For my Sci/Tech Blog “A New-Age Twist on Longhand Note-Taking” I focused on Mueller and Oppenheimer’s article “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard” using additional sources from Wired.com and International New York Times to build my own argument. The principal source that I used, the Mueller/Oppenheimer article, focused on how laptop note-taking in the current digital age is leading to decreased academic performance compared to traditional longhand note-taking. The other two sources that I used focused on the importance of newer technologies and how they are shaping the face of note-taking today. None of these articles focused on putting these two things together though. So for my blog post I brought out a new idea: what if new technologies like smartpens would allow for digital versions of handwritten notes so that students are still transcribing their own ideas and not losing out on information by typing lectures verbatim.
To create a blog narrative, I took Rettberg’s Blogging into account, focusing on her definition of “blogging.” In the text, Rettberg uses the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “blog” as “A frequently updated website consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites” (Rettberg 34). This definition precisely describes the blog post that I created. My individual class blog takes my personal observations of note-taking as a current student into account while bringing in other sources through hyperlinks to their articles to provide credibility and citation on old and new note-taking technologies. Part of the assignment in creating a Sci/Tech blog was also to give our blogs a “Sci/Tech” appearance. I changed my blog temporarily for this assignment, changing the background and fonts. I created a new green background that I feel is fitting for the assignment and chose a serif font to give my blog post a sharp appearance.
Rettberg also focuses on how blogging changed how we define authors and publishing saying that blogging “[opened] up publishing to regular people” (Rettberg 12). This is an important concept to consider for this assignment because as students and young professionals it is necessary to still take a credible stance on the issue. While I am not strictly a professional in the field of note-taking, I am a student who relies on note-taking to receive an education on a daily basis, thus giving me credibility on this issue. For some classes I use a laptop for note-taking and in others I am prohibited from using a laptop so I can argue for the benefits and detriments of both.
In “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts,” Fahnestock focuses on how science writers accommodate to their non-science audiences. Referencing how science writers address their lay audiences, Fahnestock says, “Accommodating the scholarly piece for the non scholarly magazine is not, therefore, simply a matter of translating technical jargon into nontechnical equivalents” (Fahnestock 280). The same was necessary in writing my Sci/Tech blog. While I was translating information and creating a new idea about note-taking in the modern age, I was still writing for an academic audience; therefore, the assignment was not just about translating the issue into more understandable material, but presenting a new argument for a new audience. Fahnestock also says, “In the space limits of a short notice in a magazine of popularized science, there is not room for the qualifications a more knowledgeable audience would demand, qualifications that show the author’s awareness of the criticism and refutation that an expert audience could raise against his inferences” (Fahnestock 283). While only composing a short individual blog post, I had to establish credibility in that amount of space but only the credibility necessary for the audience I was trying to reach. This intended audience would be other students and frequent note-takers like myself. I established credibility quickly because of my knowledge of note-taking as an academic student as well as by providing hyperlinks for the articles I referenced so that readers can access them and gain more information for themselves without my unnecessarily lengthening my post to provide extraneous information that does not directly add to my specific argument.
Fahnestock, Jeanne. “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts.” Written Communication 3.3 (Jul. 1986): 275-96. JSTOR.
Rettburg, Jill Walker. Blogging: Digital Media and Society Series. Cambirdge, 2014. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment