Skip to content

Posts from November 2017

#FridayFact: You Need to Be a Fact-Checker

#FridayFact: You Need to Be a Fact-Checker published on

Meme: Skeptic Cat demands proofTo avoid being accused of spreading untrue information, be a fact checker. When you write a document in the workplace, your first task is to compose the document; but before you send that project out to your readers, you need to do some fact checking to verify the ideas.

You know all about fact checking from the news. Fact checking isn’t just for political speeches however. In the same way that you will doublecheck your calculations in a budget, you need to confirm the facts and sources that you include in your report.

Read more about the importance of fact checking in the Medium post Three Important Reasons Why You Need to Fact Check Your Content, and then follow up by reading Five Tips for Fact Checking Your Content! Pay particular attention to Tip #3, which will result in different answers for every career field.


 
Last updated on Wednesday, November 1, 2017

#InfographicInspiration: Research Steps

#InfographicInspiration: Research Steps published on

Since you are gathering information for your Genre Analysis Report this week, our #InfographicInspiration for focuses on the research process. The image below breaks the research process into eight steps that are typical for academic projects.

Your Genre Analysis Report probably includes the steps in this infographic, except perhaps the final step “Repeat.” It’s important to realize that research, like most creative projects, can take a much messier route than the infographic suggests. People rarely march through research in a 1-2-3 order. They back up, jump ahead, and redo.

As you look at this infographic, compare it to the way that you usually work. You might comment on any of the following:

  • How is your process the same as the one in the infographic?
  • How is your process different than the one in the infographic?
  • What steps do you follow that are not represented in the infographic?
  • If you created a visualization of your research process, what would it look like?
  • If the infographic inspires you to talk about something not covered in these questions, tell us about it.

Infographic: Steps in the Research Process
Click for larger image

 

 

Note: This infographic needs a text-based transcript. See the Optional Accessibility Transcript Activity for more details.


 
Last updated on Tuesday, October 31, 2017

#WednesdayWrite: Emojis and Professional Writing

#WednesdayWrite: Emojis and Professional Writing published on

Today’s #WednesdayWrite focuses on emoji and emoticon. To get started, review the infographic on the right and check out these articles:

Once you have reviewed the background information, add a comment that shares advice you would give someone about the use of emoji in professional discussions. You could write about any of these ideas:

  • when to use emoji (and when not to)
  • what emoji to use
  • what emoji not to use and why
  • how emoji work in special contexts, such as with clients and customers or with international audiences
  • what to do if emoji use goes wrong
  • any additional tips or advice

For examples of what your document can look like, see these resources from “the government’s internal design agency, 18F, about how they use emoji in Slack, including one on how they use emoji to document shared knowledge” (18F information from the Profhacker post, Getting More Done with Emoji).

Using Emoji In Your Comments

I believe that most of you are well-versed in using emoji in your writing. Just in case you are unfamiliar or you aren’t sure how to type emoji from your computer, I am including links to the WordPress documentation for emoji. These links will tell you how to find the emoji images you can insert in your comments:

 

Note: This infographic needs a text-based transcript. See the Optional Accessibility Transcript Activity for more details.


 
Last updated on Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Primary Sidebar