Technical and Professional Writing Commons^™

Finding Their Chrysanthemum: Linguistic Representation In Children's Literature, Marielena Zajac

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Children in America today struggle with finding themselves in the books they read due to societal expectations. From an early age, children are dictated on the correct way to speak and write in “American,” which can leave children and their home languages feeling unseen and dismissed. To help further the conversation and promotion of linguistic diversity in American society, this capstone analyzes dialectal representation in children’s books, with a heavy focus on attitudinal linguistic principles rather than prescriptive mechanics. The secondary research explores current literature and resources that discuss literacy acquisition in adolescents, trends in dialects in America, and childhood …

A Word From The Writing Team (May 2022), Pam Walter, Mfa, Liz Declan, Ma, Mfa

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

This issue includes:

• News from the OPWPC
• Quick Tip
• Reminder

English Is Not Dead! Long Live English: Teaching The Evolution Of English And Inclusive Communication Via Online, Face To Face Or Hybrid Instruction, Teresa Marie Kelly, Stephanie Thompson, Sheryl Bone

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

When popular media and many individuals discuss changes in English, some erroneously contend that the language has always been the same and changes amount to little more than “politically correct woke liberalism” desired by only certain people. The English language continually evolves as a natural process that nothing can force nor prevent. Field-specific language also changes with increased understanding and knowledge. The variety of English taught to most students also shifts as Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)/Writing Across Disciplines (WAD) initiatives increasingly focus on Global English rather than the standard of any one country or group. Even informal interactions with …

Writing Center Resources, Samantha Hince

Honors Projects

This project facilitated the composition of a series of resources for the Bridgewater College Writing Center website, part of the MyBC online portal. The result was thirty resources on writing-related topics such as the writing process, including prewriting, drafting, and revising; citation styles and avoiding plagiarism; and grammar, mechanics, and style. These resources are available to Bridgewater College students, faculty, and staff. The primary purpose of these resources is to assist Writing Center tutors during tutoring sessions with students and to provide supplemental writing assistance for students. Project development was based on research into college writing centers and best practices …

A Word From The Writing Team (April 2022), Pam Walter, Mfa, Liz Declan, Ma, Mfa

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

This issue includes:

• Upcoming Workshop
• News from the OPWPC
• Quick Reminder

A Word From The Writing Center (March 2022), Pam Walter, Mfa, Liz Declan, Ma, Mfa

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

This issue includes:

• Quick Tip: Inclusivity and Awareness in Writing
• Upcoming Workshop Reminders
• News from the Academic Commons

A Word From The Writing Center (February 2022), Pam Walter, Mfa, Liz Declan, Ma, Mfa

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

This issue includes:

• Introduction to Liz Declan
• Upcoming Workshops
• Quick Tip: When to Use Semicolons

Intermediate College Writing: Building And Practicing Mindful Writing Skills, Stacey Corbitt, Dawn Atkinson

Writing

Welcome to Intermediate College Writing: Building and Practicing Mindful Writing Skills, an open textbook designed for use in university‐level courses that focus on cultivating study skills alongside effective academic and workplace writing skills. It offers a no‐cost alternative to commercial products, combining practical guidance with interactive exercises and thoughtfully designed writing opportunities.

This textbook’s modular design and ample coverage of topics and genres means that it can be used flexibly over semester‐long or stretch courses, allowing instructors and students to select the chapters that are most relevant for their needs. By blending new material with reviews of key topics, …

From The Field: Using A Simple Guide To Help Students Write Better Abstracts., Rochelle H. Holm, Anna Karin Roo

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) often write abstracts for research assignments but may not understand the purpose of an abstract. This paper presents the pilot of a simple guide for writing abstracts which gave student support to two undergraduate Malawian ELL students for their undergraduate research assignment. The two students and the instructor found the handout was helpful for the students to develop technical writing skills for the abstracts.

A Word From The Writing Team (December 2021), Pam Walter, Mfa

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

This issue includes:

• New Writing Specialist, Liz Declan
• Saying Farewell to Jen Wilson
• Coming Soon -- Find the Time: Time Management

Wrt 150: Strategies In Writing Oer Curation, Chealsye Bowley

Curated OER Collections

This OER curation is an annotated bibliography of potential OER for the high-enrollment Strategies in Writing course at GVSU, and is based on a sample of syllabi rather than for a specific instructor.

Providing Students With Multimodal Feedback Experiences, Dan Martin

Journal of Curriculum, Teaching, Learning and Leadership in Education

In higher education, feedback is an effective but underappreciated teaching tool that expands students’ opportunities for learning. Students need more formative feedback that can lead to dialogic experiences, and they need more feedback experiences in different mediums and modes. Providing students with multimodal feedback that is formative may lead to more dialogic experiences for students and improve their learning. Multimodal feedback experiences benefit all students, including those from diverse and disabled communities. This paper examines some of the advantages and limitations of written, audio, and video feedback and argues that feedback that is primarily formative and delivered using multiple modes …

Annual Evaluation Of The Student's Perception Of The Value Of Writing Goals, Renee Kuess

ONU Student Research Colloquium

Focus: This study focused on pharmacy students’ perception of the value of writing goals and how this perception changes as students progress in the program.

Methods: Annually, all students in the pharmacy program are required to reflect on the previous year’s goals and develop new goals. Following this assignment, a survey was sent out to a random sample (n=162) of students. Based on the feedback, the response was classified as indicating “value” or “no value”.

Results: Of the 162 surveys sent out, there were 78 completed responses. 56.25% of responses indicated the student found “value” in the assignment. The data …

Open Access Textbooks In A Professional Communication Classroom: A Pilot Study, Sherena Huntsman, Avery C. Edenfield, Erin L. Davis

Journal on Empowering Teaching Excellence

In this paper, we share our findings from a curricular innovation project: a small pilot study replacing a conventional professional communication textbook with an open access book. Results showed that students received the change favorably and a final grade comparison showed no variation between similar courses that used conventional books and those that used open access books. While far from definitive, this study demonstrates the promise of open access books and open educational resources (OER), and that further study is needed in this area.

Inclusive Audience Analysis And Creating Manageable Content, Carleigh J. Davis, Michelle F. Eble

English and Technical Communication Faculty Research & Creative Works

Over the last 15 years, content management systems have dramatically changed the ways we think about our pedagogical approaches to teaching audience analysis. This is especially true when content may need to be reused in a set of discrete contexts for various audiences. This chapter introduces a heuristic that helps students think about, write, and deliver reusable content. Modeled after Ridolfo and DeVoss’s (2009) concept rhetorical velocity, this heuristic introduces students to both how they must consider primary audiences for the content they develop as well as various stakeholders, possible audiences, and potential contexts where their content needs to be …

Information Literacy As Structured Authoring, Robert Terry

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

By drawing on the early findings of an IRB-approved study, this presentation will discuss some challenges involved in teaching structured authoring, defined here as topic based authoring combined with an XML or XML-like structure. Since the late 1980s, Robert E. Horn and others referred to structured authoring/writing as a new paradigm that transforms the ways writers think about information usage, presentation, and structuring. Charlotte Robidoux (2007) and Sally Henschel (2010, 2014), among others, have explored how curriculums that taught structured authoring might help students begin to understand how the approach changes writing. However, as Joy Robinson et al (2019) demonstrated, …

We’Re Both Your Librarian: A Course Collaboration Between An Academic Library And A Health Sciences Library, Stephanie Evers Ard

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

The University of South Alabama is in the process of merging its academic library and health sciences library, which have previously functioned as essentially separate entities. This ongoing process requires many changes, from budget and staff considerations, to revisiting the roles the librarians play in their respective academic communities. This last concern led to a collaboration between two librarians--the Assistant Director for Strategic Initiatives at the health sciences library and the Social Sciences and Student Engagement Librarian at the academic library--in response to a faculty request for an embedded librarian to support a fully-online graduate nursing class in scholarly writing. …

Findable, Impactful, Citable, Usable, Sustainable (Ficus): A Heuristic For Authors Of Digital Publishing Projects, Nicky Agate, Cheryl E. Ball, Alison Belan, Monica Mccormick, Joshua Neds-Fox

Library Scholarly Publications

We came together in Spring 2018 at a two-day think tank hosted by Duke University Libraries and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with dozens of other librarians, publishers, and scholarly communication stakeholders, to work on the question of sustainably publishing large digital projects. The outcome of that discussion turned into an extended project at TriangleSCI 2018 and culminated in the heuristic presented here.The heuristic can be used as a checklist to help authors (and their project team) assess their needs when it comes to making their digital projects findable, impactful, citable, usable, and sustainable (creating the acronym FICUS).

Rhetorical Analysis Of Statements Of Purpose (Sps) For Admission To Graduate School: A Shared-Understanding Perspective Of The Sp Genre, Priyanka Ganguly

Masters Theses

"In this study, I analyzed twenty-four statements of purpose (SPs) submitted to the Department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) by current and former students. My goal was to determine the applicants' shared understanding of the SP genre. I analyzed the SPs from three dimensions: rhetorical moves, rhetorical appeals (pisteis), and rhetorical style (elocutio).

To understand the rhetorical moves used by the applicants, I analyzed the content of their SPs according to the categories (moves) and codes (steps) validated in my pilot study. To understand the arguments used by the …

Faculty Writing: A Year-Long Approach To Producing Publishable Manuscripts, Jennifer Wilson, Ms, Els, Pamela Walter, Mfa, Julie Phillips, Phd

Thomas Jefferson University Faculty Days

For faculty, the ability to write about their research and publish their findings can advance their academic career while contributing information to their field. Yet faculty often lack confidence in their ability to write for publication and struggle to find time to write.

An interdisciplinary faculty group asked us for help prioritizing their writing and meeting their publishing goals, and in response we developed a yearlong month by- month program of achievable small tasks to guide the manuscript writing process and make publishing less overwhelming.

Thinking Outside The Toolbox: A Teaching Resource For Vocational Writing, Dustin Ledford

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone project combines elements of contextualization, professional writing, and process pedagogy to create a course design for teaching writing in the technical college/vocational school setting. With this course design, students are asked to complete a variety of scenario-driven, workplace-related writing tasks that teach fundamentals of college composition including research, critical thinking, and process-based writing. With this sample curriculum, students write from realistic scenarios from the healthcare industry, especially tasks from the medical office environment. The goal of this course design is to model and promote new practices for teaching writing in vocational settings to better engage students in these …

A Word From The Writing Team (March 2019), Jennifer Wilson, Ms, Els, Pam Walter, Mfa

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

This issue includes:

• Key to Great Writing: Rewriting
• 3-Minute Thesis Competition (3MT)
• Upcoming Workshops

Lessons In Productivity: What I Learned By Writing For 30 Minutes A Day, Mary Stenson

Forum Lectures

Too often our scholarly and creative work takes a back seat to components of our jobs with built in accountability like teaching and service. During the fall 2018 semester, I participated in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity's Faculty Success Program. The program emphasizes scholarly productivity and encourages work-life balance. The core component of the program is developing a daily writing practice. The program encourages participants to write for 30 minutes per day. NCFDD founder, Kerry Ann Rockquemore defines writing as "anything between the spark of an idea and a manuscript out the door." In this forum, I …

A Guide To Thesis Book Design, Marcus Peabody, Center For Arts And Language

Thesis Writing

57 pages. "This guide is more basic and specific than other design manuals. Used in isolation it should tell you all you need to produce your book, even without prior graphic design knowledge. It could also be a starting point for a deeper dive into book design: other manuals that deal more thoroughly with elements such as book binding or typography are mentioned along the way for further reference." – from the introduction. "This book is set in Brandon Grotesque and Miller Text. Written and designed by Marcus Peabody (GD MFA 2019). Edited by Jen Liese and Meredith Barrett (A&L). …

The Importance Of Including Interactive Immersive Technology In Instructional Design To Enhance Learner And User Experience, Shawneda Crout

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Americans looking for work and preparing to enter the labor force use technology during every part of the journey. Every generation in the labor force and preparing to enter the labor force as freelancers, contractors, and employees need clear, effective support materials to learn how to do their job, stay abreast of the ever-changing job requirements, and deliver a satisfactory job performance. Solving the labor shortage in America will take a concerted effort from those in the private sector. Technical communicators tasked with the responsibility of designing instructional resources should know how to include interactive immersive technology in product use …

A Word From The Writing Team (January 2019), Jennifer Wilson, Ms, Els, Pam Walter, Mfa

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

This issue includes:

• Grammarly Tips
• Expanded NVivo Access
• Upcoming Workshops

Final Ma Portfolio, Angela Geiger-Fields

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This is a final portfolio reflecting my writing and research for the Master of Arts in English with a specialization in English Teaching program. In this portfolio, I have included four essays or projects that focus on the topics of authentic audiences; argumentative, research, and technical writing; postcolonial film and literature; and linguistics. The portfolio begins with a personal narrative of my time in the program as well as the revisions and research I completed to make the finalized portfolio.

A Word From The Writing Team (December 2018), Jennifer Wilson, Ms, Els, Pam Walter, Mfa

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

This issue includes:

• January Writing Retreat
• Find the Time Workshop

Did Hollywood Take Theatre "By Hook Or By Crook?", Catherine S. Wright

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Hollywood and Theatre have been partners in producing entertainment for over 100 years. The relationship was fruitful for both parties, but Hollywood moguls and playwrights battled over ownership of the work and crafting of its creative nucleus, story and character. Theatre was the dominant entertainment right before the rise of motion pictures. Once Hollywood’s talkies closed the curtain on silent films, playwrights had a high creative worth to movie makers. In the cinema, story and dialogue were essential for its survival and growth. Playwrights were courted by the Hollywood studio heads but were not offered equal partnership as they were …

Estudio Contrastivo Intercultural De Las Funciones Retóricas De Las Citas: La Producción De Textos Académicos En El Nivel De Posgrado Escritos En Español E Inglés, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

The main objective of this research is to discover which rhetorical functions were used in the Master´s thesis writing written by eight (8) American and eight (8) Spanish postgraduates in their na-tive language. A computerized tex-tual analysis of the rhetorical func-tion of citation was used to study this phenomenon (Petrić, 2007). The results obtained from the re-search showed that the different cultural conventions in the thesis writing indicate that when com-pared with native Spanish writers, the American writers of English use the highest number of cita-tions, and write a relatively longer Introduction and Conclusion parts. On the other hand, the …