Master of Technical and Scientific Communication, Miami University, 2009, English

This internship report discusses my 14-week internship as a technical writer intern with the Houston, Texas office of Golder Associates Inc. (Golder), completed from January 2009 through April 2009. My primary role at Golder was to provide technical review of the communications generated from the environmental, oil and gas, and waste management sectors served by the Houston office. The report is broken down into four chapters that reflect on my overall internship experience, my coursework in the MTSC program, and my perception of technical communication. The first chapter provides an overview of Golder, the organizational culture, and my role in the organization. The second chapter describes the various projects I worked on during my internship. The third chapter examines one large project in close detail. Finally, the fourth chapter examines the impact of the economic crisis on Golder's culture and its impact on technical communicators in similar organizations.

Committee: Katherine Durack PhD (Advisor); Michele Simmons PhD (Committee Member); Sandra Woy-Hazleton PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Engineering; Environmental Engineering; Environmental Science; Rhetoric

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2022, English

The teaching, learning, and administration of writing in higher education are increasingly being influenced by new technologies called analytics. Analytics are being used to teach disciplinary knowledge and predict and promote student success, but the approaches these technologies use may not resonate with evidence-based research about how writing is learned and may risk creating inequity in student experiences. Thus, this project explores explore how analytics are impacting the teaching, learning, and administration of writing in higher education. Stakeholders in Writing Studies are in a kairotic moment where they have a choice to about whether to engage in questions about analytics. This dissertation offers ideas and strategies for stakeholders in writing to engage with analytics in their work and looks towards future visions for what technology use might look like in Writing Studies.

Committee: Tim Lockridge (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Wardle (Committee Member); Jim Coyle (Committee Member); Michele Simmons (Committee Member); Linh Dich (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Education Policy; Educational Technology; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Master of Technical and Scientific Communication, Miami University, 2006, Technical and Scientific Communication

This report describes my technical writing/editing internship at WIL Research Laboratories, Inc. (WIL) in Ashland, Ohio. To complete the Master of Technical and Scientific Communication (MTSC) degree from Miami University of Ohio, I interned as a Study Analyst and Report Writer for 14 weeks for WIL, a contract research organization that conducts toxicology research for pharmaceutical and agricultural chemical corporations. Topics covered in this report include a general overview of WIL; a description of the training portion of the internship, including accounts of several projects that I completed in preparation to become a report writer; a detailed account of the major report writing project completed during the internship; and a reflection on the internship, including a description of how I used the seven steps of problem solving (as defined by Kristin R. Woolever in Writing for the Technical Professions) to outline the objectives and to develop the argument of my first report.

Committee: W. Simmons (Advisor) Subjects: Information Science

Master of Technical and Scientific Communication, Miami University, 2005, Technical and Scientific Communication

This report describes and analyzes an internship in technical and scientific communication during my full-time employment at IUPUI as a Lecturer in Geology. My key project was to develop an online course G107 Environmental Geology. In 2004, development of high quality online courses that equaled learning in on-campus courses was an emerging field. The project entailed the planning, researching, designing, writing, editing, evaluating, and revising an online course. The course consisted of learning modules that contained a compilation of written text, images, animations, and integrated media. Development required analyzing best practices in online learning and web design, designing the documentation using technical communication theory, and evaluating the success of the project. Specifically, the successful development required a foundation in problem solving, rhetoric and linguistics, technical and scientific writing, and information design. This internship revealed that a strong foundation in scientific communication is a prerequisite for developing online learning media.

Committee: Michele Simmons (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Technical and Scientific Communication, Miami University, 2003, Technical and Scientific Communication

This report discusses my internship experiences at Fig Leaf Software in Washington, DC, where I worked as a technical writer during the summer of 2001. In the report, I describe the young, rapid-development environment in which I worked, my major tasks and projects, and a significant project that I completed during my internship. During this project, I faced many challenges in developing the company's first client installation guide, including staying within the allotted hours and budget, gaining access to technical information, and establishing standards for a new document type. After discussing these challenges, I examine my role and value as an agent of change at Fig Leaf Software and present an expanded organizational role for technical communication practitioners.

Committee: Katherine Durack (Advisor) Subjects: Information Science

Master of Technical and Scientific Communication, Miami University, 2002, Technical and Scientific Communication

This report describes and analyzes my work as a technical writer for Analex Corporation during my 16-week Master of Technical and Scientific Communication internship period. Analexs Cleveland branch works in the aerospace industry and primarily contracts for NASAs Glenn Research Center. This report details my work on two projects during this time: Combustion Module-2 (CM-2) and Fluids and Combustion Facility (FCF). For the CM-2 project, I wrote procedures for astronauts to run combustion science experiments on board the space shuttle. For the FCF project, I edited requirements documents for experiment hardware that will be on board the International Space Station. This report discusses background information for each project and analyzes my writing and editing processes in terms of the Anderson Problem-Solving Model for technical communication. The final chapter describes my learning experiences and how these experiences contributed to my development as a technical communicator.

Committee: Paul Anderson (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2005, English/Technical Writing

This thesis identifies Chinese university situations specific to the transfer of technical communication to China, especially the relationship between general socio-economic settings in China and the influences these general settings have on the university disciplinary structure changes. The objective of this research is to reveal openings in translation discipline as a shell for technical communciation to merge with. The necessities for the merger and the reasons for choosing translation as the right discipline are analyzed through the conception of institutionalization by Berger and Luckman and the theory of power relations by Michel de Certeau. Earlier attempts of U.S. technical communication to reach China are reanalyzed to expose both accomplishments and problems in these efforts. In order to show the openings of translation discipline for technical communication, a survey has been conducted among Chinese translation professionals to reveal tensions in the development of translation theories and practices. It is concluded that the merger of technical communication with translation can both gain technical communication a pivotal status of being a discipline in Chinese universities and solve some problems of the translation field. More importantly, such a merger offers a future-oriented perspective of development for the merged discipline to ride more successfully the stablly growing Chinese economic growth.

Committee: Gary Heba (Advisor) Subjects:

PHD, Kent State University, 2021, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Ethnographic UX research applied to technical communication about a large scale sustainable energy project shows that an embodied understanding of the environment prevails in the public, pointing toward more effective methods for communicating scientific and policy information through improved use of metaphor in technical communication.

Committee: Pamela Takayoshi (Advisor); Brian Huot (Committee Member); Derek Van Ittersum (Committee Member); Joseph Ortiz (Committee Member); Eren Metin (Other) Subjects: Alternative Energy; Climate Change; Cognitive Psychology; Communication; Composition; Ecology; Education; Energy; Environmental Education; Linguistics; Literacy; Logic; Public Policy; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, English

Planning, developing, and assessing sustainable mobile strategies is a challenge that many non-profit organizations face as they build mobile sites, native applications, and mobile experiences with community members. Through interviews with community organization leaders (n=3), community members (n=11), and a survey of a non-profit organization's members (n=266) in the southern Ohio region, this project, Designing Mobile User Experiences for Community Engagement, extends mobile literacy scholarship within the field regarding community-based work and, more recently, mobile communication literacies. Seeking to fill a gap in writing studies research concerning mobile communication strategy in non-profit organizations, this study's research questions include: (1) How do community organizations use mobile technologies and mobile communication practices for community engagement?; (2) What does the mobile technology and strategy development process look like in community organizations? (3) How do community members and leaders define the affordances of mobile technologies?; (4) What purpose do mobile technologies serve in community engagement?; (5) What are the challenges and benefits of using mobile technologies for community engagement purposes? Findings show participants encountered major breakdowns in motivation in using the application regarding three key areas: pertinence, personalization, and duplication of content, rather than issues that would be typically defined as breakdowns in ease of use. Ultimately, this dissertation offers a methodological framework based in activity theory and space as practiced place for studying mobile communication and mobile user experience that highlights identifying motivations and breakdowns that exist across communication ecologies and offers key strategies and practices for building, using, and developing mobile communications for community engagement.

Committee: W. Simmons PhD (Committee Chair) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Chemical Engineering

Our three studies examine the factors of learning styles, student self-efficacy, collective (team) efficacy, attitudes, perceptions, and performance at individual and team levels. Each study addresses a different environment: (i) Individual Level—we are interested in how variability in learning styles engaged by specific exam problems may correlate with student learning styles, self-efficacy, and performance in our introductory chemical engineering course, Process Fundamentals (i.e., mass and energy or material balances); (ii) Team Level—we are interested in understanding how team composition with respect to learning styles (homogeneous vs. heterogeneous teams) may influence these factors in the upper level Unit Operations course; (iii) Combinatorial Level—we are interested in understanding how collective efficacy may influence individual self-efficacy and again if there are any correlations with learning styles and performance in the senior level Process Design and Development course. Some of the most interesting results of these studies have stemmed from the study on individual students, which has shown correlations between learning style preferences and performance in specific instances. Even more interesting, evaluating and characterizing the learning styles that exam problems engage has shown strong variations in problem types by instructor. This presents new questions regarding how these variations may affect student understanding and subsequent performance. Also included are details regarding a course developed in Technical and Professional Communication (for Chemical Engineers) that was offered Spring 2014 and Spring 2015.

Committee: David Wood (Advisor); James Rathman (Committee Member); David Tomasko (Committee Member) Subjects: Chemical Engineering; Education

Master of Technical and Scientific Communication, Miami University, 2010, Technical and Scientific Communication

This paper provides an in-depth report on a full-time internship completed in 2006 at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center to fulfill requirements of Miami University's Master of Technical and Scientific Communication program. The paper includes an overview of the internship, including details of major projects that integrate communications, marketing, information technology, and project management. An in-depth review of a project concerning change management communications follows. The paper concludes with a reflective analysis applying theoretical principles from graduate study in technical and scientific communication, such as audience analysis, collaborative writing, document design and linguistics, to work and experiences during the internship.

Committee: Dr. Jean Ann Lutz (Advisor); Dr. W. Michele Simmons (Committee Member); Dr. Janel M. Bloch (Committee Member) Subjects: Health Care; Information Technology; Technical Communication

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2008, English

This report describes my technical communication internship at Towers Perrin in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a writer/communicator. To complete the Master of Technical and Scientific Communication (MTSC) degree from Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), I interned for 14 weeks at Towers Perrin, a global professional services firm that helps organizations optimize performance through effective people, risk, and financial management. The first chapter of this report introduces Towers Perrin, describes my role in the organization, and outlines my goals for the internship. The second chapter is an account of my learning experience about health care, which was essential to complete my project tasks. The third chapter summarizes the major projects I completed, including summary plan descriptions, communication strategy documents, meeting presentations, project work plans, and training materials. The concluding chapter of my internship evaluates the strategies of project management, audience analysis, and document design as they related to my internship experience.

Committee: Jean Lutz PhD (Committee Chair); Michele Simmons PhD (Committee Member); Marjorie Nadler PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Health Care; Management

Master of Technical and Scientific Communication, Miami University, 2004, Technical and Scientific Communication

This report is a case study of a technical communications internship in a government institute devoted to scientific research in occupational safety and health. Descriptions in this report include the structure and goals of the Institute and how my internship corresponded with these goals, the three projects I worked on during the internship, and an in-depth examination of the activities required for converting material from a Dutch database to functional Web pages. The final chapter examines my technical communication activities with respect to several communication models, and briefly describes three specific-purpose communication models (social marketing, elaboration likelihood, and diffusion of innovations) and their use at NIOSH.

Committee: W. Simmons (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Technical and Scientific Communication, Miami University, 2004, English

This report describes my projects and major activities during my internship with Eli Lilly and Company. As a Scientific Communications Associate, I worked in a highly cross-functional group at Lilly to create documents the company sends to regulatory authorities worldwide. This report provides a basic description of the organizational structure and culture, the nature of my work and the types of documents I created, my contributions to Lilly during the internship, as well as my interactions with an internship mentor. Several projects, including work on ethical review board responses and intranet virtual space design are highlighted. The process I used to complete one of my major activities, updating a Clinical Investigator's Brochure for a Lilly compound, is described in detail. My analysis of the communications process I used to update the Clinical Investigator's Brochure, using Paul Anderson's problem-solving model, is also included.

Committee: Michele Simmons (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, English

Classroom-based simulations act as both reflections and deflections of reality. Nonetheless, their purpose is to enculturate students into a professional community through an experiential learning activity that asks students to adopt the mindset, mannerisms, and expertise of a professional. As such, students are molded into professionals through these experiences, and once they enter the workplace, they take part in shaping it, helping to subsequently craft the reality mirrored in future simulations. In other words, simulations create a feedback loop between the simulation and reality, each always shaping and reflecting a version of each other. Because of this, instructors and researchers need to take seriously not only the pedagogical implications of simulations, but also the sociopolitical. Guided by the methodological approach of abductive analysis (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014), this dissertation, through a mixed-methods case study of the pseudonymous Simulation for Raising Interprofessional Aptitude (STRIA) Program, examines how interprofessional healthcare students—social work students, in particular—are trained, through simulation, to provide patient-centered care in a simulated hospital setting. Specifically, building upon rhetorical theory, technical and professional communication, and critical disability studies, this study asks: How do interprofessional healthcare students work across divisions (in knowledge, experience, and language), together and with patients, to enact patient-centered care? How can rhetorical theory be put into practice to help interprofessional healthcare students prepare for working in unpredictable environments? How might pre-professional healthcare training, specifically simulation-based learning, respond to humanistic critiques about the efficacy and ethics of simulations? And what can rhetoricians learn from conducting in-situ research in complex workplace simulations? Key findings from this project offer rhetoric resea (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christa Teston (Advisor); Lauren McInroy (Committee Member); Margaret Price (Committee Member) Subjects: Health Care; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2023, English: Composition and Rhetoric

In this dissertation, I articulate and reclaim African rhetorical traditions and apply an African rhetorical lens for examining how contemporary Ga communities can use digital communications to further cultural practices. I examine ancient Egyptian African rhetorical traditions, exploring the theories and practices of Maat so as to articulate themes and characteristics of African rhetoric. I focus on African rhetoric from Ancient Egypt and then highlight some of its practices in contemporary Ghana, including Akan and Ga rhetoric. This dissertation centers and attempts a practice of rhetoric to a local/Indigenous people, The Gas of Ghana, whose cultural and linguistic survival might depend on how they use the Internet and digital technologies to share and celebrate their rhetorics. The Gas, Indigenous to Greater Accra, the capital city of Ghana, have a rich culture similar to the Akans. However, their dwindling population, cycles of poverty, lack of education, and exclusion of their language (Ga) education in the teaching curriculum by successive governments have all contributed to a near-loss of a rich Indigenous cultural heritage. Drawing from interviews with cultural preservationists in Ghana and Ga leaders, I examine how the Gas have used and could use the internet to engage in rhetorical acts of survivance. Some of the research questions shaping this study are: (1) How might minority Indigenous peoples (specifically in this study the Gas of Ghana) use the digital to assert their cultural practices and achieve visibility and survivance? And (2) In what ways can we Africans contribute to the cultural design and decolonizing of our material and digital rhetorics? I apply a combination of local methodological frameworks to understand how local research works with Indigenous communities. These include Indigenous concepts like Sankofa, which means return to the past and fetch from it, Ga samai (symbols), decoloniality, Indigenous storytelling. Finally, I close my diss (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Heidi McKee (Advisor) Subjects: Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2023, English

Scholars and practitioners have legitimized narrative and storytelling as areas of study within not only composition and rhetoric (Vealey & Gerding, 2021) but also related fields, such as data visualization (Knaflic, 2015) and design (Quesenbery & Brooks, 2010). Composition and rhetoric scholars such as Natasha Jones, Kristen Moore, and Rebecca Walton have developed grounded theorizations of narrative for community-based research. However, undeveloped is a theorization of community-based writing and narrative that examines years-long community development. This dissertation builds upon past scholarship to investigate how the nonprofit Millvale Community Development Corporation (MCDC) tells the narratives of its work. I interviewed twelve participants as part of a community-engaged study, one which employs an antenarrative methodology. Key to this methodology was tracing marginalized or outlying stories, or antenarratives, and reifying how the Millvale Community Development Corporation centralizes them in its communications to rewrite harmful narratives of Millvale, a former mill town which borders Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. An antenarrative also refers to a bet, as in to “up the ante,” and I further examined how the Millvale Community Development Corporation “wagered” on its new narratives and what it did to ensure the odds were in its favor (Boje, 2001). My methods also include analysis of Pivot, a planning report which coordinates social action under six themes: energy, food, water, air, equity, and mobility. I theorize how a community's plot contains people resolving a complication around a theme, such as water, which initiates social change. The resulting narratives are both internal and external. For the MCDC, the external narrative involves making Millvale a hip destination to visit while the internal one involves keeping the borough an equitable, prideful, and sustainable place to live. This work applies to community-based writing, professional and tec (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Timothy Lockridge (Committee Chair); Heidi McKee (Committee Member); Timothy Holcomb (Committee Member); Emily Legg (Committee Member); Michele Simmons (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

In this thesis, I examine the ways in which race, ethnicity, and the raced body are written into the Census as a document of technical writing. The United States Census is the key site of inquiry that I examine in analyzing and articulating a rhetoric surrounding race and identity. While the Census does not dictate the ways how ethnicity is made visible or erased or the ways in which race is reified; the ways in which conceptions of race and racism permeate American society are complex and too large for the scope of one conference proposal or project. The Census, however, is an important technical document that tracks identities and demographics in America. And as a governmental document, its use in public discourse impacts minority communities such as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Hispanic Americans, as well as other minoritized communities like migrants or refugees. In this thesis, I use this analysis of the Census document to focus on Middle Eastern identity and its relationship to race, ethnicity, and the raced body in technical writing, and seek to use this study to develop a theory of delivering identity through writing.

Committee: James Porter (Advisor); Adam Strantz (Committee Member); Sara Webb-Sunderhaus (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Middle Eastern Studies; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2022, English

Setting the Table: Ethos-As-Relationship in Food Writing employs methods from rhetoric and technical and professional communication to argue that the rhetorical mode of ethos should be understood as fundamentally relational, rather than as a more discreet property of communication synonymous with the rhetor's authority or character. I argue that reconceiving ethos-as-relationship better accounts for the rhetorical strategies used by the food writers who identify as women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and/or as part of the LGBTQ+ community whose texts I analyze, which include food memoirs, decolonial cookbooks, and food blogs. Food writing is a valuable place to examine the development of ethos because food writers are especially attuned to hospitality, a structural metaphor that all rhetors can use as a framework for understanding their relationship to their audience. A key focus of my analysis is the development of these food writers' textual personas, or their self-portrayal within the text. Textual personas are crucial to the development of what I call the ethotic relationship between writers and readers because a reader is unlikely to meet the writer in person, and an ethotic relationship can only be formed with another party. Ethos-as-relationship has important implications for understanding expertise and professional identity, especially for those rhetors who occupy historically-marginalized positionalities, as they must often work harder to negotiate a position of authority in relation to their audiences.

Committee: Kimberly Emmons (Advisor); T. Kenny Fountain (Committee Member); Vera Tobin (Committee Member); Mary Grimm (Committee Member); Christopher Flint (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing​, University of Findlay, 2016, English

This thesis researches the lack of collaboration between rhetoricians and technical communicators. The aims of the study were to 1) identify areas in which collaboration could be strengthened and 2) present a means to use these areas to improve technical communication documents. The researcher designed an instruction manual evaluation rubric which incorporated theories and principles from rhetoric, technical communication, humanism, and audience theory. In a qualitative study, six instruction manuals were evaluated using this rubric. The results of the study revealed audience analysis is the most lacking category in the manuals. Technical communicators must increase their study of audience and use rhetorical principles to engage the reader and write more effective instruction manuals.

Committee: Elkie Burnside Dr. (Advisor); Ron Tulley Dr. (Committee Member); S. Chris Ward Dr. (Committee Member); Christine Tulley Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Rhetoric; Technical Communication; Vocational Education