Within the reading for this week was the essay "Nonacademic Writing: The Social Perspective" by Lester Faigley that discusses a vital aspect of Professional Writing - it's not all academic. I think this point is extremely important when rhetoric is discussed. How can one ignore the social and cultural effects on writing and language? It's difficult to do and Faigley illustrates this.
The last selection for this week's assigned reading, an essay entitled "The Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power Authority," by Jennifer Daryl Slack, James Miller, and Jeffrey Doak, puts forward three different theories or views of communication. These are the transmission view of communication, the translation view of communication, and the articulation view of communication. Each view describes the meaning of communication, the actors involved, and the power these actors have.
As part of our reading assignment for week two, the essay “Whose Ideas?
“The speaker, then, should possess the faculties of Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery.”
Excerpts from Book I, Rhetorica Ad Herennium
Marcus Tullius Cicero, pg. 41, Professional Writing and Rhetoric Tim Peeples
An important aspect of the reading this week involved three different perspectives for research with job-related writing. It is important to study job-related writing as many of us will use our PW majors in our future jobs as a supplemental perk. There are three theoretical perspectives commonly used to explore this type of writing. Researchers of nonacademic writing want to understand how the differences in nonacademic writing compared to academic writing might best be understood or described. The three perspectives help in answering this. The three perspectives are: