November 2, 2023

Feedback for ENGL 5106, Week 4

Some great work this week, writers. I am impressed by many of your remediation projects, and most of you are becoming expert technical bloggers. I was impressed with what most of you were able to come up with in a week: creative approaches to taking what could be dull and quotidian materials and remediating them into the beginnings of something new, fresh, and imaginative. Most of you are addressing the needs of your discourse communities and writing succinct and focused prose. Well done.

Be sure you have read my feedback for the last couple of weeks, now available linked off the schedule. Some are still making errors that I have pointed out a couple of times, even on individual feedback, like tags, headers, citing sources, and using logical links. I will count off more for these errors in future posts, especially when post tags are not used or used correctly.

I’d like to see you use some of the vocabulary from the reading in your theory. For example, many of your discuss usability without ever mentioning it.

I expect support from solid secondary sources, like your assigned reading. More of you are doing this, but credibility should always be a chief concern when writing anything in a professional capacity.

Finally, please be sure you contextualize everything in your posts. Remember that all blog posts must stand on their own. If you begin by writing “For the remediation project,” readers who are not in our class will have no idea what you’re talking about. At least if you begin this way, a link would be warranted.

I am missing several posts and projects for this week. Please communicate with me if you are running into difficulties. Remember, if you need an extension, get in touch with me before the due date.

Wiki Work

As there was some confusion about what the wiki assignment was this week, so both (the addition of the source on your LitWiki project and the NPOV rewrite) will be due next week. That said, I will try to begin evaluating these for those of you who have completed them. Please be sure you’re following the schedule. I apologize for any confusion that I might have caused.

I see that many of you have already added your citations to our course wiki project. However, while there are many ways to add sources to a wiki page, I would like you to use templates, like I outlined in my “Wikipedia Sourcing” article I asked you to read this week. If you already added your source, please add the template to it. Also, if you duplicated a source that was already added, be sure to shorten your footnote—also outlined on the link.

I see that your wiki article is coming along. I had a question about the minimum effort that needs to be put into this project. The real answer is: until the article is satisfactory. This is not to be flip or nebulous, but emphasize a truth of writing: it’s done when it’s done. What would the discourse community of technical writers in the digital age—both those new to the discipline and veterans—expect in an encyclopedia article about the practice? This is what should be there.

Again, I don’t expect a perfect article, but I want to see significant contributions by all in research, writing, revision, and editing. In addition, you should have some proficiency in wiki writing, both in syntax and delivery.

Feel free to discuss this on the article’s talk page.

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