When I teach technical communication, I try not to make it too dry and "how to" oriented. We cover "how to," of course, but I like to bring in interesting and current cases that illustrate how the kinds of documents we write in class actually work in the world. Last time I taught tech comm, I pointed to the torture memos to show the function of a memo, the importance of primary and secondary audience awareness, and the ways that memos can be circulated and used. When we discussed research reports, I brought in the Gap, Inc. Social Responsibility Report. I used it to talk about how authors of reports address a rhetorical context and situation -- in this case, accusations that the corporation uses sweatshop labor -- and establish an ethos. For the Gap report, we also talk about their use of images and colors to neutralize their opposition.

I also bring plenty of humor into the discussion. I've long used the Dilbert Performance Review Generator and the Mission Statement Generator as a point of entry into talking about discursive practices in organizational and professional settings. For example, the start page of the Performance Review Generator says:

You have to review the performance of a co-worker who exhibits the intelligence of a slug, but since today's incompetent co-worker could become tomorrow's incompetent boss, you don't want to say anything offensive. Do you lie?

Solve the problem with Catbert's Performance Review Generator! Its vague sentences can be interpreted as praise by your dimwitted co-worker, but you'll know that "you would be lucky to get him to work for you" means he never works.

I bring in the laptop and attach it to the LCD projector, and we have a good bit of fun as I enter students' names into the Performance Review Generator and read them aloud. Then we talk about what the performance reviews reveal in terms of communication styles in organizational and professional settings, e.g. the indirectness and tact spoofed to great effect in Office Space:

Performance Appraisal for Ms. Ratliff:

Ms. Ratliff is not afraid to ask questions that check the assumptions of others. Ms. Ratliff makes decisions with minimal direction. A reevaluation of her salary is long overdue and the possibility of hiring more employees like her should be discussed immediately. It is apparent that she sets a compelling example for the younger employees. For completeness I should mention that Ms. Ratliff shows an interest in related tasks not assigned to her.

* In Strict Confidence *

For the Mission Statement Generator, I like to direct students' attention to the word banks. We look at each group of words and use them as a starting point to discuss the values that are privileged in American culture and the economy (though I know there no singular, monolithic "U.S. economy," to be sure):

Adverbs:
quickly, proactively, efficiently, assertively, interactively, professionally, authoritatively, conveniently, completely, continually, dramatically, enthusiastically, collaboratively, synergistically, seamlessly, competently, globally

Verbs:
maintain, supply, provide access to, disseminate, network, create, engineer, integrate, leverage other's, leverage existing, coordinate, administrate, initiate, facilitate, promote, restore, fashion, revolutionize, build, enhance, simplify, pursue, utilize, foster, customize, negotiate

Adjectives:
professional, timely, effective, unique, cost effective, virtual, scalable, economically sound, inexpensive, value-added, business, quality, diverse, high-quality, competitive, excellent, innovative, corporate, high standards in, world-class, error-free, performance based, multimedia based, market-driven, cutting edge, high-payoff, low-risk high-yield, long-term high-impact, prospective, progressive, ethical, enterprise-wide, principle-centered, mission-critical, parallel, interdependent, emerging, seven-habits-conforming, resource-leveling

Nouns:
content, paradigms, data, opportunities, information, services, materials, technology, benefits, solutions, infrastructures, products, deliverables, catalysts for change, resources, methods of empowerment, sources, leadership skills, meta-services, intellectual capital

What I'd like to start doing, though, is using some of those hilarious letters by Joey Comeau. They're brilliantly ridiculous lampoons of the bravura and hyperconfidence one is expected to demonstrate in cover letters and the innovative and groundbreaking plans and ideas one is expected to have. My favorites are the application for the position of Systems Analyst in the Transplantation Services Department of Queen Elizabeth Hospital*, Salesperson for Toyota**, and the best of all, a letter applying for a position at Microsoft addressed directly to Bill Gates:

I want to start a program down there at Microsoft, where every week five hundred random employees are selected to spend ten thousand dollars of your money each, on making the world more perfect. I want to approve budget increase of fifty thousand dollars for the janitor's idea to build a chess computer that loses every game and hates you for it. A computer that is the worst kind of poor loser.

I want to put satellites into orbit that do nothing but make life better for children, that broadcast an unending documentary we finance where we interview old women and ten year olds about their best friends, where we talk to the CEOs of fortune 500 companies and Tom Cruise and they tell us about that summer by the lake. I want to save the world. Money is so awesome.

Do any of you do anything like this when you teach tech comm? I'd love to hear about it.

Also, I'm down in Alabama for the Thanksgiving holiday, where I'm going to try to participate in Buy Nothing Day. Blogging may be light for the next week.

*(update) This letter also does a fine job of making fun of the Deep Passion for the job that an applicant is supposed to express.

** On second thought, I wouldn't use this one (see the antepenultimate paragraph).

I keep meaning to blog about Nuttin But Stringz, but have kept forgetting until this very moment. Go to the lower right corner of the screen and watch the Tonight Show video. I'll be buying that CD in January.

Treatment of the Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women. Bookmarking that one for later.

There's a new issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication out, and of particular interest to me is Elizabeth Würtz' A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Websites from High-Context Cultures and Low-Context Cultures. Look at all the images from McDonalds sites and the Summary, Implications for Web Design, and Discussion sections. Very interesting work.

Finally, you must look at projects on the construction of identity and flickr, a clever and insightful art installation about "showing off one's good life" on Flickr. This Quicktime movie is especially illustrative and provocative. Hopefully I'm not the last one to see this site; I was trawling through the archives of the Flickr blog and saw it there.

• Go to the Carnivals! There's the Teaching Carnival and the Feminist Carnival.
• I've had Alabama's The Closer You Get in my mind all day. What's up with that?
• A good friend of mine who recently finished her Ph.D. said about dissertation writing: "Eventually you get to this point where you know you're going to finish it." I'm there. The chapter I'm working on now is going well, and quickly. All I wanna do is zooma-zoom-zoom-zoom and a boom-boom. I have full confidence that I'll be done with this thing before August 06.
• I've decided to take a new tack with my treadmill running. Instead of being hyper-vigilant about my time, I'm just entering a distance into the machine (2.5 miles today) and slowing down when I feel like it. I don't have a specific running goal, and I don't know what the best practices are for training.

I'll join Jill, Rox, Lindsay, and Deanna in blogging the SadieMag story on women and blogging. For the story, I answered some questions over email and spoke on the phone with Stephanie Schorow, the author of the story, and I recommended that Schorow watch these videos from BlogHer, especially the ones by Halley Suitt and Heather Armstrong. I don't have anything to add beyond what others have already said, but I thought I'd share some comments I made that ended up on the cutting room floor.

1. Are there truly fewer female political bloggers than men? Seems like male-written blogs dominate the top 100 lists (technorati, truthlaidbear) but does that reflect what's happening in the blogosphere?

No, I don’t think there are fewer female than male political bloggers. I think the common understanding of “political blogger” is too narrow and usually refers to a blogger that, first of all, writes about politics narrowly defined. Lots of women especially, but also men, have a broader, more sophisticated understanding of “political” that includes the ways public policy affects individual lives. This view of “political” opens up a space for a lot of personal narrative writing about lived experience, which, again, doesn’t immediately spring to mind when someone says “political blog.”

Second, some of the male-authored blogs in the top 100 lists are more like aggregators or filters, with many short posts per day mostly consisting of links to news stories and to other bloggers’ posts. That’s certainly doesn’t reflect what’s happening in the blogosphere. Plus some of them write about nothing but politics, and that doesn’t reflect what’s happening in the blogosphere either. Most people write about a wide variety of topics.

Also, if you look at the most popular blogs according to the ranking tools (especially Ecotraffic), you’ll also see several of the blogs that are owned by Nick Denton of Gawker Media: Gawker, Defamer, Gizmodo, and Wonkette. Many in the blogosphere read them but think of them more as magazines than blogs. These blogs have several writers, all of whom are paid to blog, and they stay very much on topic.

2. Are female bloggers-- right left moderate -- getting the attention they deserve? if not, why not?

It’s hard to cast it in terms of “deserving” or “not deserving” when we’re talking about blogging. It’s not as simple as saying that good writing will attract a large audience, and bad writing won’t. Blogging is a distributed communicative model, where you have to reach out and gather your audience. You have to link to other blogs so that they can see you in their http referrers, you have to comment on other people’s blogs, send them trackbacks, link to their posts in your posts, etc. You have to write yourself into the network and engage with the medium, and that entails a good bit of what many would consider self-promotion.

So if you think of it as “the best writers deserve the most attention,” well, there are plenty of good writers out there, but we have to find out about them somehow. Some people argue that the people who are at the top of Technorati and the Ecosystem, regardless of whether they’re men or women, deserve to be there because they’ve put a lot of work into updating their blogs constantly and reaching out and connecting to their audiences – and maintaining their relationships with their audiences. (See, for example, Halley Suitt here.)

Still another factor to consider is a blogger’s real-world reputation. If a major league scholar with impressive credentials starts a blog, people are going to link to it immediately. Economist Gary Becker and judge / legal scholar Richard Posner, for example, started a blog together some months ago, and it generated a lot of buzz immediately. Some people might think that if a person has impressive credentials, that means he or she deserves a larger audience.

3. What are some of the best female-written blogs in your opinion? The best liberal blogger? The best conservative blogger? The best in keeping everyone guessing?

Best female-written blogs:
One Good Thing: http://buggydoo.blogspot.com/
Girl Genius: http://girlgenius.typepad.com/girlgeniuscom/
Badgerings: http://badbadbadger.blogspot.com/

Best liberal bloggers:
Pharyngula: http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog
Bitch Ph.D.: http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/
Body and Soul: http://bodyandsoul.typepad.com/
Norbizness: http://norbizness.com/
Feministe: http://feministe.us/blog/
blackfeminism.org: http://blackfeminism.org/
Hullaballoo (Digby): http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/
John & Belle: http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/

Also creative endeavors like:
The Rude Pundit: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/
Wealth Bondage: http://thehappytutor.com/ (“fetish action figures”)
[UPDATE: Totally should have put Fafblog here the first time.]

Best conservative bloggers:
Ann Althouse: http://althouse.blogspot.com
Ilyka Damen (now defunct): http://ilyka.mu.nu
(and though they’re more libertarian/fiscal conservative)
Crescat Sententia: http://www.crescatsententia.org/
Marginal Revolution: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/

4. Do females have a different voice than men when blogging? Or is the Internet truly a genderless zone that levels the playing field? Do females feel more free in writing their opinions than speaking them when they might be shouted down by men - or even by other women?

I wouldn’t say women have a different voice from men. While stereotypes do exist, both feminine (attenuated assertions, claims phrased as questions, an interpersonal style) and masculine (opinions stated as facts, information accompanied by critique, aggressiveness), it’s not at all the case that actual practice confirms these stereotypes.

I hope that women feel free to state their opinions online, but I’m not sure about that. In the course of my research, I’ve seen references to women bloggers who stopped blogging, especially conservative women, but I don’t know why that is. I’ve also read quite a few posts and comments about how women face harassment and threats online, so intimidation might make some women feel inhibited about posting their opinions online. Whether it’s actually the case or not, it’s commonly said that more women blog pseudonymously than men.

5. Some bloggers, such as Digby, are said to be female but keep their gender a secret. Do you think it makes a difference to readers?

Google "jon digby" blog and you’ll see that some people claim digby is a man. But for a long time, I’ve found it interesting that people think digby’s a woman, though; many of his posts are more essayistic than the punditry we see on a lot of the men’s political blogs, where most of the posts are just links to news items or other posts with a sentence or two of commentary.

6. Wonkette has garnered a lot of attention for her site. How representative is she of female bloggers?

Not very. Wonkette is run by Nick Denton of Gawker Media and is more like a magazine. He picked Ana Marie Cox based on some of her prior writing, like on suck.com.

Yes, I know I've blogged these photographs before. But this time I'm doing a little something extra for the Feminist Carnival. I don't have any grand arguments to make about 1970s feminism, but I find it very interesting how, during the 1970s, before the backlash, feminism seemed almost celebrated. (Thumbnails go to larger photographs.)

Advertisement for Hour after Hour deodorant, Mademoiselle magazine, 1973	Advertisement for Secret deodorant, 2005

The 1973 ad says:

How do you rate as a 1973 woman?

It used to be a man's world. But you've changed it. How much? Check a box for every yes. In the past year:

• Have you taken an active part in an election campaign, bond issue, school budget, zoning question?
• Have you expressed your opinion in areas where you used to just smile and nod agreement?
• If you manage a home and family, does it upset you when someone says you're "just a housewife"?
• Do you have -- or do you want -- a job in what was once considered a man's domain?
• Do you pay more attention to news, comments, editorials?

The more "Yes" answers you have, the more involved, concerned and active you are. But now that you're tough enough to dish it out, you should be tough enough to take it. Frankly, you sweat. That's why you need an anti-perspirant that's tough enough to take it . . . Hour after Hour.

It fights odor and all 3 kinds of wetness. From heat, tension and exercise. That's powerful protection. Yet it has a new fragrance that tells you you're still utterly feminine. Hour after Hour. Protects against 3 kinds of wetness. So you dish it out. We're tough enough to take it.

The 2005 ad says:

My secret: I send myself flowers to make him jealous.

Our newest body sprays give you such a rush of long-lasting Lavender and Passion Flower freshness, you'll be tempted to pluck a handful.

See also these other ads from Mademoiselle for more context. It isn't that I feel nostalgic for the 1970s -- I was only a tot then, but I know it was no Herland -- but I would like to see some of this Hour after Hour kind of pride right about now. Irony and flippant humor are great, but so are sincerity and earnestness. UPDATE: I just discovered this list of Tips for Strength on Secret's site, which, much to my relief, makes the scale a little more balanced, though it lacks the agenda-like specificity of the 1970s ad.

I'd love to hear any other thoughts about this if you have them. If anything, these images can be a jumping-off point or prompt for further discussion.

As an aside, check out this ad for Chomsky's American Power & the New Mandarins from a 1969 issue of The Nation.

Technorati tag: feministcarnival

Look who, in another Flickr Recognition Moment, I happened to meet!

I was in Chicago over the weekend; I had gone down there to see Jonathan, who gave an excellent paper at SLSA. Unbeknownst to me, Jill was at the conference too. I was just leaving to catch a cab to Union Station when she and I saw each other in the lobby.

I have photographs from the train ride -- lots of pan shots while the train was in motion. I'll post those soon.

I have an article coming out in the Fall 2006 issue of Scholar & Feminist Online, and of course I Just Ask!ed if they would let me publish it under a Creative Commons license. They said it was fine; authors retain the copyright anyway.