Technical and Professional Writing Commons^™

'Some Quite Nice Little Tunes': An Overview Of The Preparation And Recording Of The Incipits For The Britten Thematic Catalogue, Jonathan Manton

Jonathan Manton

Improving Academic Writing With The 6 + 1 Writing Traits, Elizabeth J. Sandell

Elementary and Literacy Education Department Publications

6 + 1 Writing Traits:

• Ideas and Content
• Organization
• Voice
• Word Choice
• Sentence Fluency
• Conventions
• Presentation

Web-Based Portfolio Assessment : An Open Source Solution For Platform Design, Regina Collins

Theses

Summative assessments of student writing performance have been instrumental in the evaluation of student ability and analysis of educational programs. One method used to perform summative assessments of writing performance in post-secondary education is through the evaluation of student portfolios. Using an evidence-centered design approach, NJIT faculty researchers have developed rubrics to measure the acquired skills of students. Classroom instructors from the department meet periodically to score the students' portfolios containing constructed responses to predetermined writing tasks. The paper-based assessments are then manually key-stroked into Microsoft Excel for storage, with the scores then analyzed in SPSS and SAS.

This thesis …

Technical Writing Redesign And Assessment: A Pilot Study, Gaye Bush Winter

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to compare scores on writing assignments from traditional, fully online courses in technical writing to pilot, hybrid courses at a southern university. A total of 232 students’ assignments were compared in this study. All writing assignments were scored by six trained instructors of English using the same five point rubric.

The pilot, hybrid classes had a total of 97 writing assignments. The students were divided into three disciplines including business, humanities, and sciences. In the pilot, hybrid classes, there were 18 students (or 19%) enrolled in a business major. Five students were enrolled in …

Clinical Practice Guidelines For Emerging Ultrasound Applications Drafting For Validity And Usability, Kathi Keaton Borok

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are viewed by many people with interests in health care as valuable tools for reducing practice variations that undermine patient outcomes and increase medical costs. However, guidelines themselves vary in quality. Assessment tools generally base quality measures on strength of guidelines' evidence base, but particularly for newly emerging applications of ultrasound, standards for measuring guideline quality are controversial. The validity of a guideline is considered likely when strong research-based evidence supports its recommendations, but for newer medical procedures such as emerging ultrasound applications, available evidence is sparse. Existing assessment tools must be modified if they are …

Implementing Usability Testing Of Technical Documents At Any Company And On Any Budget, Meghan Collins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my thesis I discuss the cost effectiveness of usability testing of technical documents and how any size company with any size budget can implement usability testing. Usability is achieved when the people who use products or technical documents can do so quickly and easily to accomplish their own tasks. Usability testing is best defined as the process of studying users to determine a documentation project's effectiveness for its intended audience. Users are tired of dealing with confusing and unintuitive technical documentation that forces them to either call customer service for help on simple issues or throw out the product …

Documentary Editing: Journal Of The Association For Documentary Editing--Front Matter

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Front matter: Officers--Editorial Staff--Table of Content

An Assessment Of Recent Developments In Historical Editing, Jennifer E. Steenshorne

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

The American historical editing profession has a rich and varied history of publishing projects ranging from the collected papers of great men and women to diaries of relatively obscure individuals. However, one senses that as the profession enters the twenty-first century, as new technologies appear, and as boundaries between disciplines are blurred, the profession is at a loss as to where to place itself. This article is based on a survey of current projects, both in the United States and internationally, from a variety of disciplines, and in both traditional print and new media. My aim is to broaden our …

Massachusetts Historical Society, “The Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive”- Review Of My Dearest Friend: Letters Of Abigail And John Adams. Edited By Margaret A. Hogan And C. James Taylor, John P. Kaminski

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

My Dearest Friend contains 289 letters “selected from the entire corpus” of the Adams letters from 1762 to 1801 and “is meant to show both the consistency of their relationship and the evolution of the family through the entire founding era.” A three-page epilogue on the death of Abigail consists of a short headnote and two letters exchanged between John and John Quincy Adams. All but three of the letters in My Dearest Friend are in the Adams Family manuscript collection given by the Adams family to the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) in 1956. The letters were all microfilmed on …

A New Approach To Thoreau’S “Indian Books”, Jessie Bray

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Thoreau’s unpublished Indian Books depict a similar consideration of these cultural vectors that cuts across the chronology of his career, which places them at the forefront of his most serious and ambitious research. In order to track Thoreau’s evolution as a writer and thinker, a re-evaluation of this text is necessary. In the 147 years since his death, comparatively little work has been done to bring the value of this remarkable text to light. Yet the advantages of our present digital age provide perhaps the most useful, but heretofore inaccessible, solution to the problem of discussing the Indian Books. In …

The Gilbert & Sullivan Critical Edition And The Full Scores That Never Were, Ronald Broude

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

The critical edition of the “Savoy Operas” of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan provides a useful example of the ways in which scholarly editions of performing works can alter important elements of the sources on which they are based. The accepted form for the presentation of a critical edition of an opera is the “full score,” but for no Savoy Opera did a real full score ever exist—nor was one ever intended. The sources closest to full scores were the copying masters that Sullivan prepared for use by copyists extracting parts for performers, but these are skeletons into which …

Scholarly Editing In A Web 2.0 World: Presidential Address, October 16, 2009, Cathy Moran Hajo

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

How many of you remember when the World Wide Web was new? I remember being thrilled by the things I could do, the information that I could find quickly, and the ability to spread the word about our work. I also remember being unsure how the Web would change the practice of editing. Lately, the design advances and the use of Web technology often described in shorthand as Web 2.0 have made me feel that way again. I am excited about the possibilities, but uncertain about some of the underlying premises of Web 2.0 and what it might mean to …

The “Almanacks” Of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition, Noelle Baker, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the eve of the American Revolution, Mary Moody Emerson (1774–1863) is most widely known today as the brilliant aunt of American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). She was, however, an exciting figure in her own right: a scholar, a theologian, a proto-feminist, and an author whose writings offer a rare and prolific example of early American women’s intellectual production. In 1804, when she was thirty, and again in her seventies, Emerson published a handful of periodical essays. 1 But her most significant literary accomplishment is an unpublished series of manuscript “Almanacks” (c. 1804–1855), a miscellany …

Documentary Editing: Journal Of The Association For Documentary Editing, Volume 31: 2010

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Volume 31, 2010 *The Association for Documentary Editing is pleased to announce that with Volume 31 (2010) Documentary Editing, formerly a quarterly publication, becomes an annual journal.*

Articles

• Experiencing Women’s History as a Documentary Editor, Ann D. Gordon
• The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition, Noelle A. Baker and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis
• “Dangerous Thoughts”: Margaret Sanger’s World Trip Journal, Japan, 1922, Peter C. Engelman
• Models of Digital Documentation: The Nineteenth-Century Concord Digital Archive, Amy E. Earhart

Boydston Prize Winner

• The Gilbert & Sullivan Critical Edition and the Full Scores that Never Were, Robert Broude

Review Essay

• Dearest …

Review Of Irish Immigrants In The Land Of Canaan: Letters And Memoirs From Colonial And Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. Written And Edited By Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, And David N. Doyle., James M. Perry

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

The Irish Diaspora and the influx of Irish immigrants to North America have received much attention in recent decades. The multitudes of Irish- Catholics arriving in the middle nineteenth century in the aftermath of Ireland’s Potato Famine have received the majority of this scholarly attention. In Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan, Kerby A. Miller, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle tackle an often overlooked aspect of the Irish migration to North America, the largely Protestant immigrants arriving before the American Revolution and in its immediate aftermath. Using letters, and occasionally other sources such as personal …

In Memoriam: W. W. Abbot (1922–2009), Making Something Of Life, Philander D. Chase

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

George Washington, Bill Abbot wrote in his 1989 essay “An Uncommon Awareness of Self,” “saw life as something a person must make something of.” Several years of patiently editing Washington’s pre-Revolutionary papers had left Bill “with the impression of a man driven to master every aspect of his life and to make the most of what life offered.” Anyone who had the privilege of working with Bill Abbot, particularly during his long and distinguished documentary editing career spanning the last third of his life, is left with a similar impression of Bill himself.

Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931–2008), Joel Myerson

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Matt Bruccoli joined the English department at the University of South Carolina in 1969, and retired in 2005 as the Emily Brown Jefferies Distinguished Professor of English. As his obituary in the New York Times noted, he “continued to cut a dash on campus, instantly recognizable by his vintage red Mercedes convertible, Brooks Brothers suits, Groucho mustache and bristling crew cut that dated to his Yale days. His untamed Bronx accent also set him apart.” As a scholar, Matt published widely on James Gould Cozzens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, and John O’Hara. Matt knew more about F. …

Lyman H. Butterfield Award For 2009 Presented To Gregg L. Lint, Mary Jo Kline

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Now I will begin leaking details that will enable you to confirm your suspicions, for by now many of you will have guessed that this year’s recipient of the Lyman H. Butterfield Award is Gregg L. Lint. The project where he has spent his entire career as an editor is, of course, the Adams Papers, whose staff he joined in the fall of 1975. He recently completed work on the fifteenth volume of The Papers of John Adams, the series with which he has been most closely identified. He has been the “lead editor” responsible for volumes in that series …

J. A. Leo Lemay (1935–2008), A Remembrance, Kevin J. Hayes

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

My first semester in graduate school at the University of Delaware I took J. A. Leo Lemay’s Edgar Allan Poe seminar. Writing a seminar paper on the subject of Poe’s use of frontier imagery in his short fiction, I happened to read Prof. Lemay’s essay “The Frontiersman from Lout to Hero” (Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 88 [1978]: 187-223). In terms of its breadth of knowledge and depth of insight, I found this essay astonishing. As an undergraduate I had read much about the American frontier, a special interest of mine, but Prof. Lemay’s essay was the single best …

Review Of The Papers Of Joseph Henry, Volume 11: January 1866–May 1878: The Smithsonianbyears. Edited By Marc Rothenberg; Kathleen W. Dorman, Associate Editor; Frank R. Millikan, Assistant Editor; Deborah Y. Jeffries And Sarah Shoenfeld, Research Assistants., Julie R. Newell

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

This volume brings to an end a forty-year project that is both a tremendous contribution to the content and practice of the history of American science and a monument to the talents, commitment, and perseverance of its editors. The list of sponsoring institutions provides some indication of the perceived value of this project across a range of academic disciplines: the Smithsonian Institution, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences. Twelve volumes in all including the index, the series traces the life of Joseph Henry (1797–1878) from his education and early academic employment in Albany, New York, through …

Life Service Award Presented To Rich Leffler, John P. Kaminski

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

I have known Rich Leffler for more than forty years. We both came to the University of Wisconsin in 1967 as graduate students in the Department of History. He came from New York and I from Chicago. Rich started to work informally with the Ratification project in 1969–70, when he went to Raleigh, North Carolina, to do research on his dissertation. He searched libraries for the Ratification project, the First Federal Elections project, and the First Federal Congress project. Officially, Rich started to work full time on the project in 1973, first as a researcher, then as assistant editor, associate …

Experiencing Women’S History As A Documentary Editor, Ann D. Gordon

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

This is a modest revision of a paper written for a panel on the past and future of historical editing at the annual meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing in 2008. I thank Esther Katz for reading it in my stead. Richard Leffler edited the original and made valuable recommendations. This list of the women whose papers have received editorial treatment is not an exhaustive one. For Addams, see The Jane Addams Papers [microfilm] , ed. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1984), and The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, eds. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, …

“Dangerous Thoughts”? Margaret Sanger’S World Trip Journal, Japan, 1922, Peter C. Engelman

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Sanger’s longest and, I would argue, most significant piece of travel writing was her 1922 World Trip Journal, which chronicles her six-month tour to discuss birth control in Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong and Ceylon, with stops in Yemen and Egypt, vacation time on the European continent, and a major conference in London. Coming just a few months after she formed the American Birth Control League in New York, the world tour raised Sanger’s international profile and gave her increased prominence at home, solidifying her leadership of the American movement. My focus in what follows is on the first leg …

Models Of Digital Documentation: The 19th-Century Concord Digital Archive, Amy E. Earhart

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

As with many digital archives, The 19th-Century Digital Concord Archive (CDA) started as a website utilizing simple technology and has evolved to a more technologically advanced scholarly site. The CDA joins an interdisciplinary team from the Department of English, Texas A&M University; the Digital Humanities Initiative, the College of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University; the Map and GIS Collections and Services, Texas A&M University Libraries; and the Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts, in the development of infrastructures that allow the entities to share metadata easily, develop innovative, visually-based search functions, and make visible and accessible the cultural record of …

Editing Sophia Peabody’S Cuba Journal: Travel, Recovery, And Interpretation, Jana L. Argersinger, Cheryl J. Fish

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Some collaborations are born out of chance encounters. For us, it happened at a recent conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Having briefly met before on the common ground of studies in nineteenth- century American literature, we said “Hello” and discovered in the space of a five-minute conversation that both of us had our eyes on the early nineteenth- century journal-account of a young New Englander’s rest cure in Cuba. The traveler who authored the journal was Sophia Amelia Peabody (1809–1871), an accomplished visual artist, writer, member of a family that was vitally involved in …

Review Of The Papers Of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents And Cases. Edited By Daniel W. Stowell, Susan Krause, John A. Lupton, Stacy Pratt Mcdermott, Christopher A. Schnell, Dennis E. Suttles, Kelley B. Clausing, And R. Dan Monroe., Anthony M. Joseph

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Lincoln’s long career as a lawyer has been as much the subject of winsome anecdote as comprehensive scholarly study—an unhappy balance caused in part by the lack of readily accessible documents bearing on his practice. That problem, however, was remedied in stunning fashion with the publication in 2000 of the massive digital edition of Lincoln’s legal papers, The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln (LPAL). The LPAL produced more than 96,000 searchable documents spanning over 5,000 cases and nearly 500 nonlitigation activities through the course of Lincoln’s legal career. The present selective letterpress edition in four volumes continues the same tradition …

Review Of The Joseph Smith Papers, Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839. Edited By Dean C. Jessee, Mark Ashurst-Mcgee, And Richard L. Jensen., Kenneth P. Minkema

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

With the long-anticipated appearance of the first volume of The Joseph Smith Papers, a landmark project in American religious history and in Mormon Studies commences. Containing the scribal and printed remains of the founder and organizer of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, The Joseph Smith Papers, when completed, will amount to some thirty-two volumes—a phenomenal undertaking in an age when the magisterial, multi-volume printed edition is an endangered species. Under the general editorship of distinguished historians Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman, the edition is arranged in six series: Journals, Documents, Revelations and …

Recent Editions, Margaret A. Hogan

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

This annual bibliography of documentary editions recently published in the fields of American and British history, literature, and culture is generally restricted to scholarly first editions of English-language works. In addition to the bibliographical references, Internet addresses are provided for the editorial project or the publisher.

Association For Documentary Editing Business Meeting, 15 October 2009, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Local Arrangements Committee--President’s Report--Secretary’s Report--Treasurer’s Report--Publications Committee Report--E-newsletter--Meetings Committee Report--Federal Policy Committee Report--New Business

Contributors

Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011)

Contributors to Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing, Volume 31: 2010