Getting ready for the C’s, planning classes

Tomorrow at a god awful hour of the morning, I board a plane that, through a series of other destinations, will eventually get me to San Francisco. At least, that’s the plan-there’s a chance the snow will decide otherwise. But most likely, I’m off to the C’s. This is not my first conference, but it [...]

Technical communicator: author and extreme usability

Though not yet finished my reading for this week, I wanted to blog about two of the articles I am reading. The first is by Jennifer Daryl Slack, David James Miller, and Jeffrey Doak. It’s called “Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority.” The second is “Extreme Usability and Technical Communication” by Bradley Dilger. Both [...]

Critical Power Tools, part one

Today’s post is about the foreword, introduction, and three chapters of Critical Power Tools by J. Blake Scott, Bernadette Longo, and Katherine V. Wills. The reason this is part one is that I will be coming back to the rest of the book in a few weeks. Part of my interest in this work is [...]

On Great Writing

I have more to say about my own stuff, but first I wanted to talk about a nice little book that I just read. It’s called On Great Writing (On the Sublime) and is by this guy named Longinus. No, not the Roman soldier who supposedly stabbed Jesus on the cross. I mean Longinus, the [...]

Questions and the First Order of Things

So I’ve started researching on my own. This is the first time I’ve really had this kind of freedom. I imagine it won’t last forever, but for now all I have is a general topic: question and answer. Specifically as it relates to the internet. But I started looking, and I’ve found a few articles.  [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]