that the reader is totally clear what the "it" refers back to.
Coffee cup (check list, celery flow chart/arrangements, dummy text round-up). content. You must, by now, be clear about your team: Styro or Paper. Doing so makes clear what content details you need in your paragraphs. We can, though talk about the paragraphs that are common to both teams-->
First-person opening WITH PREVIEW OF RECOMMENDATION and basis of recommendation (energy efficiency/climate change OR Styrofoam/plastic fate in ocean and environment
Here is the short recommendation report on coffee cup choices that you requested. I recommend X...I use X as the global environmental problem to frame my analysis.
Problem description in your office (Global to local)
use a referral link for a "global" metric on the problem
count out/"employee math" of a week or month's estimate of the cups used in office
Cup type definition: (count of three; reduce to two, compare contrast) See the "meh" paragraph discussion of last week.
you can do this without referral links but can use one if you like
if you use a specific metric, you do need a referral link
Define life cycle analysis (EPA is the best source);
technical comment -- either use the block quote convention OR paraphrase
use a referral link
Closing para sample:
I hope this recommendation helps you. I would say, however, that we can revisit this more carefully within our office. Let me know if we should proceed with more work on this complex policy question. As you can see, both disposable cups pose serious environmental problems. We can address them simultaneously vs. reusables but still, locally and globally, people select convenience. That is a serious social choice problem.
Getting these paragraphs done in rough form will help you climb a steep (writer's) cognitive wedge into this analysis. You have made a document already, right?
Marybeth Shea
Hello. Lots going on in the coffee cup memo. I want to present a writing craft choice -- meta discourse -- paired with first person/send person voice that can help you move and pivot through the complex information you need in the first part of the recommendation report to the analysis in the last portion of this report.
Here are examples of meta discourse* phrases you can use in your writing-->
I use the frame of [climate change and energy efficiently or fate of aquatic plastic and microplastic concerns]...
Let's turn now to life cycle analysis...
I use life cycle analysis in my summary of [Hocking's work on the energy embodied in coffee cups... or Moore's foundational work documenting ocean plastic "patches"...]
We can divide the disposal coffee cup problem into to primary materials types: styrofoam and paper.
Even though I know that you are aware of the environmental preference for reusable cups....We simply must acknowledge that people select convenience, sometimes without thinking of environmental impacts.
We can use first person and second person voice strategically places within the memo. However, most of the memo is in third person because we are "letting the experts speak."
Now, here is a central critical thinking skill: information is often divided or arranged into three types:
- describing (includes defining, meaning that we are in the second stasis)
- summarizing (we are pivoting toward analysis)
- analyzing.
Here is a short Google doc on the differences between describing, summarizing, analyzing that uses the rain garden memo knowledge as an example.
Back to the coffee cup memo. All of the paragraphs BEFORE the life cycle paragraph are primarily description and summary. The life cycle paragraph helps you pivot toward the analysis part where you present either Hocking's work using summary of peer-reviewed work OR Moore's work using his peer-reviewed work.
You will have an ER Writing Task posted today, due on Friday per usual. I ask you to write some paragraphs out (select from the ones suggested on Monday; I will ask you to use some bullet points in the other paragraphs regarding their content. Pre writing is important for thinking about this complex task.
If you have not made two documents to attack this project, please do so! I suggest one for research where you can copy/paste links (later can become referral links) and the other for the memo. Go back and gather my free phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. Grab the meta discourse sentence starters in this post, too.
*writing that hovers above the content, writing that tells the reader something about the writers goals, writing that address the reader for clarity and emphasis.
Another meta discourse example would be direct address in theater. Here, the actor pauses in the play and turns to speak to the audience. Hovering above the action of the play, which is in the text. 1995 Ken Branaugh in clip of Iago, (Othello) telling audience his plans.
Marybeth Shea
Knitting up from Monday and Wednesday concerning first, empty subjects and second direct address, which is a kind of meta discourse. 
Then, we will look at the Oxford comma.
Remember empty subjects? Linked here is a two-page Google doc with my take on these "placeholder" constructions that, while technically correct, do not support the reader with immediate specific detail. See the table of substitutions that you may want to copy.
Ok, then; next up? direct address. In drama, direct address causes what I call a jump-what. The reader is surprised (not frightened as in the classic jump-scare technique from horror and suspense films). When the reader is a bit surprised, their cognition wakes up, so to speak. The increase in reader alertness helps them focus on the content you write.
Lastly in our three-part writing/craft review concerns commas in sci-tech-prof writing: ta dah!, the Oxford comma. We will start with examples, including this instance of twitter persona, The Oxford comma!
TLDR: Use the Oxford comma in your professional writing pretty much always. We will discuss theory about this punctuation convention on Monday. Let's keep learning with some examples.
In science, ambiguity that can be helped with by Oxford comma use or rearrangement. First, from Scitechedit,
Read more here:
The effects of NMDA antagonists, MK-801 and DxM were evaluated in a model of chronic pain.
Here, both MK-801 and DxM are NMDA antagonists. Inserting an Oxford comma would mistakenly imply the evaluation of three distinct entities. The Oxford comma’s omission clarifies that only two NMDA antagonists are under scrutiny.
Here is one from my writing practice recently:
Conservation biologists look at two approaches to biodiversity losses, species counts in the tropics and changing distribution maps.
And, a third example (remember the power of three examples?). What about this one that the proto-doctors among us might say to a patient?:
Your cancer can be treated with chemotherapy, surgery or immunotherapy.
TBD.
ASSIGNMENTS: Turn in your rain garden memo to night. TURN IN YOUR ER PREWRITING TASK TONIGHT. If you have to choose, do the prewriting task so that you get into the quittich (rhymes with Squidich) game of ER per review. Please, says the coach.