Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, I'm Sid Dobrin. In this video I'll be talking about the Mapping Your Situation feature.
When I teach the Mapping Your Situation feature in the chapter about writing to propose, I
walk students through the process it illustrates. I ask students to begin mapping their situation
by asking a series of questions about their purposes in writing to propose: what am I
proposing? Why am I proposing? What does my proposal need to convey? Does my proposal
serve a larger purpose, like establishing an approach for a research project?
Once they have a sense of their purposes in writing to propose, students should then begin
asking about who will be reading their proposals, asking questions to determine what they know
about their audiences. At the same time, students should consider in what medium and by what
method will they convey their proposals. The questions they ask about medium and method
should be asked in conjunction with their questions about audience since the responses
work together to help students frame their understanding of the situation. Likewise,
I always want to show students that when thinking about and asking about audience, medium, and
method, they should also start to question the context of their proposal: where it will
occur, where will it appear, what limits their proposal, what can be proposed? Each of these
kinds of question should be asked in conjunction with one another as the answers to these questions
might change how the questions get asked. Next, I ask students to start thinking about
who else is already participating in the situation and what the various relations are in the
situation. This kind of questioning can help students under- stand other proposals that
are already part of the situation and how their own proposals then work in relation
to other proposals—particularly when multiple proposals from multiple writers are all competition
for the same funding or the same audiences. One thing I try to emphasize with students
is the ways that institution and power can constrain what counts as a legitimate proposal
within a situation. This is also the point in mapping the situation that I ask students
to consider the ethics of their proposals in connection with thinking about relations,
constraints, and power. Next, I ask students to consider the networks
in which their proposals will function. How will their proposals circulate, both in terms
of the audiences they intend and those they don't necessarily address. Ultimately, this
degree of questioning asks students to consider how their writing might affect the situation
and others who participate in it. I also try to talk with students about how
situations undergo change even as a writer tries to analyze and lock down a situation.
I encourage students to analyze and map their situations multiple times as they write to
propose within a situation. So, those are a few thoughts about walking
students through the Mapping Your Situation feature with an eye toward teaching students
how situational awareness is integral to the activity of writing to propose.
Thanks for watching and thanks for using Writing Situations.