Crowdsourcing: Videos & Websites

We'll be discussing these materials in class...

Popular Online Crowdsourcing Platforms:

Innocentive

iStockphoto

Yelp

Wikipedia

Urban Dictionary

Crowdsourcing & Art:

Kickstarter

99Designs

The One Million Masterpiece

Concision: The Paramedic Method

from the Purdue OWL...

Use the Paramedic Method (originally developed by Richard Lanham in Revising Prose) to edit any kind of professional writing. Editing your professional writing using the Paramedic Method will make your prose easier to read. Sentences that are easy to read are more persuasive and more user-centered.

Professional writers understand the need for clear, concise prose. An industry standard for helping workplace writers achieve user-centered, persuasive, and clear prose is the Paramedic Method. When you use the Paramedic Method, you will reduce your word count by eliminating unnecessary words. The Paramedic Method also helps you activate your sentences by eliminating passive voice and redundancies. The Paramedic Method is an easy to learn, systematic way to make your sentences more persuasive and more user-centered.

Follow the seven steps below to improve the readability of your sentences.

The Paramedic Method

1. Circle the prepositions (of, in, about, for, onto, into)
2. Draw a box around the "is" verb forms
3. Ask, "Where's the action?"
4. Change the "action" into a simple verb
5. Move the doer into the subject (Who's kicking whom)
6. Eliminate any unnecessary slow wind-ups
7. Eliminate any redundancies.

Now You Try

Use the Paramedic Method in the sentences below to practice making your sentences more concise. 

1. The point I wish to make is that the employees working at this company are in need of a much better manager of their money.
2. It is widely known that the engineers at Sandia Labs have become active participants in the Search and Rescue operations in most years.
3. After reviewing the results of your previous research, and in light of the relevant information found within the context of the study, there is ample evidence for making important, significant changes to our operating procedures.

Writing to Advocate

Here's an example of an advocate-style blog post, written by best-selling author Steven Johnson, which we'll be discussing in class today: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2012/03/why-the-bay-area-needs-the-bay-lights.html

Writing to Emphasize and Contextualize

Good filter-style blog posts emphasize. As a blog writer, your job is to find and select the most relevant resources -- emphasizing their value over and apart from the loads of other material variously related to your post's topic. In addition, the text you write needs to emphasize which aspects of that resource are most important (e.g., useful, interesting, humorous, insightful, etc.) to your readers. Your points of emphasis need to spark readers' interest and, perhaps, add value to their experience of the resource you've given them.

So, let's practice writing to emphasize. In 50 words or less, emphasize something in this painting by Edgar Degas:

Connector-style posts ask you to take things a step further by connecting your points of emphasis to another source of information. Here, the objective is to foster inquiry or channel an insight. You are equipping your reader with a provocative connection. Perhaps you haven't thought about this connection long enough to offer an answer to the questions it might provoke. In any case, you're just a liaison here; set your readers on a path and let them do the work. In 50 words or less, make a connection between an aspect of the painting you emphasized and an additional piece of information relevant to that aspect of the painting.

EMAC Club

The following is a message from the newly formed EMAC Club at UT Dallas:

The EMAC Student Group is now an official UTDallas student organization. We'll be participating in on-campus events, peer mentoring and more.  More information to come in the next week or two, as well as our officer meeting TBA. 

If they have any questions or would like to join, email me at laurenvoneper@gmail.com, message on FB or twitter @laurenvoneper.