|Chapter-4|5|16|23-Readings|

|CHAPTER 4|  

Talking about usability seems to be an issue the book is driving into our brain.  Making sure you identify what your readers need and organizing your writing around those developed ideas, you can then proceed.  There are many steps that are overlooked everyday that many people take for granted. Chapter 4 does a great job of pointing out that we the writer should avoid including information just because we find it interesting and/or want to demonstrate our knowledge (Anderson 101).

I have done this many times before thinking that showing off my knowledge on a product may encourage others to be more interested.  Most of the time you and the reader do not share the same interests so you have to ask these questions that you think they might ask upon your approach. (Always outline if you are uncertain of how your writing will turn out)

|CHAPTER 5|

BE PERSUASIVE!  In being persuasive you have to listen and attack yourself at times to understand what it is you are trying to get across.  You cannot just sell yourself.  You would never get anywhere.  The chapter is common sense that most of us lack in presenting what we have to offer.  We never step back to listen and need to learn to take counterarguements and use those to make our persuasion stronger than it was before.  The three things that I took away from this chapter that have stood out in all the readings this semester is the simple reasoning chart.

       EVIDENCE           ------------------------->   CLAIM          

The facts, observations,             | The position you want 

and other evidence that                     | your readers to accept   

 support your claim |

|

|

|

       LINE OF REASONING

  The connection linking your claim and 

  evidence: the reason your readers should 

agree that your evidence supports your claim.

|CHAPTER 16|

This might be the most important chapter a college student could read in this book.  Everything else is a great way of developing your professional writing skills but typically based on the individual.  Many classes assign group projects that require strangers to come together and form a bond over the course of a semester or a quarter and develop a presentation/paper for a grade. A grade that requires a team effort.  If you are positioned with all Alphas you have the problem of who is going to do what because everybody wants to take the lead without the proper forms of distribution.  

Sharing leadership responsibilities poses a problem because many may not agree on your tactics so you have to go back and establish a team structure and agree on these issues prior to moving forward.  Setting up an outline and other detailed plans helps keep the group in check on and on task.  Many groups suffer from not creating a project schedule and pose the problem of not presenting what they are capable of.  Identify the roles of each person immediately and move on from there.  Propose, listen, debate, reform, draft, finalize.

|CHAPTER 23|

This chapter was a breeze in the sense that we see this everyday and understand what is trying to be communicated. The difficult problem comes in actually being able to write a reader-centered set of instructions for someone else.  Can I do this?  I would love to be assigned a set of instructions to write on a given product and compare them to the original after response from others.  Troubleshooting is something I do every day with one product or another and usually stray away from instructions because I cannot find them or have thrown them away.

This would be fun to try and see how difficult it really is.