Emotion and the Economy of Genre in a Design Presentation

ABSTRACT

Part of learning a discipline’s genres is learning how one’s work must be presented. Students confronting this economy of genre sometimes chafe at its restrictions, and their apprehension reveals unsuspected stakes for technical communication. In interviews, students discuss how their final presentations fail to capture the sophistication and the nuances of their designs, suggesting that learning genres is not just about participation but also about letting go of competing ways of conceiving practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Engineering communication
• genre theory
• design presentations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The variety of opinions led me to try to account for how educational experiences might affect students’ views. I found no correlation between engineering fields and attitude with design work nor did experience in an internship or co-op seem to affect student attitudes, though data available were thin in this regard, with no description available of the kind of work students did in internships. In a larger sample size and using different methods (see Artemeva, 2009) there may be a correlation between attitudes toward genre work and the kind of experiences students have in a co-op, internship or other curricular/extracurricular activities. For instance, Don credited his unique understanding of design work as a business enterprise to his Business Minor and his work with Design For America (DFA).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J. Scott Weedon

Dr. J. Scott Weedon is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric in the English Department at Texas Tech University. His research is in engineering and medical communication, rhetorical genre studies, and intersections between design and rhetoric. The author would like to thank Leigh Elion, Rebecca Walton, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback.