I read nearly everything for the rest of the semester this weekend (except the Tebeaux) articles. I was doing research for the global history of Tech Com for my final paper, and I thought that I might as well just read the rest of the articles for this class that are concerned with that same subject matter. I started my interviews this week, so I wanted to have some intelligent questions to ask and a good understanding of what had happened globally so that I could understand TTU's history better.

After reading so much about the 1850s to the 1950s and the development of Tech Com within colleges of Engineering, I was interested to find out why TTU's program is instead in the college of English and Arts and Sciences. Dr. Locke Carter gave me a good answer to that question today when he said that we are in the college of English because we are concerned with how to do things with words, how to "delight with the written word," as he put it. He also said that this professiona took a very humanistic turn in the 1970s, which put it on the college of arts and sciences.

I was also concerned with how the TC department of TTU got its first teachers since there were no Tech writers to come in and teach what they had learned in a PhD program. I leaned that TTU's first TC teachers were composition teachers who learned additional TC information by going to conferences and reading journals. They added audience analysis and more types of documents to their teaching programs--and the Technical Writing program was born.

There is a lot more that I could summarize from my interview today with Dr. Carter, but I will save that for the final paper. I learned a lot from my readings this weekend and from speaking with him. I now feel that I have a better idea of the scope of my paper, and the specific questions that I will ask the others whom I get a chance to interview. I still want to speak with Dr. Rude, either Dr. Barker or Dr. Dragga, the Dean, and Dr. Kimball. Dr. Carter told me today that he sees a weakness in the TTU program in that we are losing senior professors and filling up with junior professors. He said that this program is getting a bit "bottom heavy," and he is anxious for some of the junior professors to get tenure. This is something that I would like to interview Dr. Kimball about. It's also something that I personally find very interesting because I am still considering the possibility of going on the get my PhD and becoming a professor of tenure.

This will be my last entry before the grading period. I will summarize the articles that I read this weekend as we discuss them in class so that I will have something to be graded for Blog IV.

Today's class was more interesting than I anticipated. I have to admit that I did not enjoy reading about sewing machines and mower-reapers, but I did like the additional information that Dr. Kimball gave about women's issues in those days. The part about women being equal to cattle was just like the episode of Maury that I watched yesterday. It was about abusive husbands, and they were all saying that their wives were their property and had to do whatever they said; the marriage certificate was the Bill of Sale. I wish Dr. Phil would have got a hold of those guys. Anyhow, let me get back to the article.

I liked the way that Brockmann laid out his article. It was a style that I could have used in my jounal analysis because we both used a similar methodology. When I was reading the chapter, I was a bit uninspired by the topic he was discussing, and I thought that his graphs were a bit excessive. I paid more attention to the way that he presented his topic, told what specific things he was going to research, presented the information in graphs and tables, and then summarized his findings. If I would have read this article before I did my journal analysis, I think that I would have done a better job of summarizing the information in my tables in written form. I made the mistake of letting the tables speak for themselves without a good commentary.

Like Dr. Kimball said, we can't read everything at the first of class and leave all the assignments to the end. I'll just keep this knowledge handy for anything that may come up in graduate school. (And by the way, can I take this class again as a grad student? This summer?)

It's time to do a little summarizing of Playfair and the guys who wrote about him and his ideas before we move on to Dr. Dragga's articles. First of all, it is very interesting to note that Playfair was not a stand-up guy. The main motivations for all the work that he did was to make money and be accepted by the higher-ups in society (by complementing them within his graphical presentations). Playfair made use of the graphical techniques that he had learned in his previous employment and from his brother. There are many experts who write about Playfair, and the ones that we read excerpts from were very careful to gloss-over his unsavory image. He was generally presented as a very important mind of his times who developed many of the graphing techniques that we either still use today or have built into more relevant methods.

Playfair made it possible to look at a graphical presentation of the manner in which diseases were wiping out populations at that time. He did extensive work comparing the imports and exports of England and other countries (though we see these graphics to be a bit biased). He also made table-sized nobility family trees to sell to the rich families of the day.

These Playfair articles that we read tie into the previous articles about the need to integrate more graphics into text and teach graphical methods to technical writers. The Dragga articles that we will discuss next class present a whole different side of graphics (one that I doubt Playfair ever considered). Dragga and his co-author make an interesting claim about the need to humanize graphics that present human statistics. More about that next Blog after we discuss it in class.

Dr. Kimball and I had a meeting on Friday afternoon, and I feel really good about my final project now. I am going to do an ethnographic study of the Technical Communication program here at Texas Tech, interviewing various people who are active in the program. I will also do additional research on the global changes in TC instruction.

My first step is going to the library and looking through the old course catalogs and English department meeting converstations. I need to get a good sense of the changes that have happened her at TTU so I will be able to develop interesting and relevant questions for the people that I will interview. I am also going to research the books of Kynell, Conners, and others to get a good idea of the changes in TC in a more global sense.

My next step will be composing the questions to ask my subjects and developing a methodology that I will use with everyone. I need to be sure to let them know exactly what I am doing and why I am asking them these questions. I will also need to tape record the sessions so I won't forget any important information that I hear in my interviews.

The next step will be to set up the interviews with all of the poeple that I want to include in my ethnographic study. Dr. Kimball recommended that I speak to Dr. Rude, the Dean of the English department, Dr. Carter, Dr. Dragga, Dr. Barker, and the person who teaches the internet course from another state (I can't remember his name). I can forsee the possibility that it could get rather difficult to meet with each of these people because of all of our busy schedules here at the end of the semester. It is important that I get started on this step right away.

My final step will be to organize all of the information that I have obtained into an interesting and well-organized paper. When doing this, I can imagine that I might have some problems knowing how many quotes will be good to include and how many will be overkill.

Basically, I feel like I have a very good sense about what I am going to be doing for this project. I definitely understand it much better than the previous two assignments that I have done for this class. I am still worried about my re-write for the literary review, and we haven't gotten our journal analysis papers back yet, either. I hope that all turns out well.

I absolutely forgot that Blogging existed until today in class. Spring Break was lovely, and the only homework that I did was re-write my literary review. Let me get going again by giving a re-cap of today's class conversations.

Today we spoke about Moran and Brockman. I did not read the Moran article because I thought we were supposed to read Conners, but I assume that both Moran and Brockman wrote about the same thing: there is not enough emphasis on learning how to use graphical elements in technical writers' educational background. He said that there used to be lots of graphics in technical documents (in the shipbuilding days), but they are no longer used enough.

Brockman exemplified this theory in Chapter 1 by talking about Oliver Evans. Brockman gave illustrations of Evan's first milling machine promotional document that was only text and then told how it was not well-received. He then showed how Evan's next document that included illustrations was much better. The thing that Brockman failed to note in his analysis is that it is much easier to mislead people when using pictures. Communication happens more quickly and there is more potential for ethical problems.

A classmate reminded us that the reason that graphics are not taught to technical writers is because we are part of the English department, and English departments traditionally want to focus on literature rather than graphics. Dr. Kimball talked about how this is changing, especially here at Texas Tech. Any of us who have taken Dr. Susan Lang's class know this fact first-hand.

Pictures and other graphical elements are everywhere today, and people are used to getting their information quickly and in an exciting format. Nearly everyone has at least one television in his or her home, and the news has become very quick and to-the-point. Even technical manuals have come to rely more and more on pictures rather than words. Some businesses do not require their technical writers to do their own graphical work, but some do. There is definitely a place for learning basic graphical design techniques in the overall education of technical writers.

I am having difficulties deciding on a topic for the Primary Research Project. The main thing that I do not understand is how it is going to be any different from the first two papers that we wrote. If I use the same topic--the way the American Psychologistjournal has become more culturally aware--how would my PRP be any different from the Journal Analysis? And if I changed topics, what would I choose instead?

I was thinking about the oil company idea that Dr. Kimball suggested. My family is good friends with two of the big oil families around here, and I would be interested in researching how they got started. But if I chose this, what would I really be looking at? The documents that the company used within its own employees? Or the documents that they used to communicate to their stockholders? Or the documents that they used to buy land or ask others if they could drill on their land?

Next problem: What does this stuff have to do with Technical Communication? How would I keep from writing a history paper like I did with the Literary Review?

Another idea that I thought about is looking through the old course catalogs to see how the teaching of Technical Communication has changed here at Texas Tech. It would be interesting to see how engineering, advertising, and pre-med majors have integrated Tech Com classes into their course loads. I think this topic would be a lot easier to show significance to Tech Com because it is actual research about the teaching of Tech Com.

We've been slowing down a bit in our readings, and I'm grateful. This journal analysis has been very time consuming. I keep changing my mind about what feature that I am going to analyze, so I have to go back and look through them again and again to record new data. Ten years is a really long period to analyze.

In class on Tuesday and Thursday, we talked more about scientific writing. For the second time this semester, I am excited that the things that I am learning in my history of Latin America class are overlapping with my readings for this class. In Spanish class on Wednesday, we watched a video on the Incas and the Nazcos that mentioned the book Chariots of the Gods, and I had just finished reading the first chapter of that book. I always feel like I'm getting a very well-rounded education when I learn about things from different angles from different teachers.

Even though the readings by Von Daniken and Sagan were interesting, I didn't feel the desire to continue reading either of their books. I guess this just goes to show that no matter how much a writer tries to make his or her subject appeal to a broader audience, there is just no way to suck in that reader who doesn't have an innate interest in the writer's subject matter. I don' t know if anyone could write so excitingly that they could convince me to read about planets and light years and black holes and gravity.

We didn't really get around to speaking about plain language, but I did read the articles by Whitburn and Mazur. I also looked at the completely un-plain styles of Bacon and Burton. The latter two were so complicated that I didn't really get any meaning out of their words. Before I read the former two articles, I didn't really know that there was a debate over whether plain language was a good idea or not. I feel like it has been taught all throughout high school and college, and I never stopped to think of its downside.

I have noticed that I am sometimes on the wrong track when I analyze articles before we talk about them in class, so I'm just going to stop here and finish my summary of the plain style articles next week.