Production Report 8a

This blog post concerns my first production report of two for this week's blog work. For this blog post, I decided to develop my introduction. After all, it is the first thing that people see and, ultimately, you can tell if you want to read something within 3 to 4 seconds. Let's make those seconds count!


Original Content Outline Introduction:

This field of study is focused around Electrical Engineering. The two main writing genres I will explore are information journals and engineering magazines, both which serve unique purposes. The first aims to give readers a deeper understanding, while the latter aims to interest the casual, yet interested audience to perhaps pursue the field, if not at a bare minimum be entertained by the trinkets and inventions proudly shown off by the inventors. Using the rhetorical concepts that we have been covering, the most important being audience, occasion, and purpose, I can pinpoint precisely which genres will resonate with different audiences.

Introduction

1. Start off by hooking the audience with humor
2. Briefly introduce the interviewees (Ali Bilgin and Tosiron Adegbija, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professors at the University of Arizona)
3. Establish baseline credibility(research topics that they went over… circuits, energy efficiency, graphical computation, etc)
4. Transition over to first discussion topic by discussing the pertinence to real life and how electrical engineers benefit society in ways other than “crunching math”

Adaptation:

Engineering a Future for Tomorrow's Children

I had the privilege of interviewing Ali Bilgin and Tosiron Adegbija, who are both assistant professors here at the University of Arizona, who are experts in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Fields.  Ali Bilgin's expertise also extends to the BME field, or for the common plebian like myself, Biomedical Engineering - basically the lovechild of engineering and medicine.

 How do we interest a generally disinterested public about engineering?

The common person is more invested and interested in engineering than you think.  Whenever you buy a brand new iPhone, whenever you use an HP printer to print out your homework for school, hell, even when you turn your light on, you are harnessing the power of computer engineering.

Engineering is obviously loved by the people inside the field, or otherwise they (hopefully) would see themselves out.

But the better question is, how can we nourish the average man's thirst for knowledge?

How can we present it in such a way that it doesn't go in one ear and out of the other?

When UA football players wear their helmets, it's backed by a promise that it has been tested, and will do its job when put under the ringer. It's backed by the promise that engineers have tested it.

The most effective way to present the information to the common man depends ultimately upon the writer's goals. Engineers publish documents primarily for 2 reasons:

1) interest the general public

and the motive that is only apparent to people within the genre:

2) prove superiority over other publishers (not seen unless you dig into the community)

Interesting the general public is accomplished through engineering magazines, with lots of pictures and flashy displays of products we use (iPhones) and products we envy (private jets).

Proving superiority is accomplished through the infamous scientific journals, in which the publisher barrages the audience with complex, dense language that is purposely meant to confuse the reader.

Using a quick reference guide to me was extremely effective because it breaks down otherwise complex thoughts into workable chunks of information.

The conventions of the genre allow the reader to work incrementally, and the bolded questions help guide the reader. It slows the flow of information down, like putting a tennis ball in a dog bowl to make the dog eat slower.

The hardest part about this, or perhaps the best thing I learned from this step, is that I need to use more quotes. Otherwise it's just a judgement of how I perceive and has nothing to do with the input of the interviewees. However, this is just the intro, and I decided we don't need their input until the body paragraph.