Citation for Michele Simmons
Elevated to ATTW Fellow, March 2020
by Jeffrey T. Grabill
On behalf of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Fellows Nominating Committee, the Executive Committee of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, and the membership at large, I write to congratulate you on your elevation to Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW).
To be a Fellow of ATTW means that you have made significant long-term contributions to technical communication, that you have an established national reputation based on your teaching, scholarship, or academic administration. Being named a Fellow, in other words, is a recognition of your intellectual leadership and collegiality.
Your research has opened new areas of study in technical and professional communication. You are a leading voice—arguably the leading voice—arguing for connections between the traditional, civic concerns of rhetoric and the more contemporary affordances of technical and professional communication. We owe our current understanding of risk communication and public rhetoric to your innovative work on public participation. This is most evident in your excellent book, Participation and Power: A Rhetoric for Civic Discourse in Environmental Policy, and visible as well in your contributions to Lean Technical Communication: Toward Sustainable Program Innovation.
For this work, you have earned a number of accolades. Lean Technical Communication won the 2020 CCCC Research Impact Award. And twice you have won the Nell Ann Pickett Award for Best Article in Technical Communication Quarterly, first for “Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication: Producing Citizens and the Role of Technical Communicators” and then again for “Productive Usability: Fostering Civic Engagement in Online Spaces.”
About your work, Meredith Johnson writes:
Michele is nationally recognized for her groundbreaking work on high-stakes research sites: a nuclear waste depot housing more than 1,000 tons of deadly VX nerve agent, a Midwestern steel plant that emits eight million pounds of soot into the air, a uranium enrichment plant in Oakridge, Tennessee. She has also brought her careful attention to everyday territory: annual activity reports, websites that help citizens manage invasive weeds and, of course, the writing classroom. What unites this influential work is Michele’s profound respect for the communities she studies and for the wisdom of their members. Michele’s research honors local, tacit knowledges and makes them visible. This commitment carries over to her classroom as well; she frequently teaches service-learning projects that benefit local community partners as much as her students.
Timothy Amidon continues:
Michele demonstrates what it means to work in earnest toward justice, equity, and emancipation, as her work has not only challenged our field to interrogate whose voices and bodies are absent from and marginalized in contexts where technical and professional communication unfolds, but she has also offered concrete tools and practices that members of our scholarly community might deploy in order to carefully, respectfully, and purposefully construct more just, sustainable, and inclusive futures.
Your service to the field and to ATTW in particular has been nothing short of extraordinary. You have served in formal leadership roles for fifteen years, including member at large on the executive committee, conference program chair, Vice President, President, and now as the organization’s Immediate Past President. As president, you implemented the Graduate Research Award to support students presenting their research at the conference. Adding to your impact, you co-founded Women in Technical Communication, which has been a transformative educational and mentoring project in the field. For that work, you and your colleagues won the 2015 SIGDOC Diana Award for extraordinary contribution to the field of Communication Design.
Your leadership roles in ATTW have been marked by persistent efforts to create space for others. This has been true across your career. As your colleague Caroline Dadas writes:
Michele has served as a mentor to many students at the M.A. and Ph.D. level, helping to move the field toward a sustained focus on effective digital communication, participation in civic processes, and robust methodologies for studying online public spheres. As one of her PhD students, I can attest to Michele’s seemingly-endless patience and thoughtful intellectual collaboration with her students. She continues to shape technical communication in meaningful ways.
This same sentiment is echoed again by Timothy Amidon:
I am humbled by and owe much to Michele—she is a generous mentor, collaborator, and advocate to so many members of our field. What stands out most about Michele as both researcher and mentor—a characteristic that I admire and seek to emulate in my own practice—is that she has a special knack for listening with care and respect. It’s a tenet that is unmistakably centered within Michele’s scholarship and practice, and it’s among the lessons our organization and field stand to benefit from most as we continue to mature.
The words of your colleagues reflect well your value to the field. We thank you for your exemplary engagement with this community of scholars, practitioners, and teachers.
For these reasons, the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing is proud to elevate you to Fellow. We are humbled by your example and proud to call you a colleague.
Citation for Patricia Sullivan
Elevated to ATTW Fellow, March 2020
by Jeffrey T. Grabill
On behalf of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Fellows Nominating Committee, the Executive Committee of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, and the membership at large, I write to congratulate you on your elevation to Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW).
To be a Fellow of ATTW means that you have made significant long-term contributions to technical communication, that you have an established national reputation based on your teaching, scholarship, or academic administration. Being named a Fellow, in other words, is a recognition of your intellectual leadership and collegiality.
Your career is one of the most distinguished in our field. Your intellectual and leadership presence at Purdue since 1985 helped establish it as one of the leading graduate programs in the discipline. During your time at Purdue, you directed Technical Writing and later were instrumental in starting the B.A. in Professional Writing, which became one of the leading undergraduate programs in the field. You also helped establish areas of study at the Ph.D. level in Technical and Professional Writing and in Rhetoric, Technology and Digital Writing. Students in these programs have gone on to distinguished careers in industry and the academy.
Your expertise as a researcher is extraordinary and has been field-changing. You have distinguished yourself as an early and consistent feminist voice in technical and professional communication and as one of our most creative, thoughtful, and strongest methodologists. Your books have been field-changing. In Electronic Literacies in the Workplace (co-edited with Jennie Dautermann), you provided one of the first looks into the impact of digital technologies on workplace writing. It is a book that grounded the work of scholars for years to come. Opening Spaces (co-authored with James Porter) remains one of the best books on research methodology in the field. It is a book that has literally opened space for research and to researchers exploring new ways to understand the world. You and your colleagues published one of the first digital textbooks in the field (Professional Writing Online). In both Labor, Technology, and Literacy in the Twenty-first Century (co-edited with Pamela Takayoshi) and Lean Technical Communication: Toward Sustainable Program Innovation (with Meredith Johnson and Michele Simmons), you continued a career-long commitment to innovative work, opening room for necessary conversations about the relationships between writing, technology, and design. Significantly, the entirety of your body of work is grounded in a commitment to equity and justice.
The use of the word “innovative” to describe your intellectual contributions is quite deliberate. Indeed, it may not be strong enough. Your student and colleague Bill Hart- Davidson calls your work “visionary.” He notes that four years before Nielsen’s Usability Engineering was published and about the same time that Donald Norman was writing The Design of Everyday Things, you wrote “Beyond a Narrow Conception of Usability Testing,” an article that provides – yet today – a blueprint for the vibrant, multidisciplinary area of work we have since come to call User Experience (UX). You were among the first writers to frame UX as an endeavor grounded in inquiry, in research, and you named a variety of possible uses to which the results of that inquiry could be put at a time when your ideas were uncommon.
For your scholarly work, you have earned many awards, including the 1999 Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication from NCTE, the 2001 Richard Braddock Award for Best Publication in College Composition and Communication, another six best article awards, and another five awards for teaching and mentoring. This is a partial list. The full list would take the remainder of this page.
The list of accomplishments to this point is remarkable. Those who know you best, however, know that you are perhaps proudest of your work with students and see these relationships and the work your students have produced as your most significant contribution to the field. The list of your PhD students reads like a roster of leaders, leading scholars, and distinguished educators. You have chaired more than 60 dissertations. Roughly 20% of those dissertation projects were published as books. 15 of those projects won national awards, fellowships, or prestigious postdocs.
Your students and colleagues have been effusive in their praise for you and communicate a deep respect for your mentoring and collegiality. They note how your contributions to the field have been influential, visionary (there is that word again), and useful for enabling the work of others. They note that you have continuously made space for the agency of technical communicators, the educators who prepare them, and the scholars who seek to understand how it all works. Mark Hannah notes correctly that you have “touched the lives of many,” and he goes on to note that he is “honored to have [you] as my teacher, mentor, and friend. [Your] commitment to my family, my well-being, and my work as a scholar and teacher is something for which I am forever grateful.” Mark captures beautifully what others have shared and the love so many have for you. Those fortunate to be able to call you “teacher” know that there is no more affectionate, respectful, or truer word for you.
For these reasons, the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing is proud to elevate you to Fellow. We are humbled by your example and proud to call you a colleague.