Capstone Project Progress

So far I have been unable to secure an interview with a film critic working in the field today, but am still trying. I have sent out emails to many different organizations and film reviewers and am still awaiting a response. I am working my way through the second book which I selected to reference for my presentation, and have learned several very important things already. The first being that the -5 to 5 scale that I have been utilizing up to this point is really not that effective, and I believe that using a simpler yes/no approach to reviews would work much better. The other major thing which I have discovered is that while there are many different approaches to criticism, honesty is the most important quality which you can develop and display. People who read criticism often only read the review to find out whether they should see it or not, and frequently don't read past the rating as they aren't interested in any kind of deconstruction or analysis. In this way, film criticism must deal with the same hurdles and difficulty as newspapers:  people will only read into an article if their attention is grabbed quick and early.

Reading #10: Chapter 12

Chapter 12 deals with evaluating the usability of artifacts, or more appropriately, usability testing. I found it interesting that this chapter comes before chapter 13 which deals with developing a document or artifact that would then go on to be tested, but oh well. I also think that the book overuses the word heuristic to the extreme. I had never heard that word used until I picked up this book, and I wouldn't be surprised if actual technical communicators never use it either. This raised another important question, which relates back to the descriptive/prescriptive approach:  this book is full academic writing, and for the most part prescriptive in it's examples. So what happens in the real job sites, meeting rooms and other associated places with technical writers who are actually writing in the fields? You can study this book's recommendations to death, but if the people working in the real world speak a different language, how does that help? At the end of the day, any exposure to the inner workings of companies is beneficial I suppose. The chapter mentions that the effectiveness of a document depends on how well it connects with its audience, and I think that this is an important notion. Everything in tech writing depends entirely on the audience, as we have covered before. Three types of testing are mentioned:  cognitive walkthroughs, in which a specialist performs predetermined tasks using the document and gathers data on how well the tasks can be performed, expert reviews, in which experts review the document, and heuristic evaluations, in which rankings are assigned to how well the document meets various criteria. I found it interesting that if the document is incomplete in anyway, testing will be unable to discover all the issues that might arise with full testing. Two different types of testing were discussed, dealing with tests that are conducted in the early stages of document development, formative, and testing taking place at the end of development, summative.

Reading #9: Chapter 13

Chapter 13 is entitled Managing Projects, and deals with the step by step process of how projects can be taken from the conceptual stages, through to a fully realized physical product. I found it interesting that the chapter discussed the difference between the prescriptive vs. descriptive approach to the entire process:  is it better to do have an outline, or prescribed way of working that should followed, of a detailed descriptive walkthrough?  The chapter discusses the waterfall method as being the main asses that technical communicators have at their disposal for planning and management, but does mention several others including:  iterative, or user centered design, extreme programming, in which pairs work closely together and test, test and retest until problems are solved, and agile, in which small teams focus on small parts of large products and chew their way through one piece at a time. The steps involved in the waterfall method are as follows:  planning, in which 30% of the total time spent on the project is recommended to be spent, research/info gathering, in which info should be sought actively rather than passively by technical communicators, composition/invention, in which documents are drafted, reviewing/testing against quality criteria, revision, production, and dissemination. I thought the chapter did a good job of balancing the heuristic heavy approach that the book is infamous for by this point with alternatives and other important information pertinent to the discussion. The alternative methods to the waterfall method were interesting to read about, and I can see how each approach would be best suited to a different situation.

Reading #8: Chapter 16

Chapter 16 deals entirely and unrepentantly with the concept of visual design, and the different approaches and methods that are available to the enterprising technical communicator whereby they might be successful. From the text "A fundamental goal for information design is to enable and enhance relationships among stakeholders for an artifact...The field of information design focuses on devising novel ways to enable relationships among people through the effective design of content." Appearance is front and center in this chapter, as we are informed multiple times of the manner in which human beings read things, from the first glance and impression to the way we process information in a chunked/non-chunked presentation. There are three main concepts proposed in the chapter:  1) rhetorical grouping of information; 2) contrasting ideas; 3) signaling structural relationships.  One of the phrases that was used in the chapter that I found most helpful in understanding, and that in fact made me think of visual organization in a different way was, "strategic content grouping - making implicit structures explicit." This makes total sense. At last! A clear, concise description of all the rigmarole involved. What we all should aspire to when we design visual documents is to make the implicit explicit. The chapter talks us through the use of seriff vs. sans seriff fonts, double signaling, and the way the human mind works with the x height of different fonts, which was honestly quite interesting to read about. The remainder of the chapter gives a heuristic for leaning how to work this into your own life. I had almost managed to wipe the dreaded heuristic from my memory, but here it has crept back into my life. I think that these are bloated, counter-intuitive and unnecessary. Something that I found frustrating was a passage that said "for examples of this, see X and Y, where they of course named two scholars. Why not put the information into the body of the text? They didn't even refer to what the referenced material really had to do with the broader discussion! They simply said, see this to understand this. I took a few things away from the chapter, but overall I think that visual design is quite straight forward and the book didn't really do anything to build anything more than a basic understanding.

Response to Samantha's Articles

Extracurricular:  This was certainly an academic article while almost everything else we have read as part of these readings have been web articles or lists. That said, there really wasn't that much information to be found inside beyond the, again, obvious importance of extracurricular activities for those young people going into the job market fresh from college. The article shows through evidence that those students who are more plugged in, and participate more are usually more successful. This study was based out of a French speaking university in Switzerland, which may or may not affect how the students end up. I can't remember what the overall project this is being applied to, but it seems like good advice for anyone who is currently pursuing a baccalaureate degree.

Uncovering:  This article pulled no punches in its approach to instructing prospective law school attendees, and in fact painted a very realistic picture (as I understand it). It stressed the importance of aggressively going after a potential employer to both demonstrate how much you want the job as well as to ensure that your voice is heard among all the others crying out. The other point that I found interesting was that this article used real life examples of what some students had to do to finish law school. Of course, there is no way to know if this is true or not, but as with everything in life, we trust until we are lied to.

Response to Stephanie's Articles

Both of these articles come from the dreaded education-portal.com, a resource which I myself am guilty of referencing, and even though the majority of information contained within is obvious and what should be common sense, there are some good points and things to keep in mind in there. I thought that the old adage, location, location, location, was plugged adequately here, in reference to how valuable the location of any selected educational institution can be in reference to any publishing firm or company in the vicinity. This makes a lot of sense. While I'm sure there are many more publishing outlets, there is also going to be a huge amount of competition for those jobs. The other information I took away was the difference between book and magazine publishing, which as it turns out, isn't really that much of a difference. The complicated thing, and one that an individual would need to decide on their own, is what discipline of publishing they wanted to try to break into. These articles aren't going to give you any easy answers to difficult questions, merely acceptable places to begin a legitimate inquiry.

Responses to Steven's Articles

WikiHow:  This article presented a very concise and easily understandable list of things that you as a prospective freelance writer need to do. I found it very interesting that they talked at length about how the profession can become isolating, and that you may find yourself feeling lonely. I never really considered that before, but it seems like its a totally possible outcome of the career. The requirements for getting into the profession all seemed to be fairly common sense to me. Communication was one thing that I assumed you would need to be proficient at, but didn't really realize just how important it would be. I liked that the article presented the career in a very realistic way financially, instructing that a person should plan to supplement a main source of income for a while before making the jump to full time, and whenever doing so, to make sure that it is doable.

Rivendale:  This article gave a very brief overview of several do-it-yourself publishing alternatives to traditional firms. While finding out about Feedbooks, Smashword, and Wattpad seems like a useful thing for a prospective writer, I didn't think this article really contained much valuable information. He refers to the world of traditional publishing as a scary place, but doesn't give any anecdotes or information to back this up. I think it would be better if he had painted a picture of the two routes, and left it up to the reader to decide.

Writing Assistance:  Probably the main thing I took away from this article is that there are things like the STC Job Board. This is huge for anyone who might be considering becoming a freelance technical writer, and I'm sure that other disciplines have similar resources. Other than this, this article was interesting to take a somewhat different viewpoint of the process, from that of the employer rather than the job seeker. Pretty much all of the requirements were common sense, especially after the previous articles.