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Vortrag: The Challenges of Visualizing and Analyzing Workplace Technical Writing

Learning how to write effectively has always been a challenging task. Not only because "good writing" involves a tremendous amount of practice but also because of the contextual factors influencing the process. With the most influential cognitive writing model, Flowers and Hayes (Flower & Hayes, 1981) successfully captured composing as an activity affected by the environment of its occurrence. Workplace writing has changed dramatically, however, as new contextual circumstances emerged. These have virtually changed how experts and non-experts write in real life. They include, most notably, the shift to online writing and the resulting use of multiple digital and non-digital media. For instance, Leijten et al. (Leijten et al., 2013), by analyzing proposal writing, made exciting additions to Hayes's (Hayes & Berninger, 2014) model. They unraveled how an expert writer searches for information and motivates himself in a "downtime" period.

Our study examines how the fragmentation and distribution of writing activity in a workplace influence the technical writer, the writing process, and the resulting texts. As one may expect, such an undertaking posits a great methodological challenge. It involves visualizing the processes as they occur in a specific, highly complex environment. The techniques of screen capturing, think-aloud protocols, video recording, or diary interviews (Slattery, 2007) have long been the 'go to' methods in writing research. However, they tend to be highly time-consuming for the researcher and taxing for the participants. To gain access to measurable and quantifiable data, researchers started to apply key-logging and eye-tracking tools. Although extremely useful for conducting writing research, key-logging and eye-tracking produce a high amount of highly granular data, difficult to analyze and operationalize by the researcher.

In this presentation, we would like to present our preliminary results of a screen capturing, think-aloud protocol from a writing experiment conducted on a technical writer in her working space. We will share the primary difficulties we faced when visualizing an analyzing writing activity.

References

Flower, L., & Hayes, J. R. (1981). A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing. College Composition and Communication, 32(4), 365–387. https://doi.org/10.2307/356600
Hayes, J. R., & Berninger, V. (2014). Cognitive processes in writing: A framework. Writing Development in Children with Hearing Loss, Dyslexia, or Oral Language Problems: Implications for Assessment and Instruction, 3–15.
Leijten, M., Van Waes, L., Schriver, K., & Hayes, J. R. (2013). Writing in the workplace: Constructing documents using multiple digital sources. Journal of Writing Research, 5(3), 285–337. https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2014.05.03.3
Slattery, S. (2007). Undistributing work through writing: How technical writers manage texts in complex information environments. Technical Communication Quarterly, 16(3), 311– 325. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572250701291046
Virtaluoto, J., Sannino, A., & Engeström, Y. (2016). Surviving Outsourcing and Offshoring: Technical Communication Professionals in Search of a Future. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 30(4), 495–532. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651916651908

Info

Tag: 25.09.2021
Anfangszeit: 10:30
Dauer: 00:40
Raum: Don Giovanni

Sprache: en

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