Technical and Professional Writing Commons^™

Documenting Sustainable Social Media Workflows: Supporting Student Professionalization In Faculty-Student Teams, Jenny Rissen

Master's Projects

This capstone project, Documenting Sustainable Social Media Workflows: Supporting Student Professionalization in Faculty-Student Teams, examines how departmental social media teams serve as informal training grounds where students build professional identities through collaborative, often undocumented communication work (Buck; Leon & Pigg). Addressing writing studies concerns about experiential learning gaps (McNabb; Carr et al.), the project creates a handbook offering practical guidance for onboarding, workflow continuity, accessibility, and ethical social media practices. It shows how mentorship and structured documentation turn everyday digital work into meaningful professional development. Situated in technical communication and rhetoric, the project demonstrates how social media teams help …

Observations In Writing, Education, And The Internet In The Ai Era, Jacob Westberry

Master's Projects

Artificial intelligence (AI) has reached a point in society where it is difficult to ignore or find integrated into everyday life. To keep up with AI’s rapid growth, modern workplaces and educational institutions are scrambling to identify the best practices that align with ethical guidelines, causing unexpected uncertainties. Still, the path to achieving such standards has been nonlinear, leading many to reconsider how AI can best fit their environments, if at all, especially in pedagogy. This portfolio is a compilation of projects, published articles, applied use cases, and supported research created within the MAPW program at Kennesaw State University to …

Research Reimagined: The Dissertation-To-Book Journey And Building A Scholar-To-Author Presence, Seema Kumar

Master's Projects

This capstone project, completed for a second master's degree after a Ph.D., discusses aspects of transforming the doctoral dissertation on digital versus manual mediums in fashion design into a research monograph book proposal for academic publication. It reflects on a publisher's requirements and the process, including de-thesizing the dissertation, planning the book's structure, rewriting sample chapters to improve flow and readability, and creating a table of contents that demonstrates the work's development into a publishable book rather than a dissertation. Another part of the project includes developing an author platform through blog posts and platforms such as Substack, preparing the …

Inclusive Publishing Strategies For Journal Staff And Prospective Authors In The Digital Humanities, Rachel Schrauben Yeates

Master's Projects

In this project, I will share the inclusive strategies and solutions to common pitfalls I observed in my exploratory review of a selection of DH online journals and share Inclusivity Guides tailored to journal staff and prospective authors to perform a quick audit of journal site design and content. I paid special attention to the information available to researchers considering submitting their work for publication. Which journals leave a good impression and provide potential authors with enough information to confidently submit their work? How can prospective authors assess a journal’s commitment to furthering and practicing inclusivity in their field, and …

Ensleyedits: Creating A Style Resource For Professional Writers, Ensley Fraschillo

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone explores the creation of a resource that helps professional writers keep up with ever-changing style practices and understand the implications of different stylistic and mechanical choices. Examining the history of style guides, analyzing the content of existing style references through the lens of prescriptivism and descriptivism, and assessing the gaps of current online style resources demonstrate how a new online style resource hosted on Instagram, EnsleyEdits, can meet this need for professional writers. Research on current social media, accessibility, and design practices demonstrate how content on the EnsleyEdits account can succeed on Instagram, and the results of …

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 …

Screenplay Analysis Mean Girls, Zora Evans

Symposium of Student Scholars

Screenplay Analysis: An Evaluation of Strategy of Mean Girls

Author: Zora Evans

This presentation explores the hardships and drama-filled journey of adjusting to high school. Protagonist Cady Heron has just moved all the way from Africa to the United States in the 2004 comedy film Mean Girls. Heron’s main objective in the film is to adjust to public school, find a group of friends, and fit in. Tina Fey writes this script in a very precise and unique way. This study addresses how Tina Fey’s script creates side characters that are more memorable and active than the protagonist while keeping …

Remote Working During The Pandemic: Mapw Graduates In The Workforce, Jordan Dollar

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

From early 2020 to 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of employers across the globe to abruptly shift to virtual workspaces to both facilitate safe work environments and offset operational costs in a time of economic uncertainty. This sudden change accelerated the already growing trend of remote working in a rapid fashion and, for many, signaled the start of a new era of professional operations. As one could imagine, this also created a myriad of anxiety and stress for those workers unprepared for the change. Existing research suggests that this change was especially impactful for Generation Z and Generation Y …

Video For All: An Argument Towards Standardization Of Video Production Practices And Research, Kelley Bostian

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

Instructional videos, a subset of video pedagogy, are becoming valuable pedagogical tools for instructors within both higher education and professional writing environments. By researching contemporary academic literature and creating video artifacts that put theory into practice, this capstone project answers three important questions: 1) How could video pedagogy shift student attitudes or engagement with course content in digital learning environments? 2) What benefits and limitations of standardizing and researching video pedagogy are valuable for educators interested in creating video to understand, including educators with limited or no video production experience? 3) In what ways could certain production techniques in video …

Writing As A Nonprofit Leadership Tool, Samantha Weinberg

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

When writers use their skills towards a nonprofit’s mission, they can help enhance communities and change lives. There are roles in the nonprofit sector that are very writing centric, such as grant writers and communication specialists, that writers commonly hold. However, writing is also a necessary skill for those in management or leadership positions in nonprofit organizations. This capstone project explores the kinds of writing skills and deliverables that are critical to the responsibilities of nonprofit managers and how writing impacts the effectiveness of nonprofit managers and organizations.

Community Engagement In Writing Programs: Preparing Students For Success In Professional Settings, Courtney Bradford

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This practicum focused on looking into the history of the foster care system, its development, and its modern iteration and on working with a nonprofit that supports the foster care system. The internship with Advocates for Children in Cartersville, Georgia, provided primary research into (1) how work on community-based engagement projects prepared me to explore careers in the nonprofit sector, (2) what kinds of writing, research, and other deliverables are needed by nonprofits supporting the foster care system and how the MAPW program prepared me to produce those deliverables, and (3) how having a strong understanding of the history and …

I Sh*T You Not, Jordan Dollar

Graduate Scholarly Works

"I Sh*t You Not" is an exercise in "edutainment" intended to instill feelings of skepticism and curiosity in its players when confronted with attention-grabbing headlines. Developed as an amusing answer to the fake news epidemic, this game can be played with up to four players in a head-to-head assessment of each other's evaluation skills.

Making The Case For The Use Of The Ksu Archives And Special Collections Through Interpretive Videos, Helen Thomas

Graduate Scholarly Works

One of the challenges faced by Kennesaw State University’s Museums, Archives and Rare Books Department is a lack of awareness of both the existence of our collections and the many potential research applications that archives and rare books provide. This series of short videos makes the case to potential users as to why we collect these materials and how they are useful and relevant to a variety of research interests. Each video pairs an item or collection from the KSU Archives and Special Collections (including the Bentley Rare Book Museum) with expert interpretation provided by a KSU faculty member in …

Write It Out: Reflective Writing In Writing Centers

Symposium of Student Scholars

Mental health sometimes evades academic discussions about creating an accessible environment for disabled students. However, this matter continues to influence student life. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, “75 percent of lifetime cases of mental health conditions begin by age 24.” Furthermore, within the same study, they assert that one in four students are diagnosed with mental illness (eleven percent with anxiety; ten percent with depression), and over eighty percent of students experience overwhelming stress because of myriad reasons. Ultimately, these findings reveal that, for many students, mental issues remain a focal point in their lives, and writing …

02.13: Memos And Emails, Tamara Powell, Tiffani Reardon

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Identify basic memo and email formats.
2. Describe the key differences between basic memo and basic email formats.
3. Explain cc, bc, and attachment functions and when to use them.

02.10: Handbooks, David Mcmurrey

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Explain the three types of information found in handbooks.
2. Explain and apply the guidelines for handbook format and style.

A handbook, as we are defining it here, is a combination of concept, instruction, and reference information focused on a specific topic for a specific audience's needs.

02.09: Recommendation And Feasibility Reports, David Mcmurrey, Jonathan Arnett

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to do the following:
1. Explain the differences between recommendation, feasibility, and evaluation reports.
2. Define the common components of recommendation and feasibility reports.
3. Explain and apply organization strategies for reports.

02.12: Oral Presentations, David Mcmurrey, Cassandra Race

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Plan and prepare a talk or presentation.
2. Deliver the presentation.
3. Create presentation materials that reflect standards of effective presentation.
4. Evaluate presentations delivered by others, including classmates.

02.14: Technical Definitions And Descriptions, Jonathan Arnett

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Explain and apply the 5 primary characteristics of technical definitions.
2. Write a definition using appropriate content, descriptors, details, length, placement, and audience analysis.
3. Avoid common technical definition problems.
4. Explain and apply the 5 primary characteristics of technical descriptions.
5. Write a description using the 6 common parts.
6. Organize a description according to the 3 common organizational patterns.

02.11: Titles, Abstracts, Introductions, And Conclusions, David Mcmurrey

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Summarize strategies for writing effective document titles.
2. Define abstract and explain the different types of abstracts.
3. Explain the purposes of different types of introductions and summarize the common elements of them.
4. Explain the components and purposes of conclusions.

03: Ethics, Tamara Powell

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to do the following:
1. Define ethics.
2. Analyze a situation with regard to utility, right, justice, and care.
3. Explain the importance of ethical behavior.
4. Explain copyright law, why it is important, and how to make ethical decisions regarding it.
5. Explain how to ethically analyze data.
6. Explain how biases can lead to unethical decisions/behavior in technical communication.

04.01: Report Design, David Mcmurrey, Jonathan Arnett

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to do the following:
1. Explain the importance of effective report design.
2. Explain the purpose of a letter of transmittal.
3. Define when covers and labels are appropriate for reports.
4. Explain the purposes of and write a descriptive abstract and executive summary for a report.
5. Apply design principles of tables of contents and figures.
6. Apply basic design considerations on the body of a report.
7. Define the appropriateness of a conclusion, appendix, and information sources.

04.08: Graphics, David Mcmurrey

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Explain and apply the various uses of graphics in technical documents.
2. Create and format appropriate graphics for technical documents.

04.05: Lists, David Mcmurrey

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Distinguish between different types of lists in technical documents and explain appropriate situations for using each.
2. Explain and apply general guidelines for formatting different types of lists.
3. Use Microsoft Word to style lists appropriately.

04.06: Special Notes, David Mcmurrey, Tamara Powell

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Distinguish between the four most common types of special notices.
2. Explain and apply the appropriate use for each type of special notice.
3. Explain and apply standard format guidelines for each type of special notice.

05.01: Writing Process - From Audience To Rough Draft, David Mcmurrey

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Brainstorm and narrow down topics for a report.
2. Create an outline for a report.

05.02: Audience Analysis, David Mcmurrey

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Identify the four common categories of audience and explain the differences between them.
2. Analyze your audience and explain how to tailor your writing to that audience.

05.03: Task Analysis, David Mcmurrey, Tamara Powell

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
1. Define documentation.
2. Identify and analyze tasks in order to create documentation.
3. Differentiate between function and task orientation and explain the pros and cons of each approach.
4. Explain how to begin writing documentation.

04.09: Indexing, Cassandra Race

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to create an index using Microsoft Word.

05.04: Articulating Technical Information, David Mcmurrey, Jonathan Arnett, Tamara Powell

Open Technical Communication

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to do the following:
1. Explain and apply strategies for articulating technical discussions to nonspecialist readers.
2. Use audience analysis to decide what information to include or exclude from a document and how to discuss that information.