October 7, 2015
Big Lake Steam Plant Employees and Local Community Members
Westfork, Texas
Dear Westfork Community Members,
I hope my message finds you well. Due to recent developments at the Big Lake Steam Plant, I wanted to provide clarification with regard to the maintenance challenges we are working to overcome at the plant. First, though, let me assure you that our goal in maintaining the plant is to ensure that Big Lake will continue providing clean, affordable energy for South Texans in the decades to come. Also, please know that there will be no plant layoffs on account of these maintenance-related developments as we work to resolve them.
You may remember the emergency plant closure that took place in August. The purpose of the August closure was to repair a piping support structure that had begun to fail, which threatened to undermine long-term plant operations. During the emergency closure, the damaged support structure was temporarily repaired in order to ensure the structural integrity of the plant.
As you probably already know, the Big Lake facility temporarily suspends operations for one week each spring during our annual maintenance window. This year’s window has been scheduled from March 3 through March 10. During this allotted time, the temporary support repairs will be made permanent by replacing the plant’s old suspension hangers with rigid structural supports.
If you have questions regarding Big Lake’s upcoming repairs or past closures, please submit them to ask@biglake.com or call our public relations office at 000.000.0000.
With regard,
James Long
Operations Manager, Steamco Inc.
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The preceding letter was an exercise in addressing a small community with various levels of understanding of the subject matter. In this instance, the manager of Westfork's primary source of employment, "Big Lake Steam Plant," needed to assure the community that, despite ongoing maintainence issues at the plant, there was no cause for alarm regarding matters of worker safety or closure. One challenging aspect of this letter was clearly defining the maintenance problem and solution within a level of detail that was neither confusing nor ambiguous. As a technical writer, I had to condense several pages of technical details and jargon into a couple of informative paragraphs that would make sense regardless of the reader's level of undersatnding of plant operations.
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This flier was intended to target local church congregations in order to introduce art education opportunities to parents of children that did not necessarily have easy access to art supplies or expertise.
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Memorandum
Date: October 29, 2015
To: WR320 Class
From: James Long
cc: N/A
Re: Interview Assignment
On October 28th, 2015, I met with local artist Susan M. to ask her about her use of technical writing in the field of art. She, like most successful artists, relies heavily on written communication and attributes her successes to good writing. She even went so far as to acknowledge writing as the cornerstone of her career.
As an artist, Susan regularly writes four types of documents:
● Artist Statements
● Project Proposals
● Press Releases
● Visual Descriptions
Artist Statements
An Artist Statement is something an artist regularly updates and modifies, especially as their bodies of work expand and when their creative directionality changes significantly. This sort of writing describes the artist’s motivations, techniques, or observations. Susan, specifically, focuses on three points when crafting her artist statement: interest, process, and “how is it functioning?”.
Project Proposals
Project Proposals take various shapes for Susan. Some examples of artists’ proposals would be grants, exhibitions, and residencies.
Press Releases
Press releases are generally written by artists to announce an exhibition; they are often posted online, in magazines, or in local newspapers.
Visual Descriptions
It is common for artists to write visual descriptions about their own art or the art of others. For these descriptions, Susan briefly spoke on her adherence to a five-paragraph essay approach; an introduction paragraph, a few point paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph.
Audience
Evaluating readership is one of the most important aspects of what Susan considers to be good writing. As we spoke, she separated her readers into two discourse communities: laypeople and highbrow (my word, not hers). Depending on which of those catagories her writing is aimed at, her style and word choice will change significantly. She admitted that an artist has to be careful not to sound condescending to the layperson, while at the same time not having to apologize for being smart. When targeting a layperson discourse community, she focuses the conversation on matters of visual impact and technical process. When targeting a highbrow community, she makes the assumption that they care more about the work’s relation to art theory rather than the specific configuration of physical media.
Writing Strategies
When I asked what type of process she uses when drafting documents, she replied, “Read, read, read!” Susan reads constantly and while she does, she looks for terms, words, and phrases she likes, clips them out, and stashes them away to look over later. She has a few people she relies on for editing and revising, but she only falls back on them for writing that she considers to be of great significance to her career. Usually she just does all of her own editing. One editing trick she mentioned was she will read every sentence in reverse order which allows her to more easily gauge each individual sentence’s effectiveness.
In conclusion, good writing is paramount to the career of a successful artist. Susan could not stress that enough in our interview.
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This is an example of an internal memo that I wrote in order to detail my interview of a local artist.
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The preceding image is one module's overview page from a course I developed in order to help instructors more effectively use the Canvas Learning Management System.
