Before the end of the spring semester, I met with Jose Diaz in City Tech’s Academic Technologies and Online Learning (AtoL) to earn re-certification for teaching online for the next three years (2025-2028). I received this online certificate as a record of the recertification. As a part of the process, I discussed my plans for teaching the online asynchronous Information Architecture (ENG3790) class in Fall 2025.
In any given year as we approach the end of the spring semester, I feel almost skeletal. My animating flesh gives way under responsibilities, deadlines, and stress. I tell my students to hang in there through the end as much to encourage them as myself.
For today’s class, my ENG2700 Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing students read two articles about social media and professionalism in the Technical Communication field:
I plan to discuss the difference between active and passive approaches to building an online professional identity (and why the former is the way to go–giving an example about LinkedIn from Dr. Rebecca Burnett).
I’ll also show them some things related to my social media presence, easy-to-build HTML websites hosted on Github like this one, my old domain name, and online calling card/mini-bio/link aggregator sites, such as:
During last night’s Introduction to Language and Technology (ENG1710) class, I was discussing William Hart-Davidson’s “On Writing, Technical Communication, and Information Technology: The Core Competencies of Technical Communication.” It followed our reading last week of Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context,” which Hart-Davidson engages in part.
Toward the end of lecture, when I was talking about lessons learned from Hart-Davidson’s essay, which includes being a life-long learner and keeping up-to-date on changing technologies of writing and communication, Prof. Sarah Schmerler, a City Tech English department colleague with a shared interest in Generative AI technologies, stopped by and participated in the class discussion with my students. It was informal and impromptu, but I think my students enjoyed their perspective and lived experience. I enjoyed our conversation during and after class.
I wanted to jot down some of the conversation and additional thoughts spun off from the conversation here:
How can you expect to be a good writer without learning, at least in part, from reading many examples of writing by others?
Writing is reading in reverse. Instead of the words coming into you from the world, you are sending the words out into the world.
Reading and writing go hand-in-hand. Developing skill in one, enriches the other.
Reading heuristics, such as lateral reading and vertical reading, can support getting as much as possible out of one’s reading time, energy, and needs (e.g., is this for a research thesis vs. learning enough about something for a journalistic article).
Our needs–enjoyment, learning, work, etc.–play a key role in what strategies (large scale) and tactics (smaller scale) we employ to accomplish reading goals.
Reading can be a passive exercise, but active reading that engages the text and combines cognition, reasoning, and imagination yields the greatest returns in terms of understanding, analysis, and memory.
Isolation, quiet contemplation, and dedicated time can aid the development of reading and writing.
Teaching writing requires a rethink on how we approach reading and how important reading is to developing writing skill.
Ray Bradbury was a largely self-educated writer who proudly said that he graduated from the library at the age of twenty eight (though, he adjusted this to twenty seven in a later interview in the Paris Review). In the latter interview, he also remarked about retyping the writing of his favorite authors as a part of his writing apprenticeship and early development as a writer–“[to] Learn their rhythm.”
Students do lots of different kinds of reading, which we as educators can tap into and help the student connect their reading interests to writing development. Furthermore, it can open doors to other kinds of reading that they were not previously aware of. Knowing where they are and interested can lead to possibilities and knowledge that were around them but unseen. Browsing and finding the neighborhood, in Prof. Schmerler’s terms, connects students to new reading opportunities.
Between the melees, try to find some joy and peace. I’ll be doing that with my Professional and Technical Writing students today. I’ll bring LEGO to class for a bit of educational play that combines the use of their imagination, haptics, educational knowledge, organizational thinking, and writing skill.
They will design a small model that represents something about their specialization (e.g., Biology, Psychology, Computer Science, Fashion Design, etc.) and then write an instruction manual like this example that I made for them based on the model above that I call a “Quiet Reading Corner.” Scroll down to see it deconstruct, which I presented in reverse in my instruction manual.
