Focused Proposal, another Presentation

For those keeping score, I spent Thanksgiving break writing. I wrote a solid draft of both a paper on Artificial Authors (mainly on BRUTUS, the storytelling machine) and a research proposal. It is the latter that I want to talk about, because I will be doing a short presentation on it in a little more [...]

Case Histories and Discourse analysis

The reading for this week was chapters from Carol Berkenkotter’s upcoming Patient Tales and a chapter on researching through discourse and textual analysis. I’ll start there. Discourse and Textual Analysis are where I feel most comfortable. They don’t involve human subjects, they proceed at the pace of the researcher, and they involve close attention to [...]

The Presentation

Well, the presentation went well. I was originally going to present what was written in the previous post. In fact, I printed it off. But before we got to the presentations, Laura Gurak talked to us about case studies, and about the difficulty of finding one little thing. While she was talking, an idea came [...]

Tackling the Research Question

At the start of the semester, I had a research question planned out. It was basically asking what the future holds for technology, and how we can prepare for using that technology in the classroom. Since then, I’ve refined things a bit. And in the interest of clarity, I’ve broken it down into a list [...]

Technical Cyberspace

This week was a mercifully light one for reading. The only article to read was Laura Gurak and Christine Silker’s “Technical Communication Research in Cyberspace.” Which is good, because I also spent time working on my research proposal. But that’s for another post. For right now, let me talk about cyberspace.

Feminism, Advocacy, and Ethnography

Last week, I read “Feminist Criticism and Technical Communication” and wondered to myself why it had been assigned. It was so out of place compared to the other reading for the week. Well, it was. It was actually reading for this week. Which makes much more sense. If you’re curious about my thoughts on that [...]

Single-Source Documentation and Emerging Practices

In this, the second post for reading this week, I will pick up exactly where I left off, with the forthcoming article by Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch titled A Work in Process: A study of the Development of Single-Source Documentation and Document Review Processes of Cardiac Devices. This article is a report on an ethnographic study [...]

Feminist Criticism Strategies

So there’s a lot of reading this week. Unfortunately for me, I was sick for large chunks of last week and most of the weekend, so it took me longer than usual to get through it all. But I have, and so I present now a few select comments on the things I read. I [...]

Difficult to say, but I think I’ve pushed too hard.

This week I read, among other things, “Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Research” by Charney, “Working Memory in an Editing Task” by Hayes and Chenowith, and caught up on my reading about Empirical research. In reading all this, the major conclusion I’ve come to is that while Empirical research is interesting, and while the conclusions this research [...]

A tough week: Empiricism, the workplace, and Wicked Environment Problems

Quite a bit of reading this week. Much of it was outside of what was assigned for class. But I’ll get back to that. First, let me talk about Mary Sue MacNealy’s Strategies for Empirical Research in Writing and the three articles I read.