![]() ![]() We suggest that two genres-workflow narratives and software reviews-can position writing technologies more centrally within academic conversations and practices. ![]() Both workflow thinking and mapping point to the possibilities of new composing technologies, but new composing technologies aren’t often the focus of academic inquiry. ![]() We wouldn’t recommend that anyone try to teach or demonstrate mapping without first examining their own practices.įinally, this chapter concludes with recommendations for two workflow-focused scholarly genres. In doing so, we hope to offer a pedagogical counterpoint: although workflow mapping can work as an instructional exercise, it must begin as a personal practice. Through videos, images, and narratives, we model mapping and take an autoethnographic approach to our own practices. We also dive into our own writing practices, using maps as a way to examine our practices and affective preferences. In this chapter we define and contextualize workflow mapping, which we situate within discussions of writing process and the types of composing activities introduced in chapters 3, 4, and 5. The map can function as an analytical heuristic (we could, for example, map David Sparks’s workflow), but here we position mapping as a personal, reflective practice-a means of facilitating workflow thinking. Through mapping, a writer foregrounds the role of mediating technologies, asking why they’ve chosen to use those technologies and how they shape the writing process. Where workflow thinking is a future-focused approach, workflow mapping focuses on current and past practices. In this chapter, we introduce workflow mapping, which provides a visual, spatial, and reflective means of examining a writing process. ![]() In chapter 1 we argued that workflow thinking offers writers a way to rethink and reevaluate how they approach knowledge work. Instead, we want to step back and recommend a broader practice of meta-awareness, encouraging writers to consider why they have chosen particular writing technologies or practices, how those technologies and practices shape their process, and what a change to those practices might offer. These are all reasons why we aren’t going to close this book by suggesting that you try the apps Ulysses or OmniOutliner or buy a Baron Fig notebook or any other specific writing technology. And a discussion of writing technologies can tap into a broader sense of vendor fatigue-a sense that all these new tools and technologies get in the way of simply doing the work. We see this as the product of many complex factors: Most schools and employers offer a sanctioned and familiar writing technology (currently, Microsoft Word), and learning a new technology means moving outside an institutionally supported system adopting or changing a technology-especially a computer-mediated one-can introduce initial complications and pain points and time spent learning something new (or even considering how or why one might adopt something new) is time not spent on the actual work of putting words onto the page or screen. But many writers-especially those working and teaching within higher education-are wary of such calls when they relate to writing technologies. More specifically, we’ve hoped that the methods and narratives discussed will inspire writers to look more carefully at their tools, environments, and dispositions. We have envisioned this as a book for writers. ![]()
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