Rita Rud's blog

Our team is working on our white paper draft to submit next week.

This past week, I researched six other Indiana city Human Relations Commissions websites and eight other Human Relations Commissions' sites in other states. I wrote up a summary of each, highlighting features of each that I found to be particularly user-friendly for potential clients.

After posting my research on our group Drop.io site we are now comparing what we consider are important and necessary features for a well functioning and user friendly website with the Tippecanoe HRC website.

Two very good articles! The one I found most interesting was the research reported in the "Bioteaming Manifesto." It looked at team collaboration in an innovative way comparing the differences in biological and human teams. Things that stood out to me were:

To discuss the range and scope of professional writing, it’s important to identify its principles and purposes.

Principles (as stated in PW Online):
• Communication is the basis of human relations, and good relations are the aim and purpose of all human communication activity. (Therefore, communication and ethics are inextricably linked)

Unlike a policy statement or brief that is making a specific argument aimed at a specific audience, or a recommendation report that is making one specific recommendation again, to a specific audience, the white paper presents a concept or idea that may not yet be developed, or a problem not yet adequately solved. It then provides all pertinent information and research regarding that concept or problem and concludes with one or more suggested solutions.

Haswell’s article is a thorough survey of the practice and pitfalls of teaching writing, and I found his use of du Gay’s “Circuit of Culture” interesting and instructive.

Using this model he proposed that language practices interrelate dynamically through the five activity nodes: regulation: the epicenter of instructional response; consumption: the functionality of response; production: the bane of response; identity and resistance: the major roadblock to response.

Rhetoric is the art of writing or speaking to effectively persuade, inform, entertain and impress. Rhetoric should be used ethically, to promote better relations between us, and even though used to persuade, this persuasion should be founded on “truth” and not used purposefully to mislead or deceive.