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Rhetoric and Rhetorical Situation: Who do you communicate with regularly? What are the problems you solve through communication? What are the purposes for your communication? What kind of arguments (Claims+Reasons+Evidence) do you make? How do you appeal to your audience (ethos, pathos, etc.)?
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I regularly communicate with my team as we coordinate tasks to solve our team goals/mission. This is generally less formal since we all know each other and work closely together.
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When we have a larger problem or task or need feedback; we will write up a description of the issue outlining different approaches we consider or have tried. We also write up solutions to problems we have solved that might help others. (Or ourselves in the future)
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We also have a slack/discord where we get pretty quick thoughts from other teams or problems from our users get flagged that we can fix. It’s important here that the problem gets identified and solved without confusing different problems.
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Genre: What genres do you use when you communicate? What do those genres help you accomplish? How did you learn those genres?
- Not sure what it means by genres…
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Information Literacy: What kind of information do you need? How do you find the information you need? What kinds of sources do you trust? Why do you trust them?
- Our company uses special software to preserve all our documents and makes them searchable across the company. We generally don’t use email at all and this makes us have a large and accessible institutional knowledge store.
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Writing Process: What steps do you follow when you write? What tools are part of your writing process? Who do you collaborate with when you write?
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Generally I try to focus my writing on the outcome. If I need help I’ll try to describe the issue and the approaches I have tried, why they failed and what might work (including a rough estimate of the cost).
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I start with bullet points or headers to create a structure and then fill it in.
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We use WordPress software 😆
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Generally don’t collaborate, but if something is getting pushed to the world, we send it to an editorial team to take a pass over it first.
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Reflection: Reflection means thinking about your actions and choices (cognition), evaluating your action and choices (metacognition), and thinking about how you might act or choose in the future (action). How do you reflect on your communication? How do you reflect on your development as a writer and communicator? How do you ensure that your communication is ethical and charitable?
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Company culture is probably the biggest driver in how communication is “institutionalized”. At Automattic we have a pretty fantastic culture about treating everyone with respect.
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Also have an acronym: API for Assume Positive Intent. Most of our communication is written — either in p2 posts or on slack so without body language or other non-verbal communication sometimes the nuances get a little lost. It helps to know that no one is trying to offend. (Also English is not the first language for many employees so there’s also linguistic and cultural differences)
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