Technical and Professional Writing Commons^™

Holistic Methodologies For Fusing The Material And The Ideological: Tracing The Sociotechnical Imaginaries That Enable The World’S Fastest Supercomputer, Sarah Read, Jordan Firth

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

When the Aurora supercomputer launches at Argonne National Laboratory it will operate at the exascale and be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. We have been invited by Argonne to do field work to understand both the day-to-day processes that maintain supercomputing (e.g. user documentation, government reporting, user testing) and the sociotechnical national imaginaries [11], –in particular the increasingly tense global competition between the US and China in the supercomputing race–that shaped the development of Aurora. This article proposes our work-in-progress methodological approach that accounts for both higher-level imaginaries and the everyday practices of supercomputing. We also describe …

Disaster Documentation Revisited The Evolving Damage Assessments Of Emergency Management In Oregon, Henry Covey

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This report revisits a previous case study focused on the computing machinery and design of communication that are employed at the local, county, regional, state, and federal levels in Oregon to collect, review, and publish damage assessments of disasters and other emergency events. Since the last report, emergency managers throughout Oregon have faced numerous disaster incidents, including the COVID-19 pandemic, ice storms, flooding, and some of the worst heat waves, drought conditions, and megafires on record, with the threat of more to come in the years ahead. After years of research and development, fueled by lessons learned from a catastrophic …

Ebux Of Oers For Ptc: Student And Faculty Ebook User Experiences (Ebux) Of Open Educational Resources (Oers) For Professional And Technical Communication (Ptc), Henry Covey

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This report analyzes the digital/electronic textbook user experience (eBUX) of web-based open educational resources (OERs) for professional and technical communication (PTC). Data and information were gathered from students enrolled in introductory PTC courses (with IRB oversight and input from faculty and writing program directors) via online surveys (Google Forms), collaborative documents (Google Docs), remote interviews (Zoom), learning management system analytics (Desire2Learn), workshop documentation (pre-pandemic), and email correspondence. User research revealed issues of use and usability with web-based open-access PTC textbooks related to functional specifications, content requirements, interface and interaction design, information architecture, navigation, and aesthetics. The conclusion discusses the evolution …

How To Build A Supercomputer: U.S. Research Infrastructure And The Documents That Mitigate The Uncertainties Of Big Science, Sarah Read

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article, I argue that technical reporting and documentation processes function to mitigate uncertainty and enable complex systems in the endeavor of big science. The argument draws on two years of field research investigating technical reporting and documentation processes at a federally funded supercomputing center dedicated to scientific research. A central question the study sought to answer was, “How does one build a new supercomputer?” One of the answers that emerged is that supercomputers are built by the genre assemblages of documents that mitigate financial, political, and technological uncertainties, and their attendant risks, that are inherent to technoscientific cutting-edge …

A Corpus Based Analysis Of Noun Modification In Empirical Research Articles In Applied Linguistics, Jo-Anne Hutter

Dissertations and Theses

Previous research has established the importance of the nouns and noun modification in academic writing because of their commonness and complexity. However, little is known about how noun modification varies across the rhetorical sections of research articles. Such a perspective is important because it reflects the interplay between communicative function and linguistic form.

This study used a corpus of empirical research articles from the fields of applied linguistics and language teaching to explore the connection between article sections (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion; IMRD) and six types of noun modification: relative clauses, ing-clause postmodifiers, ed-clause postmodifiers, prepositional postmodifiers, premodifying nouns, and …

Writing About Writing And The Multimajor Professional Writing Course, Sarah Read, Michael J. Michaud

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article connects the pedagogy of the multimajor professional writing (MMPW) course with two important contemporary discussions in composition studies: the pedagogy called writing about writing (WAW) and the conversation about the transferability of rhetorical knowledge from school to work. The authors argued that the capaciousness of the WAW approach accommodates the best of genre-based and client-based pedagogies for the MMPW course and provides a framework for expanding the course beyond skill-based outcomes to include preparing students to be learning transformers. The article includes two iterations of what a writing about writing -- professional writing course can look like.