I’ve made quite a number of visual pages for my Technical Writing classes, though I haven’t managed to post any for a while. Today I finished one on how to integrated figures, tables, screenshots, charts, and photos. Students frequently have…
Author: Traci Gardner
What Gets Read First? Visual Hierarchy for Tech Comm
This visual page for my Technical Writing classes explains and demonstrates how to use document design to build a visual hierarchy in technical documents.
Teaching Redundant Writing OR Digital Accessibility Example: You Decide!
The writing tips below are mostly reasonable. I’m contesting the advice that turning means the same thing as turning around. I loved helping students with application essays come to understand that they didn’t need “I think.” The whole essay was…
What Writing Stage Are You Working On?
This is a cool idea. Would be fun in faculty writing retreats as well. If you could be sure writers consistently and accurately changed the markers, it would be an interesting way to study writing workflows. Here is a close…
Tengrrl’s Do’s and Don’ts for Workplace Writing
I’m busy making fancy resources for my Technical Writing course this term—but I haven’t gotten them posted and we’re already on Week 2! So here’s a list of Do’s and Don’ts for Workplace Writing. Or more accurately perhaps, a list…
Academic Writing vs. Technical Communication Infographic
I’ve created an infographic to accompany the course objectives idea in my previous post. The goal is to help students understand the differences between academic writing and the writing they will do in the workplace.
Academic v. Technical Writing Activity
If you’ve taught technical writing, you know that students are endlessly confused by the differences between academic writing expectations and technical writing expectations. It’s not especially surprising. Teachers pound margins and labeling and long paragraphs and essay standards into their…
Rethinking Technical Writing Discussions in Online Asynchronous Classes
It’s that point in class planning where I have great, big, giant goals—but I’m not at all sure that I can design a course to meet them. Zoomed out, the big targets are better discussion posts/student interaction, solutions for group…
Returning to the Blog!
Hello again. I guess I’ve been gone a while. Like nearly 2 years! How did that happen? Let’s not think about it. It’s hard to get back to a long-fallow project like this. I keep thinking that my first post…
In Search of a Custom AI Chatbot
I’ve been playing with some AI tools that let you build a custom chatbot. Matthew Vollmer, a colleague in the Department of English, mentioned back in May that he had created a custom bot that was loaded with his course…