ENG 308: The Undertaking

TECHNICAL WRITING… WHAT WAS IT?
I came into this class expecting a writing course, and instead I got a business course. Understandable, since it is about the practical application of writing skills in business, but definitely skewed more towards the business end of things than I would have liked. Maybe for some students, this would have been a turn for the better–those in need of a writing course, but who aren't comfortable with writing a lot of long or creative works, they might find some use out of it. Or, perhaps, business majors in general (though, if you are a business major, I disrespectfully ask that you leave; I don't want capitalists reading my work). However, as someone who's here to get a degree in writing, I found that very little in this course directly addressed my writing skills, and I likely wouldn't have seen it through to the extent that I did had it not been worth a ton of important credits for my major and certification.
Indeed, technical writing was less about writing and more about general business skills. It tests one's ability to make short-term plans, to manage one's time, and to commit to decisions because dammit someone's gotta start working on something or we'll just sit here spinning our wheels forever. Probably quite reflective of the experience of being in a real office, now that I think about it. As a whole, it kind of feels like those times when you're in a group making plans, and everyone's waffling about "oh, I'm free sometime next week," and you have to put your foot down and just throw out a concrete time that people can actually confirm or reject, except that one moment is extended over the course of an entire semester. I won't say if that's good or bad; if you're the sort of person who decides on the time so no one else has to, you'll certainly flourish here. However, if you're the one who does it begrudgingly after way too much time has gone by, and you hate being put on the spot for those sorts of things, you will begrudge every second you're here.
PROS AND CONS?
There were times when the course was solid enough, and unsurprisingly for me those times were when it most closely resembled a more traditional class. I had fun analyzing scholarly papers during the Instructions unit, and I find the way that we learned about graphic design by studying existing graphics during the Infographics unit was engaging and effective. Over the course of the whole class, there were always a lot of examples of professional work that we were meant to be sort of imitating in our projects, and that kind of imitation is incredibly practical for learning what the process of technical writing will look like in a real, career-oriented setting.
However, that practicality and groundedness was also one of the biggest struggles of the class. With it came all of the troubles of actually working in an office: the swing-and-miss process of trying to get in touch with people, the faux-happy corporate language, the brainstorming, the collaboration… it's a lot. It's a great way to confirm for someone whether they truly want to work in a corporate setting; for me, it confirmed that I absolutely didn't.
To elaborate, I'll never be the sort of person who puts "works well with others" on my resume. At times, my independence is stubborn and problematic–this course certainly being one of those times–but the simple fact is that I get so exhausted when I need to rely on others' work in order to do my own. Not only that, but I get terrified when others rely on me for their work. The whole corporate environment of collaboration and teamwork and touching base… it's like a torture chamber for me. I'll be quite content living my life in a cabin somewhere far away from others, plugging away at my art, and only checking my email when I talk with my publishers.
FOR THOSE WHO COME
I can offer some advice. For one thing, get an older edition or a secondhand version or an inexplicably free PDF of the textbook. Weekly readings are helpful, but not strictly necessary, and you'll never be asked about the particulars; this isn't a test kind of class. Textbook content is more like support for if you're having trouble understanding what's going on in the weekly example stuff's nitty gritty.
Also, you will be asked on occasion during this class whether you want to watch a TED Talk. You will be tempted. You've looked at TED Talks before for other classes. They're easier than reading dry articles about instruction law. That is the devil talking to you. Watching TED Talks is always miserable, and this class will not make them any better. Resist the urge, reject the Talk. They'll only ever make you feel condescended to, and if you watch too many, I fear you'll start using that strange start-stop speech pattern that always crops up in those things.
And my greatest warning is this: the class is about 40% group project. A single, long group project. You will have only a small amount of control over whom you end up with, and you won't know how good any of them are at working, because it's an online class and you haven't spoken to any of them. If you end up in a group that just doesn't jive with you, or a group whose schedule doesn't line up with yours, you'll be stuck with it for half the semester. So, through the earlier weeks, study your classmates closely so that you can have a better idea of who you want to work with. Make contact with them. If you can, put together a group ahead of time. This will help you immensely.
Good luck. And business majors, if you're still reading this, do me a favor and send some money to a humanities major. We need it.
 

Did you see what the fast food chain Tweeted today?

BUSINESSES AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Okay, it's time for me to sound like a grumpy old man, because there aren't many good things to say about this one. We're living in an age in which advertisement is so saturated in our everyday lives that we often don't even notice its presence any longer. While streaming services like Netflix impose midroll and preroll ads on video content that people are already paying to see, so too do we see this oversaturation in places that don't look like traditional TV commercials. One such place is on social media.
I deleted my Twitter account near the start of this year. It was one of the better decisions I've made. While I sometimes miss the ability to follow certain actors and artists' works as closely as I could on the site, it was obvious that most of the time I spent on the site was unpleasant, rather than fun, and deleting my entire account was the only way to permanently keep me off of it. Now, the only social media website I use in any capacity is Tumblr, and even then I use it in-browser with an ad-blocker on–which is something that never would have worked for Twitter, since Twitter's ads are sponsored posts, and cannot be filtered from the actual content. It's in this function that the biggest problem with advertising on social media is visible.
The line between what is an ad and what is a post that happens to talk about a product that someone thinks you should buy is becoming blurier by the second. It's damn near impossible to trust anyone's opinion online when it comes to buyable products, because influencers can be quite lackadaisical with regulations demanding that they disclose paid promotions. Businesses find this blurring to be helpful, and it certainly is for their bottom lines; when advertisements look the same as friends' posts, consumers believe that businesses are their friends. That Twitter account isn't trying to sink its claws into my brain to make me spend money, no! It's my good friend Wendy's, who always posts the funniest things! No one is completely immune to this kind of personality-driven advertising, and it's so pervasive that it's hardly even viewed as sleazy or suspicious anymore. Combine this advertising method with the inherent predation that social media–especially heavily algorithmic social media, like Tik Tok–encourages, and you have a perfect storm for a miserable online experience that many people will have trouble identifying the reason for.

As we near the more real-world adjacent aspects of this course's final third, I have a lot more trouble stomping by with my head down. For an English class, this has turned into something so obsessed with business that I have to kick and scream every moment that I do anything for it. The side of me that hates corporations, hates capitalism, hates advertising… it absolutely froths at the mouth when it's being asked to suggest improvements for businesses that want to make money. What, you ask, is my suggestion for what businesses can do to improve their use of social media? Don't use it.
I cannot in good faith condone the kind of advertising that goes on in spaces that were originally designed with human expression and joy in mind. For a long time, the internet was a world that was free from the billboard-plastered space of common day, but now it's the same as any old subway, with every surface aggressively used to further profit and attention from people who are tired and miserable. Businesses are not my friend; they are no one's friend but their own. I will not have them pretend otherwise.
The day that corporations stop flashing their teeth at me on every other post may well be the day that I return to Twitter. Though, hopefully by that point I will have found more fulfilling uses of my time and attention than social media. I've been out of touch since the day I was born, so I don't feel like it's unprecedented for me to say this: the current state of social media is not healthy, fun, or moral. It's draining and negative and profit-driven to the point that I wish desperately that it wasn't so useful. As of right now, though, the cons outweigh the pros, and as long as corporations rule the airwaves, that will be the case.
 

Yikes

 IS ONE'S IDENTITY A 'PARADOX OF CHOICE?'
Well, hey, I was in a decent enough mood today until I watched that Barry Schwartz TED Talk. I've never been fond of TED Talks; I think they're usually reductive and condescending, and I made it a point not to watch any of the suggested ones for this course unless absolutely necessary. This week, I thought, 'hey, I could give one of these a shot!' The title and summary of Schwartz's Talk made it seem like it was going to be about decision paralysis, and that's certainly something I experience a lot, as someone that suffers from ADHD.
I didn't watch the whole thing, because I got about five minutes in and the guy put up a transphobic comic panel so that he could sneer about how 'personal identity' is a choice, now. Thanks for that, teach. Good to know you vet your content for potentially hateful views.
So, now I'm sitting with the unpleasant reminder that most people think that gender and sexuality is a choice–a choice that they find disgusting and ridiculous. So, instead of talking about a decision that I have made in life, like my career path or my education level or where I live, I'm gonna go ahead and talk about a decision that isn't anyone's to make: gender.

WHEN DO YOU DECIDE WHO YOU ARE?
No one can really answer this question. Life is a constant series of discoveries about oneself, and while a lot of the 'finding out' happens around one's 20th decade, it never really stops. And it's not a decision, for the most part. The decisions we make are about what parts of ourselves we want to emphasize, to prioritize, to discard, to hide. The decision of a transgender person is not which gender they are. It isn't a cisgender person's decision which gender they are, either; that's decided for them by the doctor that delivers them as a baby. The only difference is that at some point in the life of a transgender person, they realize that that doctor made the wrong decision.
So, what is a choice that a transgender person has? They can, to some extent, choose how the world perceives them. They can choose to transition, whether that involves changing their name or undergoing hormone replacement therapy or any number of other things. Though, the way that they're perceived is still going to be somewhat at the whims of other people. Or, if a transgender person decides, they could not transition, which doesn't involve changing their gender back, but rather suppressing their actual gender so as to avoid endangering themselves.
One has to weigh the options heavily for this kind of choice. Transition might help mental health, might improve confidence and reduce dysphoria and make life generally easier, but it might also make someone more visible, more at risk of violence and discrimination. For many transgender people, the choice is how they die: suicide or murder?
So, no, being transgender is not a decision. At least, it's not one made by the trans person. Instead, it's a choice made by the people around them. Society at large constantly defines and redefines what it looks like to be a man and a woman, and individuals reinforce those definitions by picking clothes for their children or, you know, murdering transgender people. I will not beat around the bush on that whole murder thing, either. I will not make light of queerness the way that Barry Schawrtz does.
Truly, I want you to think about the idea of transness being a decision. If a decision like that were to be available in your life, a decision that could make your life infinitely harder, more expensive, more dangerous. A decision that could alienate your friends and family, that could get your children taken away from you, that could prevent you from holding down a job or a home because it is still legal in most states right now to deny queer people housing or adoption rights or employment with basically no consequences. If that were a choice, why would anyone make it?

Maybe, just maybe, the consequences of not transitioning are so grave that it isn't really a choice at all.

Thoughts from a (reluctantly) emergent leader

It's hardly a controversial thought to have, is it? No one likes group projects. Reasons range–introverted people are traumatized by the command to find people to work with; extroverted people hate when people aren't communicative enough; procrastinators can't put them off, since others' grades ride on them. The most common complaint, however, is thus: 'I always end up doing all of the work.'
Now, this can't be true every time it comes up. If it were, there wouldn't be a problem, because one out of every two people would be doing 'all of the work.' It's more likely that the people who claim to do 'all that' are really doing slightly more than is their assigned role, in order to make up for others' weaknesses. It's frustrating, for sure, but it's a necessary burden of working with other people. We all know this, but the fact doesn't stop us from groaning and dragging our feet every time we need to do anything beyond what is asked of us.
What does it mean, though, that this is such a universal experience? Aren't human beings wired to help one another? If we are, then we should miss no strides in reaching out to make up for another's shortcomings, hell, we should take pride in it (which many of us do, or else we wouldn't complain so vocally about doing 'all the work'). But, for me at least, no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise, I can't ever click with collaboration. Maybe I haven't found the right person?

Looking at it from a neurodivergence perspective, it's likely that group projects and otherwise collaborative work is especially difficult for those with autism or ADHD. Beyond the obvious observation that any lack of social skills can make a collaborative setting more frustrating for all parties, there's a structure, or rather a lack thereof, that poses a more striking problem. People who are used to working alone, especially those with neurodivergencies that appreciate consistency and structure, can find collaborative work chaotic. It's easy to know exactly what your approach would be for a certain task, but being faced with another's process is disorienting at best.
You might say, 'that's the point! Working with others will help you see new angles of familiar problems.' That's true, to some degree. But it can also make things needlessly hard. For many, telling someone to do a task with others that they can do on their own is to tell them to do it with arbitrary limitations. Now, one isn't allowed to jump in and go about, say, writing a paper the way that they would be able to do naturally on their own, but they must wait and try to decipher a stranger's work process to put out a product that's possibly going to be worse than a solo work because it's been made in a fit of confusion. The positives of collaborative work, I think, only come out with certain combinations, certain chemistries. Otherwise, the only thing that extra people contribute is confusion, busywork, and struggle. 

To boil things down to the elephant in the room: yes, I dislike group work. I'm one of the archetypal ones who 'does all of the work,' not because I'm a martyr, or (for the most part) because I'm full of myself, but because I don't have the patience for any other way. Constantly being on the back foot, waiting because I can't do my work until others have done theirs, not knowing what's actually expected of me because no one likes to communicate clearly… every step of the process drives me up the wall. Perhaps, like I said, I haven't found the right fish in the sea. But, for now, I'm going to eye every collaborative project with the suspicion that I'll turn into an emergent leader because of my own impatience.

CAPTURING LIFE ON THE PAGE

IS CAPTURING THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE IN WORDS ON THE PAGE A FUTILE PURSUIT?

In his paper on operator's manuals, James Paradis makes a claim that by the very nature of their medium, manuals and instructions cannot possibly account for the entire range of experiences that can happen in the real world. It's a severe limit of the medium, indeed. There are so many variables in our busy and random world, especially so in places like construction sites, where the nailguns being referenced in Paradis's essay were being used. In attempting and failing to account for the possible dangers of the tools, the manual writers for the respective studgun companies allowed human life to fall through the cracks. It's certainly appropriate that these mistakes were legislated! That the manuals were written by tradesmen first and barely scrutinized before publishing is unsettling, and makes one wonder how many other companies cut similar corners in making safety warnings for their products.
    However, I'm not so confident that Paradis' perspective on capturing the world into text is entirely correct. The way he writes that user manuals can't possibly account for all of the variables in a real work environment makes Paradis sound downright sympathetic to the people responsible for putting out dangerous tools without appropriate warnings. Is it truly impossible, as Paradis says, to take even a narrow snapshot of the greater world and put it on the page? Surely, it can't be. If that option was so entirely off the table, then people wouldn't be spending as much time as they do on writing as a medium. It's the job of any artist, no matter the medium, to try to capture life's ephemera as best they can. It's not an easy task, indeed, but it's far from impossible. This is why people get degrees in the arts. Perhaps it's not that we should consider this kind of thoroughness in writing impossible; we must instead understand that even the most seemingly innocuous forms of communication should be done by those who really know what they're doing.
    
    I could talk for hours about my journey as a fiction writer in attempting to do just what Paradis says is impossible: catching lightning in a bottle in the form of the living, breathing world and putting it to paper. But, for the sake of keeping out of my own head, let's take a look at other mediums. In particular, the visual. I'll attach to this post a couple of pieces that have delivered something so much more than the shapes and colors on the screen.

Savanna Judd. QuikTrip In Green.

This scene invokes a lot more senses than the visual. In its surreality, it becomes somehow even more real. The jungle-like foliage and mystery of the circumstances capture how lost one feels in walking into a quick-stop gas station shop–the familiarity, because they're all so similar, combined with the looming mystery that comes from them all being just different enough that you won't be able to find the bathroom right away, no matter how hard you try. The space is cramped, and one wonders how it's even possible to move around among the shelves. When I look at this piece, I feel the sensations attached to the place without being in it at all.

 Andrey Surnov. Evening Traffic 1.

 

This image gives me chills. The lighting is breathtaking, in particular the way the clouds are backlit. Once again, the further from reality that this painting gets, the more it gets close to how the context it captures actually feels. The horizon is hard to make out, the highlights of the road underfoot brighter than anything else. One feels small, but they also feel the sort of excitement one feels at the beginning or end of a long trip. Are we coming home? Going somewhere else? Either way, in this moment, this vertical slice, we're floating with everyone else on this road.

All in all, it seems dismissive to say that any medium is incapable of capturing the reality of the human condition. So many people put their blood, sweat, and tears into getting the feelings that they have onto paper so that they can share them with others. In some ways, experiencing someone's art is the closest one can ever get to truly understanding what the world looks like through another's eyes. It's not easy to capture life's ephemera or complexities, no, but it's very much doable in many kinds of mediums. It just takes a skillful hand.
What are some works that you've experienced that have made you feel something more deep than the sensory details it provided? Do you think that certain mediums work better for such experiences? Movies? Games? Paintings? Books? Why? What's a feeling or a moment that you think is truly impossible to capture in art?
Do you think it's possible to capture the human experience in a satisfying way? More importantly, do you think you could do it?

A bloggy beginning

For those of you who are curious about this select some guy out of hundreds of other some guys in the school, here's a more thorough intro for me:

I've got about a billion different hobbies at any given time. My attention span is short, and my creativity is always looking for something new to glom onto. However, the major constants for me have always been drawing, writing, and playing video games. I always come back to those. Because of the fact that, of those, writing is the only that I can consider myself measurably decent at, I'm pursuing an English degree. This class is being taken alongside fiction writing classes, because my first love is and always has been prose. I've written a handful of novel-length works of fiction, one of which I'm working on cleaning up until it's actually in a state that can be published. While I was writing said work-in-progress novel, my average words per minute was 27, and words per day was about 3,000.

    So, then, why technical writing? I'm a realistic person. I know that being a novelist isn't in the cards for most aspiring writers, and even if it were, I know that writing novels doesn't pay the bills unless you are wildly successful. So, while I'm working on getting my degree, I want to take stops to make sure I'm developing the sort of writing skills that will make me useful outside of my own creative pursuits. This class is perfect for that; it's even more oriented towards office work than I expected it to be, and I'm just about sure that it'll help me get a job at some point. At least, a job that doesn't involve washing dishes and being yelled at for slow sandwich deliveries. Ideally.

    The idea of a blogging format to touch on student progress is novel, but not absurd. Sometimes, having the space to just take down one's thoughts can really help us all get our ducks in a row. Worst case scenario, I at least get the enjoyment of hearing my fingers tippity tapping on the keyboard for a bit, which makes me feel real productive. And, I guess by definition, this sort of writing is a kind of technical communication. I've honestly thought a few times about starting a blog on my own time, because my opinions are very plentiful, and, to me, very interesting, so this is a nice kick in the rear to do it. As a writer, it helps a lot to have an outlet for putting words on the page that doesn't involve any external pressure of publishing-level quality. It's a lot like doodling in a sketchbook between big paintings. Did I mention I also draw? Maybe I can put some of my illustrations up here.

    Anyway, this class as a whole is full of pleasant surprises. Things have been very well-communicated and thoughtful to the point where I rarely have any doubt about what I need to be doing to move forward. There are a lot of real-world applications, especially in the textbook, that help me wrap my head around the way that otherwise inscrutable office jobs actually work. This is exactly the kind of thing that people talk about when they say, "oh, I don't know what it is he does. Some kind of business work." It's always been very nebulous and opaque to me, and this class seems to be doing well to wave that smoke away.

    For those of you who are still around, thanks! I've been a little rambly for these past few hundred words, but consider that my way of wordily stretching my legs. Like I said, it's freeing to write something that doesn't have to be at absolute max efficiency, which is how I've been approaching most of my fiction as of late. I hope that the first week of school has treated all of you guys well!