Dear Future Self,

Perhaps in a similar fashion to the note you wrote yourself at the beginning of college, a letter written after a semester of work will be fruitful and allow you to better understand your own academic journey, now with the wisdom of some lived experience.

Meeting Course Learning Outcomes

Achievement in any class consists of completing assignments well, of course, but it also entails reaching the broader educational and practical goals of the course in a meaningful way.  With this course, you had the benefit of these goals being clearly laid out, and as such, it is possible to analyze our growth through this specific lens.  The course learning outcomes range from the social aspects of writing to research strategies to the implementation of knowledge of technical writing modes that we have acquired through analysis of samples, direct instruction, and application of such information in our own iterations of these forms.  Right from the beginning, there was group work to be done, and we were always an active participant in these proceedings if not an eager leader.  We engaged in group work in a number of ways, including opening our work to the class for comment—looking at the work of others both to help improve their thinking and to improve our own—discussing personal work and genre conventions in person, analyzing previous examples in depth (which also allowed us to span time and social context), and collaborating over different platforms such as Blackboard, Discord, and Zoom to craft work and share ideas about both workflow strategies and content.  We underwent extensive revision, particularly in lengthier projects such as the lab report and the proposal (but even the tech description), both after receiving comments and by applying our own objective eye and more matured understanding of the relevant conventions.  We added sections as necessary and augmented things such as tense and the focus of different sections.  We were particularly attuned to audience, as we spent a lot of time searching for the most relevant recipients of our work and we chose topics that we were particularly passionate about, leveraging our understanding of our own perspective to gain greater insight into that of others.  We also channeled this passion into appropriately objective stances, allowing the exigence and purpose of different genres to determine the extent to which we imbued their content and narrative with our intentions and feelings.  Especially given that we were new to college and possessed little to no technical knowledge or practical engineering skills, research was vitally important to our ability to craft technical papers.  We found a diverse and ultimately extensive set of sources for each project that required them, and though we did not really quote, we made extensive use of paraphrasing and had to get better at synthesizing information so as to trim the fat and avoid clunky references and large amounts of extraneous text.  

Progression of Perspective on Writing

As you may well remember, this semester was immediately preceded by our diligent work on our final research paper of high school—an opus to our literary abilities thus far.  Though many chose to focus on purely social endeavors, our project also delved heavily into the technical realm, and as such, we got a glimpse of what technical writing is and does.  However, this largely consisted of manuals and governmental reports that sharply contrasted with the social sources that we came across and incorporated.  Heading into this semester, we likely saw writing as a field polarized between the realms of neutrality and pathos, and saw technical writing as essentially the manifestation of the former.  One main element that we became attuned to was the presence of stance in otherwise highly technical and objective papers such as lab reports.  Such works can so effectively synthesize technical edification with persuasion that we were not privy to such machinations until we were acutely subjected to their formation ourselves.  Far from universally insidious, the presence of one’s humanity in their technical writing is paramount to an effective paper, especially when it comes to things such as ethics.  We also shifted from our heavily writer-oriented way of thinking about the purpose and use of writing.  Our constant attention to audience not only elucidated the many nuances that come with considering audience, it also demonstrated the larger point that writing is not just there for the writer to get out what they want to say and it is not just there to inform, it is also there to serve the needs of the audience, and potentially to allow them to do something with that knowledge (ie. writing other than manuals does not exist in a functional vacuum).  Perhaps our most acute experience with this came in writing a set of instructions, as considering audience revealed that our work would in fact be useless to a large demographic, and it also revealed that for those it was useful to, it meant so much more to their capabilities than we might have previously appreciated (in our case the instructions even facilitated readers informing their own readers more effectively).  

Impact of Audience

Given the importance of this consideration of audience, it follows that audience in general has a significant impact on the content and purpose of a given text.  Obviously the writer’s intentions ultimately determine what is written down and disseminated, but the content means nothing if it falls on deaf ears.  Accordingly, content is driven by a mutual satisfaction of the aims of the writer and the needs of the audience.  Audience also exerts influence at every stage of the process, from choosing collaborators (say, someone from the relevant culture), to determining the format (and genre) of the paper, crafting a narrative (stance), and content itself (exactly what the specific readers need to know and what they don’t need to know, perhaps because they are already privy to some information or it just isn’t relevant to their expectations/ends).  Audience determines the degree to which technical know-how can be assumed and the way in which it should be discussed.  It determines whether certain facts such as statistics and case studies would be helpful or relevant to the average reader.  It determines how a stance will be received and how strong of a stance is necessary for effective persuasion.  Audience also impacts the purpose of the paper.  Once again, writing is not just to inform, it is also to allow something to be done with that information.  Accordingly, a different audience means that there is a different potential in terms of both reception and implementation of the content and stance.  Likewise, different needs means that different content is needed to achieve the same purpose, but even within the same ultimate framework of purpose, the immediate purpose of the text is likely to have to adapt to best facilitate this.  

Our first major project, the memo, was directed at relevant administrators within the City College system and was aimed at fixing a problem that we had found with the major declaration process.  Our purpose was to get the readers to engage in further discussions with us or the necessary powers in order to improve the situation.  We had ideally directed the memo to those with the ability to do something about the problem themselves, but if the recipients were powerless to do so, that would mean that the purpose was more to convince them to reach out to people that could do something.  

Our next major project was the technical description.  We chose to discuss the slide rule, and our audience was jointly slide rule enthusiasts and younger people who do not know what the slide rule is but could stand to benefit from finding out.  Accordingly, our content had to satisfy both the needs of the latter by providing a historical description and going into detail about the slide rule’s cultural import and the needs of the former by discussing exactly how to use it and providing an overview of interesting facts.  For the former, the purpose was largely to provide those with an interest in the entertainment factor of the slide rule with a guide on how to engage with it more effectively, whereas the purpose for the latter was to provide students with greater insight into the relationships that underlie mathematical computations that are lost with an electronic calculator.  

Our third major project was a lab report on the impact of our “experiment” in which we tested the impact of different roof types on building temperatures within the city.  Our audience was the NYC Department of Design and Construction as well as building owners throughout the city.  Our purpose was to provide regulatory agencies with the means to regulate and pursue cool roof projects with as much information as possible available to make decisions, and to provide building owners with this information to allow them to make informed decisions about their property and potentially save money.  There was a persuasive element to this, as we advocated, not for our hypothesis, but for the conclusions we drew from the results of the experiment.  Having these two demographics as our audience meant that we wanted to have information that would be useful to them, including things like pricing differences for building owners (though of course for the government as well) and crafting our introductions and conclusions in such a way as to properly establish the relevance of our experiment to their needs and to highlight the takeaways that they would be most concerned with. 

Our final project was an engineering proposal in which we outlined our plans for a project to be completed in Nassau County and in which we encouraged the use of our proprietary road signs.   Our audience was mainly the New York State Department of Transportation, and in particular members of its Nassau County branch that held job positions relevant to our coordination aims.  Our purpose was to persuade the DOT to agree to our planned project and to fund it accordingly.  As such, detailed pricing information had to be provided, as well as detailed information on materials and other implementation measures.  If the audience had been confined to Nassau County Emergency Management, omitting such information and focusing on things like exact location, scheduling, and quality assurance would likely have sufficed.  The purpose would also have differed, as it would mainly be informative in nature, but would also include obtaining their go-ahead.  

A Diverse Array of Considerations

One challenge in writing across genres was the quasi-continuity that exists within the realm of technical writing.  There are naturally certain similarities that exist between different types of documents owing to general aims as well as the joint development of best practices, and while in one way this makes jumping between genres smoother, it also means that it can be more complicated to remember where conventions differ and where they do not, requiring further attention to nuance.  Working digitally likely kept these transitions as straightforward as possible, but it is hard to imagine that memo qualities never creeped into technical descriptions or that work with technical descriptions in no way neutralized the stance of the lab report more than it should have.  Working in this linear order, while necessary, also might have meant that smaller/earlier projects did not benefit from the experience of larger ones, but this is then ameliorated by this final revision.  There should also be some element of spillover: Proposals require features of memos and tech descriptions, and later projects use the same formatting conventions as earlier ones, though perhaps with more intricate, individualized applications.  A challenge in addressing specific audiences was that we not only had to be pointed in this regard and essentially code switch at times, but we also had to do this while contending with the awkward role of students communicating as both eager academics and seasoned professionals at the same time.  

This interconnectivity extends to the mutual relationship between different rhetorical elements.  It is hard to change one aspect of a project or document without factoring in the changes this will require in other aspects.  As discussed, audience pervades the construction of a document at every level, and changing it can necessitate changes spanning minor alterations in form to the ultimate goal of the piece, depending on the nature of the change.  Changing the purpose is likely to change the audience, as the ends of the writer(s) are different, which can then lead to all of the consequent changes this entails.  Changing the exigence is likely to change the purpose, and will once again have this trickle-down effect.  A different audience might make a different type of media—or even a different genre entirely—appropriate.  It is also likely to require that a different stance be taken and a different tone be used accordingly.  Changing genre can change what media is appropriate, such as using slides for a proposal versus using just a document for a tech description.  It also usually requires that stance be approached differently.  A different stance can mean that a different form of media is more appropriate and better for making one’s case.  If a different medium is absolutely necessary, this could mean that only certain genres will work for the given purpose, that the stance will have to be fitted to this medium, or even that the audience will have to change to be the best (most amenable) recipients of that particular media and content. 

Working in a Remote Environment

Distance learning meant that there was very little human interaction attached to the class, either in learning or in collaborating.  This made it even easier to forget that there is a humanity even behind technical writing.  It made it harder to gauge emotions because few faces were present.  It also had an impact on workflow, as there was less emphasis on in-class work, and engagement and asynchronous work, and even communication, was normalized.  Working like this in a group was somewhat challenging.  Never even hearing a voice meant that communication was completely devoid of emotion, so delegating felt awkward at times, and it was hard to gauge what people were really thinking either about workload or content.  Remote work also emphasized technology and made all work digital, which provided a sense of consistency but also probably ultimately means that we know less about the conventions behind the printed word.  This is likely how a lot of future work will be, but it still seems fruitful to practice different forms of communication and submission of work.  At the very least, work will likely at least involve showing one’s face more.  Our course was also probably similar to professional work in terms of the use of asynchronous communication, as well as the formation of teams (though this is true of in-person work too).  

Conclusion

Future me, if you have made it to the end of this, you deserve a break before you regard the rest of the website.  You will find on it, however, a nostalgic array of revised projects, including those previously mentioned, as well as considerations of our engagement with each rhetorical element and course learning outcome, including demonstrations of these and of our growth throughout the semester.

Sincerely,

Ray Neuwirth.