21 April. UX Test Rationale & Website Drafts

Class Meeting Agenda
- UX Test Rationale Overview
- Website Draft Overview
UX Test Rationale Overview
UX Test Rationale Overview Video
Technical Communication & Sustainability
UX Test Rationale Overview Video
Featured Image: Original Northern Hemisphere Hockey Stick Graph, of Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, 1999.
Featured Image: Yucca Mountain, NV Nuclear Test Site Project
Featured Image: Data Visualizations – Aerosols and Clouds, GDFL/NOAA
Featured Image: United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Featured Image: Oil from Deep Water Horizon Spill, 2010. Getty Images.
This course builds on the competencies you developed in English 1101 and 1102, with a special emphasis on communicating in scientific, business, and technological fields. You will learn to create workplace genres, ranging from traditional print documents such as reports, proposals, and definitions to electronic forms such as podcasts and websites. Each project affords you the opportunity to skillfully assess the rhetorical situation underlying workplace genres, so you can communicate your expert, technical knowledge and skills to stakeholders.
Model 2: GATech LMC Faculty Bios
Katz, I.R., Haras, C., & Blaszczynski, C (2010). Does Business Writing Require Information Literacy? Business Communication Quarterly, 73(2), 135-49.
On the very first page of the article, the authors of “Does Business Writing Require Information Literacy?” argue, earning a top job at a major company requires a combination of technical skill and information literacy. Irvin Katz, et. al explain, “Information literate workers know when to seek new information, how to seek that information efficiently via technology, how to judge relevance and reliability of information to reach new conclusions, and how to use technology to communicate information effectively, clearly, and ethically” (Candy, 2005). So what?
Why organize a tech writing course around sustainability?
Because of the unique technical communication challenges that climate changes poses, in this class you will learn how to communicate effectively in workplace genres using sustainability as a vehicle for that communication practice. As a discourse, sustainability recognizes that the cumulative effects of anthropocentric climate change are both material and rhetorical. Not only do experts in all fields struggle to redress the environmental degradation caused by, for example, warming, emissions, deforestation, acidification, desertification, and pollution, they also endeavor to communicate the consequence, scale, and complexity of these processes to expert and nonexpert audiences to initiate change. Given that it spans chemical, biological, economical, and cultural spheres, consider coordinating a response to ocean acidification, as just one example of the complexities of technical communication endemic to environmental issues. What sorts of choices do you have to make to represent and transmit complex, discipline, specific data to experts in other fields? What sorts of choices do you have to make to represent and transmit complex, discipline, specific data to nonexpert stakeholders? These are just some of the dynamic challenges we will practice communicating this semester.