Your
first draft of the process essay is coming up, and I want to make sure
everyone is taking an approach to gather some significant personal data
about their own writing process. There are two approaches I suggest for
gathering data. The first approach calls you to do a think-aloud
protocol. This involves recording yourself talk aloud as you write a
different paper. You might do a think-aloud protocol by recording
yourself for twenty minutes as you compose your contest essay. Of course
if you are taking another class and have an essay assigned for that
class, you can do your think-aloud protocol for that other assignment.
Please review Sondra Perl's article (pages 191-214) for a concrete
example of how a think-aloud protocol might work.
After
completing your recording, you are expected to transcribe the recording
(this means that you listen to the recording and copy everything you
say word for word). Your transcription should not be edited at all, so
if you accidentally use a curse word in the moment of thinking through
your essay, you should include the exact curse word in your transcript.
Your
other choice for collecting data for your process essay is to develop
and keep a writing log for at least five days. Your task is to log and
organize all of the writing you do for a period of five days. From
grocery lists to text messages and tweets, you must compile and organize
everything you write for the five day period. Additionally, you must
develop a method of organization to help you manage this data. One
possibility is to use a spread sheet and identify the writing situation
according to the rhetorical situations you are writing for. You might
create several columns including the following headings to identify
purpose, audience, location where writing happened, and so forth.
What's
important is that you develop a way to examine your writing practice
from a somewhat objective perspective. Obviously, there is no such thing
as perfect objectivity, but your protocol or your writing log should
give you a different perspective regarding your writing process.
For
this posting, you are called to work out the details of how your
self-study will work. I want lots of details about how you will
undertake this project. If you are doing the think-aloud protocol, you
might want to develop a simplified version of Perl's coding system on
pages 196-198 of your text. If you are doing a writing log, you should
clearly show how your log will be organized.
You grade for this posting is determined by how detailed you are in explaining and showing
how your protocol or writing log will work. Simply stating that you
will be following closely with Perl's protocol procedure will not cut
it.
In order to collect data for the process essay, I will be using a “writing log”, which will fully detail all of my encounters with writing over a 5-day period. I believe this method will prove to be much more concise and easier to interpret as opposed to a recording of myself for a brief 20 minutes span sine I still don't think in English sometimes when I write. The table will consist of: type/form of writing, audience affected, purpose, actual content, and location. With these 5 categories I should be able to pool enough information about my daily writing processes to construct an effective “Process Essay” As I expect, most of my entries into the table will be draw from text messages and social media, although the class writing assignment should appear.
ReplyDeleteI will be recording and transcribing my writing process. While I will be following a similar format to Perl's, mine will be a little bit more unique to what my writing process actually consists of. I will split my process into 4 different sections consisting of 1. Nonsense thoughts, 2. Topic Related thoughts, 3. Writing, 4. Revising. I will make a key on the top of my paper to show what parts of my transcription fall into which category. I will use the colors blue, orange, pink and green to highlight accordingly.
ReplyDeleteI will keep a writhing log of my actions throughout the week. Since I work in an environment where I am constantly communicating with people, I will try to write down the actions that occurred during the interaction, the words exchanged as best I can remember them, and thoughts I may have had, about the person or the topic. I also play some online games and i can copy down the the communication log from each round.
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