Technical and Professional Writing Commons^™

A Technical Writer's Guide To Search Engine Optimization, James Arrowood

Theses and Dissertations

Search engine optimization is a process that requires extensive technical writing skills. Technical writers are well poised to fill the role of search engine optimizer due to a strong background in rhetorical analysis of web text, audience analysis, document indexing, and copywriting. The search engine optimization techniques discussed in this thesis demonstrate the writing processes involved in search engine optimization and serves as a guide to technical writers that may one day find themselves in a search engine optimization role.

Becoming A Professional Indexer, Robyn Dewall

Theses and Dissertations

Indexing is an important, yet behind-the-scenes, rhetorical activity that provides readers with quick access to information. The format and creation of the index, since its inception, continues to evolve with the transforming format and mode of information. Although professional freelance indexers come from all walks of life, the journey to become such always progresses through the same three stages--gaining an introduction to the profession, followed by learning an indexing methodology, until finally, gaining enough confidence in their abilities, they can announce to the world that they are open for business. After becoming a professional, indexers use the skill of textual …

Faculty Perceptions About Attributes And Barriers Impacting The Diffusion Of Online Education In Two Saudi Universities, Mohammed Mfarij Alhawiti

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recognizing that faculty are an essential part of the success of any distance education program, this study sought to examine faculty perceptions of attributes and barriers impacting diffusion of online education at two Saudi universities: Taif University and Tabuk University. More specifically, the study intended to (a) give an overview of faculty members’ current stage in the innovation-decision process in regards to online education, (b) examine faculty perceptions about attributes (motivating factors) and barriers (inhibiting factors) impacting diffusion of online education, (c) investigate the relationship between faculty members’ selected personal characteristics (including age, years of teaching, DE experience, gender, academic …

A Study Of The Grant Writing Policies And Practices Of Municipalities In Polk County Florida Having A Population Less Than 25,000, Michael Scott Carter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to identify the grant writing policies and practices of the fifteen municipalities in Polk County, Florida having a population less than 25,000, compare these findings qualitatively, and to present the data in a form usable by any city in Polk County so each city can make any needed adjustments to their grant writing strategy that will increase their success of grant funding. This study is needed now because smaller cities are continuing to feel the effects of the recession, a slumping housing market, and a reduction of real estate property values which means lower …

Connecting Visual Design And Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions The United States, Latin America And Spain, Suzanne Mcdonough

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My thesis discusses whether culture can be used to predict visual design preferences in documentation and whether cultures with similar attributes demonstrate similar visual design preferences. The visual design of a document is an important element in effective communication to an audience. If the audience is outside the United States, it is important to understand the attributes of that culture to create documents that are most effective for the audience. Cultural theorist Geert Hofstede describes cultural attributes in terms of six cultural dimensions: individualism versus collectivism, high versus low power distance, high versus low uncertainty avoidance, masculinity versus femininity, long-term …

Afterword, Clancy Ratliff

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

E-Portfolios And Digital Identities Using E-Portfolios To Examine Issues In Technical Communication, Jane E. Moody

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Technical writing teachers have always struggled with understanding how to best deal with pedagogical issues including rapidly changing technology, audience construction, and transposing an academic ethos into a professional one. The expanding online world complicates these issues by increasing the pace of digital change, making the potential audience both more diffuse and more remote, and creating a more complex online rhetorical situation. E-portfolios provide a vivid way to examine this complex technological situation, and in this study, the author examines four cases of students creating online portfolios in a technical communication classroom. The author looks at both their e-portfolio process …

The Best Job In The World: Documentary Editor, Beth Luey

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

Graduates of the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents deserve congratulations, not only because they have learned a great deal but also because being a documentary editor is the best job in the world. I can speak of this with some authority. Although I am a 1981 graduate of the Institute, I officially became a documentary editor only after retiring from university teaching, which was my second career. My first was as a university press and textbook editor. Those were all good jobs, but documentary editing is the best. Here is why.

Editing Harriet Beecher Stowe’S Uncle Tom’S Cabin And The Fluid Text Of Race, Wesley Raabe

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

I suspect that many scholars begin to edit a work by accident: I begin with the anecdote of how I became an accidental editor of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in academic year 2002. I had read not a single work by Harriet Beecher Stowe when I was admitted to the Ph.D. program at the University of Virginia. During my first semester, I was often at Alderman Library’s Special Collections floor to subject a copy of Delariviér Manley’s Memoirs of Europe (1710) to bibliographical analysis. I was reading Stowe’s work in another course, was already in Alderman for the Manley work, and …

Documentary Editing: Journal Of The Association For Documentary Editing, Volume 32: 2011

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

Articles

• Editing Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s Travel Writing and the Conundrum of Copies, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti
• On Editing Late-Nineteenth-Century Author Interviews, Gary Scharnhorst
• “A Broad, Generous Stream of Love and Bounty”: The Concord Sewing Circle and the Holley School for Freedmen, Mary Lamb Shelden
• What’s in a Name? Cultural Onomastics and Other Scary Things about the Lincolns and Their Contemporaries, James M. Cornelius
• Issues and Challenges of Moving and Maintaining The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Ryan P. Semmes and John F. Marszalek
• The Best Job in the World: Documentary Editor, Beth Luey
• Preserving the Alliance: The Artful Diplomacy of Benjamin …

Willa Cather’S Many-Colored Medusa Of Art: Review Of Youth And The Bright Medusa Willa Cather. Historical Essay And Explanatory Notes By Mark J. Madigan. Textual Essay And Editing By Frederick M. Link, Charles W. Mignon, Judith Boss, And Kari A. Ronning., Nancee Reeves

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

The latest edition to the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition series, Youth and the Bright Medusa, is a monument to Cather’s own standards of excellence. The thick paper stock is warm and creamy—the kind of paper that feels smooth and comforting to fingers well used to thumbing the cheap texts that are so common today. The type is large and dark, and the wide margins showcase the text while filling the consummate note-taker’s heart with joy. As the series general editors, Susan J. Rosowski and Guy J. Reynolds, point out in the preface, “[g]iven Cather’s explicitly stated intentions for her works, …

Contributors

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

Contributors to Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing, Volume 32: 2011

In Memoriam-Jo Ann Boydston (1924–2011), Larry A. Hickman

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

Jo Ann Boydston enjoyed a distinguished career as general editor of the Collected Works of John Dewey and director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Born in Poteau, Oklahoma, of Choctaw Indian heritage, she graduated summa cum laude from Oklahoma State University in 1944. She received an M.A. from Oklahoma State in 1947, a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1950, and honorary doctorates from Indiana University (1994) and Southern Illinois University (2004).

Recent Editions, W. Bland Whitley

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.

From The Canonical To The Non-Canonical: Editing, The Walt Whitman Archive, And Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Poetry, Elizabeth M. Lorang

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

This paper draws on my experiences at the Walt Whitman Archive as I begin thinking about my own digital editing project that will treat nineteenth century newspaper poetry. Until recently, I have imagined my project as a fairly straightforward digital documentary edition of newspaper poems, one in which a selection of newspaper poems would comprise the primary texts for editorial treatment. The edition also would accommodate the surrounding text of the newspapers in some capacity, whether with page images or within a critical apparatus. As I have become more familiar with the texts I want to recover, edit, and present—the …

Julian P. Boyd Award Presented To John P. Kaminski, Barbara Oberg

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

The Julian P. Boyd Award is the highest award presented by the ADE. It was established in 1980 through the contribution of an anonymous donor. The award commemorates Boyd’s commitment to excellence and the breadth of his scholarly interests. First presented in 1981, the Boyd Award is now given every three years to a senior scholar in honor of a distinguished contribution to the study of American history and culture.

Documentary Editing: Journal Of The Association For Documentary Editing, Volume 32: 2011-Front Matter

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

Front matter: Officers, Publication Committee, Editorial Staff, Table of Contents

Issues And Challenges Of Moving And Maintaining The Papers Of Ulysses S. Grant, Ryan P. Semmes, John F. Marszalek

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

In December 2008 two large moving vans arrived at the Mitchell Memorial Library at Mississippi State University, Starkville, containing over ninety filing cabinets and hundreds of boxes of materials belonging to The Ulysses S. Grant Association (USGA), formerly housed at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). These materials represented over forty-six years of work by the late John Y. Simon and The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant project.

On Editing Late-Nineteenth-Century Author Interviews, Gary Scharnhorst

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

Contrary to the assertions of the marketing department of the Paris Review, the celebrity interview was not invented in 1953. In fact, the first interviews with prominent authors began to appear in American newspapers in the early 1870s. No interviews with Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, each of whom died before or during the Civil War, are known to exist. Charles Dickens sat for no interviews during any of his U.S. speaking tours, including the final one in 1867–1868. The first known interview with Mark Twain appeared in 1871, and the second was not published until …

Rethinking Digital Editing Practices To Better Address Non-Canonical Texts, Amanda A Gailey

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

This article stems from my recent work on Race and Children’s Literature of the Gilded Age (RCLGA),1 a digital archive that aims to provide a heavily annotated resource for scholars and students of literature, history, African American studies, visual communication, and education to examine how adults wanted children to think about race during the era of Jim Crow. I edit the archive with Gerald Early, Professor of Modern letters, English, African studies, and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and D. B. Dowd, Professor of Communication Design and American Culture Studies, also at Washington University. When complete, …

Editing Non-Canonical Texts: Issues And Opportunities, Kenneth M. Price

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

The three articles that follow—by Elizabeth Lorang, Amanda Gailey, and Wesley Raabe—highlight challenges and opportunities faced by editors who address non-canonical texts.1 These essays, while commenting on individual projects, also help narrow the gap separating the disciplines of literary studies and documentary editing. That is, in the past few decades in literary studies, a great deal of attention has been directed toward previously neglected writers. This work—and the debates it has engendered—is contributing to a more complex and multi-faceted sense of our cultural history. Remarkably, full-scale editorial work has barely addressed our altered intellectual landscape.2 Most work by editors has …

Association For Documentary Editing Business Meeting, 15 October 2010, Hilton Garden Inn, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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

Program Committee--President’s Report--Liaison Committee Report--Membership Committee Report--Secretary’s Report--Treasurer’s Report--Federal Policy Committee Report--Motion to adjourn was passed unanimously at 4:36 pm.

Preserving The Alliance: The Artful Diplomacy Of Benjamin Franklin, John P. Kaminski

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

Documentary editions are filled with stories—stories that often are rich with detail. One of many such stories is found in The Emerging Nation, a three-volume work edited by Mary A. Giunta and J. Dane Hartgrove and published by the NHPRC in 1996. I would hope that this short article might inspire editors and the users of these documentary editions to bring these kinds of stories to life.

Helen R. Deese Honored With The 2010 Lyman H. Butterfield Award, Butterfield Award Selection Committee

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

The Lyman H. Butterfield Award is presented this year to Helen R. Deese. With this award the Association for Documentary Editing recognizes, first and foremost, Professor Deese’s achievements as a scholar who works on both sides of our putative divide, producing acclaimed editions of both literary and historical texts. We also recognize her generous service to the Association over many years as a member of its committees and Council, a presenter at annual meetings, an author in Documentary Editing, and a thoughtful contributor to our ongoing discussions of editorial theory and practice.

Presidential Address--New Editorial Futures For The Past, Kenneth M. Price

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

Documentary Editing has served the association well since 1979 as a print journal, but it has run into the familiar problems of a print journal with a limited circulation and ever-increasing costs for paper, printing, and mailing. There have also been problems in having a lack of continuity in the position of editor. The association owes many thanks to the publications committee, and in particular to Ron Bosco and Rich Leffler for their recent work as co-editors. Bosco and Leffler agreed to serve for two years, and with time slipping away we needed new leadership. Luckily Amanda Gailey and Andrew …

Gender Composition Of Online Technical Communication Collaborations, Erika A. Wardell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Online collaborations are more prevalent in society due to electronic communication allowing students and professionals to communicate with each other, without needing to spend time or money traveling. The lack of visual cues in electronic communication means writing styles primarily set the tone of a message. A group member‟s gender can affect his or her writing style and what he or she assumes about the message. The differing writing styles and potential gender bias can cause misunderstandings, which delay projects and sometimes lead to ostracizing a group member. The gender composition of an online collaboration, therefore, can have a positive …

Xml Beyond The Tags, Christopher Adam Meloy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

XML is quickly being utilized in the field of technical communication to transfer information from database to person and company to company. Often communicators will structure information without a second thought of how or why certain tags are used to mark up the information. Because the company or a manual says to use those tags, the communicator does so. However, if professionals want to unlock the true potential of XML for better sharing of information across platforms, they need to understand the effects the technology using XML as well as political and cultural factors have on the tags being used. …

Editing Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’S Travel Writing And The Conundrum Of Copies, Patricia Dunlavy Valenti

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

For Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, living and writing were virtually synonymous. An inveterate letter-writer and journal-keeper, she was among the first American women to document her travels abroad. In December of 1833, Sophia Peabody departed for Cuba; she spent the next eighteen months on a coffee plantation, where her older sister Mary was a governess. In 1853, Sophia Hawthorne left the United States again, this time with her husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who assumed the post of United States Consul at Liverpool. During the subsequent seven years, Sophia traveled throughout England and Scotland. She and her daughters, Una and Rose, also journeyed …

“A Broad, Generous Stream Of Love And Bounty”: The Concord Sewing Circle And The Holley School For Freedmen, Mary Lamb Shelden

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

Following her trip in October 1875 to the Women’s Congress in Syracuse, Louisa May Alcott spent November and December at Dr. Miller’s Bath Hotel in New York City. There, she spent time with Sallie Holley (1818–1893), who was a frequent visitor at the Hotel. The two spent six weeks “go[ing] about together”: on Thanksgiving Day, they took a carriage ride together in Central Park; another day, they went to tea at the home of a cousin of Holley’s.1 Holley was among the “notables” Alcott remarked on in her Journal, along with Henry Ward Beecher, Bret Harte, Ann Booth, and Moncure …

What’S In A Name? Cultural Onomastics And Other Scary Things About The Lincolns And Their Contemporaries, James M. Cornelius

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

Let me engage in some speculative onomastics. Onomastics is the study of both what a person or a group calls himself, herself, or itself, and what others call that entity. It is the Lincolns’ names for themselves, and what others have called them, that is the main point of discussion for this talk. Many of their contemporaries underwent similar letter-adding or letter-dropping in their names. Again, this will be speculative. I am no more a cultural historian than the next person. Nor have I performed a thorough search of the scholarly literature on either nineteenth-century naming and spelling patterns or …