nau | english | rothfork | teaching | eng522

University:        Northern Arizona University
College:           Arts & Letters
Dept.:               English 
Courses:              English 522: Rhetoric & Writing in Professional Communities
                      1.1.  Mountain Campus (Flagstaff) resident student class number: 5380
                      1.2.  Statewide/Worldwide class number: 5381
$:                          Statewide tuition
When:                  Spring 2007
Credit:                 3 hrs.
Instructor:           John Rothfork
Office:               BAA 324 (Babbitt Academic Annex, next to the English bldg.)
(:                   928.523.0559
*:                john.rothfork@nau.edu
Homepage:      oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6
Prerequisites:  graduate status

Access the Course:   http://vista.nau.edu  Use your dana account user name & password to log on.

Course Description:

"Different discourse communities have different styles, & to write successfully in these discourse communities you must know what these different styles are & how to use them to your advantage." This was written by Dan Jones & appears in one of the texts we used for ENG502, Technical Writing Style (259). This recognition provides the premise & rationale for ENG522.

Writing is not simply writing. This course will help you recognize & define contexts, audiences, & “discourse communities”; such specific communities as:

• an independent software company, like Coffee Cup, that sells products via the Internet

• a research oriented university hospital

• an office of a federal agency, like the BIA

Even though it may not be a conscious decision, you have in mind a context or an implied audience when you write a document. You write to your teacher or to a friend or to an unknown official at an agency & the context or situation influences your style, organization, & rhetorical strategy.

Easy writing is addressed to an audience with whom you share values, methods, & experiences. You assume such readers can "read between the lines." Providing an occasion for you to write, a discourse community becomes a kind of co-author. The organization of a community determines who speaks (or writes), when they speak, how they speak, what tone they use, how long they speak, to whom they speak, why they speak, and what they can say. Because little of this is explicitly defined, it is important to recognize & analyze discourse communities in order to write successful documents. In this course, you will:

• read theory (mostly by Michel Foucault)

• work through case studies on a team

• analyze Web sites to discover how communities rhetorically define themselves in a struggle with each other for power, prestige, & readers.

Informally, I might describe the concern of this class as "psyching out" readers to know what they are thinking, how they are reacting, & what they want. The better you know someone -- as with members of your family -- the more adept you are at doing this. Rather than developing a psychological "profile" of someone, this course strives to develop a sociological or rhetorical profile. Once you know what someone is thinking in a professional situation & what motivates them, the next step is to get them to do what you want or what your organization wants by grafting the two together. You do that by developing a rhetorical strategy for the documents you write.

Course Structure & Texts:

Component	Text
Theory	Foucault, Michel.  The Archeology of Knowledge.  Pantheon: isbn 0-394-71106-8.
Case Study Work	Peterson, Gary.  Communicating in Organizations.  Allyn Bacon: isbn 0-205-29589-4.
Illustration & Analysis	Hogan, J. Michael.  Rhetoric & Community.  Univ. S. Carolina Pr: isbn 1-57003-185-1.

Click here to order these books online from the NAU bookstore. The Foucault book is easy to find. The other two are more difficult to find.

Assignments:

Each unit has several components. Here is a sample, the directions for completing unit 01:

English 522 | Unit 01 What to do in lesson 01: Read Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge: pp. 21-39. The 2 Webpages on Foucault offer notes on The Archaeology of Knowledge.  You must study read the text in association with reading through the notes on the 2 Webpages. Read the Webpages for Unit 01. When you are ready, take Quiz 01 on the reading. You can only take it once (28 points) but it is not timed. Contribute to the class discussion page.  Your discussion contributions are graded.  10 points available for this unit. Read how to do case studies.  This page is accessible from Study Tools. Do case #3 in the Peterson book, "Scribe & Send" (36-40), questions: 1 & 4 (p. 40).  Consider these additional questions: 5.1  Identify & discuss Ann's management style.  Should she change?  How? 5.2  Pursuant to #4, is it time to reorganize?  What makes you think so?  What recommendations do you (Ann) make to Juan Carolos Molinio? 7 points each: total 28 points. Visit the Glossary page.  Suggest terms from the reading that you would like me to define.  If a definition isn't helpful, let me know.  E-mail me your suggestions.  This is not a graded assignment.  It is optional. There are 66 points available in unit 01.

This sample suggests the course workload:

• Reading from Foucault or Hogan with a quiz on the reading. 
• Contribute to the discussion on the readings.
• You will be a member of a team. The team will discuss case studies using the discussion tool & e-mail.  Someone from the team will report your team's solution for a case. The cases are short: 3--6 pages.  There are 3 to 4 questions on each case. The responsibility for making the team report will rotate among team members. You will have to make the report no more than twice during the semester.
• You will write an analytic paper assessing the writing of some specific discourse community. This may be either Web or print media. Your analysis will identify professional values, characteristic rhetorical patterns, & institutional behavior & expectations. The easiest places to look for such documents are institutions you are already involved with (schools, hospitals, etc.) or Websites. Look for such things as mission statements, objectives, standards or methods, disclaimers, product support, manuals, FAQs, & even such documents as forms to be filled in. The framework or critical stance for this study is internal to the organization.  You are primarily assessing coherence &/or tacit messages (subtexts) of the discourse community rather than critiquing its stated goals or methods from the outside. Your primary concern is "how" rhetorical processes are performed.  As well as Foucault, consider Hogan, especially his thesis of how communities negatively define themselves by declaring who or what they oppose. You will wish to ask "why" as often as "how?" Length: 1250---2000 words (5-8 pages, not counting illustrative material you may wish to include). 

Grades:

(The numbers may not be accurate, but they give a sense of relative importance or different activities in the class.)

A: 90% of the total points
B: 80%
C: 65%

Schedule:

There are 10 lessons in the course. Each lesson is scheduled for about 10 days; see the calendar. All lessons will be available throughout the course.
But, this is not a self-paced class, nor a tutorial. The course follows the university calendar. The calendar tool in the course specifies the schedule.

Submission Deadlines: A day or two late is acceptable with no explanation required. Watch the calendar. I will not accept material from lessons two units prior to the one we are studying. If the calendar says we are working on unit 5, I will accept late work from units 4 and 3, but not earlier. The grade for work submitted a week late is reduced by 10%; two weeks late by 20%. Work submitted more than two weeks late is not accepted. I will not accept multiple assignments sent in the last week of class.

Incompletes:

Online course material is not entirely under my control. Course material is not available indefinitely after the course is over. Almost half the points in this course derive from small group processes & reports that can only be done during the class. This makes requests for an "I" unrealistic.

Calendar:  Spring 07

Emergency: If WebCT is off-line for some time, you can contact me outside the course. This is from E-Learning Center:

In all cases initial contact regarding WebCT problems from students should be through the ITS Help Desk

Official NAU Correspondence

Although we will primarily use WebCT's email in this course, you should be aware that Dana accounts are NAU's official email channel for communicating with students. Be sure to check your Dana email regularly for information that might affect you. In the event of a technical problem with WebCT, I will communicate with you through your Dana email.

If you have used the ITS Email Account Manager (see http://www.nau.edu/its and Click on Manage Your Email Accounts) to forward your Dana email to some other email account, such as Yahoo or AOL, you do so at your own risk. NAU isn't responsible for any delays you might experience in retrieving necessary information from some other email account.

You might also give a bit of thought about what you might do in the event that your computer crashes. If you don't have a backup or access to a family or friend's computer, public libraries often offer a limited resource.

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