- Accessing syllabus and other online materials from myCourses
- You need to (temporarily) disable a security feature after clicking on the syllabus or other link the first time; a second click will then open what you want
- Diagnostic writing “graded”
- Please bring computers to class for writing each day
- They Say, I Say introduction and chapter 1
- Questions?
- Your experience with this idea?
- Use conversational tone?
- Not necessarily, tone should sound professional
- Responding to question as in conversation, relate response to larger conversation
- Conversation is back-and-forth, writing responds to one idea & anticipates
other party’s ideas
- On a longer time-scale than in face-to-face conversation writers really do get back-and-forth of conversation
- Use conversational tone?
- Who might the conversation be with?
- The reader
- Rest of subject community
- Yourself — writing to refine your own ideas
- The author of something you have read if you are challenging, critiquing, etc. his or her ideas
- What will it take to write as part of a conversation?
- State different views and the reasons people hold them
- So know those views (and your own)
- Acknowledge others’ contributions
- Clearly identify your view, why it advances conversation, why it matters
- State different views and the reasons people hold them
- Who is the conversation with in a representative technical paper?
- In the class example, with computer graphics people, esp. Möller & Trumbore
- More generally, the point is that even very technical professional papers fit very well into the writing-as-conversation metaphor
- What could be, or was, the “they say” in your birds-as-dinosaurs mini-essay?
- Usually, “they” was scientists or paleontologists, and what they say is that birds are dinosaurs
- Your reaction?
- They seem helpful, should help writing flow
- Although maybe they are better for getting ideas laid out in a first draft than as the exact wording to use at the end
- How (not) to use them
- Try exercise 2 in They Say, I Say introduction, using the template verbatim
- Very hard to do, the long detailed template turns out to be constraining when used that way
- Templates are really a bridge from lots of specific sentences people have written
to very abstract idea of writing “moves”
- The important thing is to get to the moves, which may or may not use the exact words of the templates, depending on your style, situation, etc.
- “The Gold Bug”
- Read it