Friday 2 June 2023
The lecture is about academic writing. However it is also useful in technical writing for developers
- Stop thinking about rules and start thinking about readers
- Writing is a tool for thinking
- Thinking and writing are not separate processes
- You generate the text while you’re thinking
- Your writing helped you think.
- This is different than how your readers expect to read
- Readers: slow down, reread, they don’t understand, they stop
- If your readers dont NEED to read it they’ll stop
- Your teachers were paid to read your writing
- Readers after school period read because they think text is valuable to THEM
- Writing needs to be:
- Clear
- Organized
- Persuasive
- Most importantly: Valuable
- Value is about readers not the content
- Some readers will value your writing and other group will think it’s useless
- Text should show why it’s important
- no body cares what’s inside of your head unless they’re paid to care
- Writing is not communicating your ideas to your readers
- It’s changing their ideas
- Nobody cares what ideas you have
- Your work is not new or original. it’s vaulable work.
- You’re not here to create new knowledge. but valuable knowledge.
- Every community has code. set of words that communicate value
- Know the code to make your text persuasive
- Have an argument not an explanation
- If you’re challenging the community you need to do it under the code
- There are insulting ways to do it. avoid it
- Your writing function is to help your readers understanding better something they want to understand well
- Reasons for writing is different than reasons for reading
- The function is to move the conversation forward
- The function is not to be preserved indefinitely
- It’s not to reveal what’s in your head but to change the space of what’s going on between your heads
- Words that create tension: however, challenge, contradiction, despite, instability, red flag, instability.
- Avoid talking about yourself, it’s not about YOUR problem.
- the problem needs to reside on the reader side not the writer side
- you locate a problem in a specific reading communities
- Show that the situation is unstable
- Readers look for models of inconsistency to identify value
- “We have a gap in our knowledge” a polite way to say: “We’re wrong” about something
- It’s huge problem for some communities to use a category that they don’t understand