15 Exercises

Exercises

These exercises are designed to help you practice and develop writing strategy skills.  You are encouraged to practice self-reflection and ask yourself open-ended questions: describe the event/experience, explore what your thinking/emotional response was, imagine what other kinds of results could have been achieved, contemplate what behaviours could have helped accomplish alternate outcomes.

1.  Choose any of the scenarios from Chapter 14 and create a SHAPE analysis.

2. Choose any of the scenarios from Chapter 14 and create an Audience Analysis:

3. When choosing the Channel, or method of delivering your information, it is important to consider four factors (Chapter 2).  Explain why that is and how the factors contribute to choosing a channel.

4. The Direct Strategy approach anticipates a positive response from the audience and places the reasons after the purpose or request.  Identify a situation where the Indirect Strategy would be a better choice and create a point form draft, or a fully developed piece of writing.  Check the scenarios for situations to use.

5.  Draft a letter to different people requesting a donation to a community charity event.

6.  Write a paragraph using objective language to describe a room where you live.  Write another one using subjective language.

7.  Evaluate a TikTok video to determine if it is reliable and provides accurate information.  Find another site that does not provide accurate information.  How were you able to tell the difference?

8.  Paraphrase a paragraph from an online source.  Make sure to use IEEE documentation style for the in-text citation and Reference entry.

9.  Create a layout with four pictures with consistent internal margins that provides a circular flow of movement.

10. What purpose do Headings have in online articles?  How can you use them effectively?

11.  What body language would tell you the audience has stopped paying attention to what you are talking about?  How could you regain their attention?

12.  What are some voice techniques you can use to increase audience attention?

13.  What are some questions you can ask yourself to reflect on your work?

14. What makes conflict situations so difficult to resolve?  How do you start?

15. How do you determine what is a “problem” and what you can do about it?

16. Describe the details of a time when you received instructions from someone that were easy to understand and follow.  What made it easy (verbal description, visual demonstration, practice, feedback from the instructor, etc.)?