- I moved to Texas in the
summer of 1997--my first experience of living west of
the Mississippi or south of the Mason-Dixon line. I
was previously on the faculty at Penn State for 11
years, where I taught techical and business writing,
argumentation, and courses on the processes of reading
and writing and the rhetoric of science. I started out
studying linguistics in college at Brandeis University
and went on for a master's degree in linguistics at
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. There I
began teaching writing, an experience that inspired me
to look at texts bigger than sentences, and at how
people read and write them. So I moved to Pittsburgh
and began studying rhetoric and composition at
Carnegie Mellon University.
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- I became interested in
technical and scientific writing after spending a
summer at Apple Computer working on a manual for a
spreadsheet program. I ended up doing research for my
dissertation on how to design computer manuals that
people can actually learn from. After that I did some
research on job resumes and work order forms. The
basic questions were always--what was it in the text
that readers need or want to see? How do writers move
readers to see things their way? To get at those
questions, I ended up doing even more
inter-disciplinary work, combining rhetoric and
composition with linguistics and cognitive psychology.
Lately I've been working on how members of
professional communities (like scientists) learn to
persuade each other with their writing. All of this
work finds its way back to the classroom--I enjoy
helping students figure out how they can use writing
to make the world a better place.
-
- Ok, that sounds pretty
cock-eyed and optimistic--but the other thing you need
to know about me is that I've been a die-hard Cubs fan
ever since I was old enough to say "Ernie
Banks."
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-
- Here I am with some
colleagues: Aristotle, Plato and Demosthenes:
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