Have Faith in the Writing Process
- Trust the force.
- Trust the generative power of language.
- Trust your ability to find out what you want to say and how to best say it for your intended audience.
If your listeners or readers think you lack authority (aka credibility), then they are less likely to listen or read your work. This article defines the textual attributes of authoritative works. Learn how to communicate in ways that enhance your authority and persuasiveness.
Learn how to ethically condense content while ensuring your summary accurately reflects the essence of the original source. Summary also refers to a genre of discourse--such as an Abstract or Executive Summary. Learn how to succinctly and ethically summarize the works of others.
Writing Commons publishes peer-reviewed, original articles on matters of interest to students and writing teachers. Learn about Writing Commons, an online encyclopedia for professional writers, writing studies, and teachers who require writing at the undergraduate or graduate level in composition, academic writing, fiction writing, and professional writing. The site map below reflects the current iteration of the site. If you think we've sorted an article incorrectly or you have a suggestion, please use the commenting form below to get in touch with us. We also encourage you to write for us.
This is the third creative challenge in Research Methods in Professional and Technical Communication. This challenge introduces students to methodological flaws associated with the studies conducted by scholars/theorists, designers/creatives, and empiricists (i.e., qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods researchers). The article below summarizes common problems with research methods. For instance, it introduces ethical concerns, including the impact of AI systems on inquiry. It analyzes common problems with scholarly, design, creative, quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods. It contextualizes the need for critique by introducing Samuel Arbesman's work on the "The Half-life of Facts." Working collaboratively in groups of three, students continue working on their research notes they began for the second creative challenge. This time, rather than focusing on the ways researchers ask questions, present literature reviews, and engage in citation, they analyze, critique, and reflect on the methodologies that PTC researchers employ in a disciplinary journal. Evaluation criteria include methodological appropriateness given the audience and research questions, ethical considerations, and alignment with the research conventions and epistemological positions of scholars, creatives, or empiricists. Subsequently, the groups will prepare a presentation for their peers that reports on their findings. The goal here is to identify the epistemological assumptions, ethical practices, and scholarly conversations that inform scholarship and research in PTC -- at least as reflected in the journals analyzed by the student groups. Additionally, working individually, students prepare a reflection that reports on their use of AI to conduct the research notes and group presentation. They also identify, based on the group work and presentations, what study they would find most likely to conduct.
Literary Criticism refers to critical methods for interpreting texts and for substantiating arguments. This article focuses on literary interpretation, which may be called second-level literary criticism. The difference between first- and second-level criticism is similar to the distinction between a like or dislike of a text versus giving an interpretation of it. Imagine that a group of friends gathers outside a movie theater after watching a re-release of Twilight, the first film in the Twilight film series, based on the novel of the same name by Stephanie Meyers: