Interview and Source Analysis

Interview

My interview for this project was conducted with Professor John Solow, who I chose to interview in order to gain knowledge about the roles of writing in the job of an economics professor. The first thing that I learned about his role at the university is that he does not currently have a work schedule that is typical of a professor. Right now, Professor Solow is teaching, but he is also managing projects and tasks associated with the college of business. This means that he spends, in his own words, "About 40% of my time teaching, about 20% conducting research, and about 40% working on projects for the University and for the College". Most professors would be doing more research and reporting alongside teaching classes whereas Professor Solow is not. Another thing that I learned from the interview is that he does not consider the teaching of the class to be real writing. Therefore, teaching subjects such as writing questions and guiding learning will not be a focus in my report as, to my understanding, teaching does not constitute a rhetorical situation of substance. I feel that it is not a true rhetorical situation because much of the curriculum relies on adaptation of tests (the selection of questions) to outside texts. The writing of business texts and literature falls underneath the umbrella of what I am considering research for the purpose of this paper. Professor said that his style of writing has not changed much since he was in high-school. Yes, he writes better, certainly, but Professor Solow didn't need to fundamentally change his writing. To Professor Solow, the kind of writing that matters most in business is efficient, accurate, and persuasive writing. This point is rationalized by the fact that when teaching, he spends about 50% of his day either writing or reading the writing of others. This number takes a jump upwards when he isn't teaching a full semester lecture of microeconomics, and if he could do more in a day even while teaching, I have the sense that he would. From this interview, the fundamental idea that I got from everything that was said is that efficiency is the essential in business writing. Whether it's an e-mail, a memo, a report, or a full 150 page dissertation, knowing how to effectively communicate your ideas, where you left off, and where others should pick up is paramount to success.

Sources

The three sources that I already chose were my non-academic sources and so, although I changed them, I will not be covering them in this summary. The three academic sources that I chose are all economics based reports, papers written over research in various fields, with a focus on how the results connect to economic theory and economic success. These papers all fall into the research category of a professor's job, and one in particular that stood out to me was the paper on the subject of multi-platforming. This paper was written with the purpose of connecting other journals already in existence and compressing the ideas and the takeaway into a sort of useful crash course for those who want to quickly extract the use out of multi-platforming for business. This struck me as particularly relevant to the idea of efficiency that came up in my interview with Professor Solow because the paper was written to be easy to skim and extract information from. The entire purpose of the paper was to synthesize the existing information into useful statements and from there, fill in the knowledge gaps about new emerging ideas that had come into play since the writing of the other journals. This reminded me of the ideas we were discussing in class about how we don't introduce new ideas, we build on top of existing ideas. There is recognition given to previous authors and credit given to their expertise, but at the same time the paper is written to fill in the gaps and slim down the ideas into applicable devices. The other two papers that I chose are full reports similar to those that the article on multi-platforming analyzes. One of the reports, for example, is about the economic impact of pesticides and the report is much longer than the paper on multi-platforming, but this makes it a strong example of typical business writing reports.