Awards – Association of Teachers of Technical Writing

2020 Michele Simmons and Patricia Sullivan

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

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.

CCCCs Technical and Scientific Communication Awards

Congratulations to the following recipients of the CCCCs 2019 Technical and Scientific Communication Awards. These awards were announced at the ATTW awards reception and the CCCCs awards ceremony on March 13 and March 15 in Pittburgh.

Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication
Julie Collins Bates, Illinois State University
“Toward an Interventionary Rhetoric for Technical Communication Studies.”

Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication
Christa Teston. Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty. University of Chicago Press. 2017

Best Original Collection of Essays in Technical or Scientific Communication
Natalia Matveeva, Michelle Moosally, and Russell Willerton, Eds. Special Issue on Plain Language, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 2017.

Best Article Reporting Historical Research or Textual Studies in Technical and Scientific Communication
Lilly Campbell. “Simulation genres and student uptakes: The patient health record in clinical nursing simulations.” Written Communication, 2017.

Best Article on Pedagogy or Curriculum in Technical or Scientific Communication
Lynda Walsh. “Visual invention and the composition of scientific research graphics: A topological approach.” Written Communication, 2018.

Best Article on Philosophy or Theory of Technical or Scientific Communication
Jordan Frith. “Big Data, Technical Communication, and the Smart City.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 2017.

Best Article Reporting Qualitative or Quantitative Research in Technical or Scientific Communication
Julie Watts. “Beyond Flexibility and Convenience: Using the Community of Inquiry Framework to Assess the Value of Online Graduate Education in Technical and Professional Communication.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 2017.

2019: Cheryl Geisler and Mark Zachry

Citation for Cheryl Geisler
Elevated to ATTW Fellow, March 2019
by Bill Hart-Davidson

Today we join a chorus of colleagues and organizations who have honored the career contributions of Dr. Cheryl Geisler by elevating Cheryl to the rank of Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing. Cheryl’s contributions to scholarship in the field are rich and copious. Her rigorous work has consistently served as a benchmark for investigations of the way experts and academics write, work together, incorporate technologies into their practice, and balance the demands of work with other aspects of their lives. As Cheryl’s own career advanced, she moved into a series of leadership roles in the institutions where she worked, including as Department Head and Dean. Her inquiry merged with her dedication to being a resource for those she was charged to lead, and today Cheryl is well known across disciplines for her outstanding work on faculty development, and especially in the area of making inclusive career paths for women in the academy.

The ATTW has of course enjoyed the benefit of Cheryl’s leadership to our organization as well. She has been the architect of our graduate student professional development efforts in ATTW during her more than ten years of service as chair of the Research committee. She created our research methods workshops for graduate students and advocated for ATTW to fund travel fellowships so students could attend these full day sessions with leading researchers in the field. She has sought out those scholars in the field whose work has been recognized for its methodological quality and novelty to lead these workshops each year, ensuring that our best researchers connect with graduate students in the formative stage of their own careers. We are deeply grateful to Cheryl for her dedication to this program and to the broader effort of making ATTW a professional home for students and faculty by supporting their learning.

We are, in truth, a little late to the party when it comes to recognizing Professor Geisler’s transformative contributions to the field of rhetoric, writing, and technical communication. You may know, for instance, that the Rhetoric Society of America has an award that recognizes outstanding contributions to mentoring. That award is named for Cheryl! The program she started at RSA to assist junior faculty in finding mentors who could scaffold their career growth – particularly when they were in institutions where they might be the only rhetoric or technical communication scholars in their department – have helped many, many people in our organization and in the field to grow successful careers.

There are many people in our organization who have Cheryl to thank for the trajectory of their own scholarship. Her talent as a researcher and scholar who has continually advanced knowledge in the fields of Literacy Studies, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication has also consistently expanded our field’s reach into new areas such as Human-Computer Interaction and Mobile Technology. With colleagues in computer science, Cheryl was among the first in our field in the mid-1990s to publish work on computer-mediated collaboration and design. In 2001, Cheryl led a “dream team” of researchers she dubbed the iText Working group to fashion a research agenda on “the relationship between information technology and writing” that remains relevant today. Also that year, six years before the iPhone was introduced, Cheryl had already begun researching and publishing on the ways mobile technologies – do you remember the Palm pilot? – were changing the dynamics of knowledge work and how these tools might shift the balance of work/life, particularly for professional women.

Cheryl’s 2004 research methods book Analyzing Streams of Language made rigorous analysis of verbal data accessible to anybody with Microsoft Office. The text offers a glimpse of what it is like to learn with and from Cheryl as a student in her classroom or as a colleague on a collaborative team. She moves back and forth between concepts and operational details smoothly, making sure that each analysis move is well-grounded in a theoretical rationale. Her passion for helping others learn to think like researchers is obvious on every page, just as it is when you talk to Cheryl in the hallway or after a panel session at ATTW. A colleague of Cheryl’s characterized this quality of her personality this way:

It has always been inspiring for me the way Cheryl works tirelessly and efficiently in all areas of her own career, holding herself to the highest standards of quality in teaching, research, institutional and national service. She does this, moreover, with true joy. You can see it on her face! The result is that Cheryl becomes a leader. Not because she seeks positions of power for herself, but because others recognize in her the qualities they most want to emulate. Cheryl is truly a leader by example, and her example is both inspiring and energizing.

Cheryl’s depth of experience in administrative positions, as a researcher, as an advisor to Ph.D. students and junior faculty, and as a teacher is nearly unparalleled in the field. This experience undergirds an organizational savvy that is remarkable. Evidence of this exists most obviously in the programs and alliances Cheryl has helped to build, ranging from formal structures such as the first Writing Across the Curriculum program at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute to ad-hoc collaborations like the iText Working Group. We want to note that, as a leader in these and other endeavors, Cheryl’s work often advances the reputation of the group over her own. And while it may be true that Cheryl’s work is motivated by broader interests than accolades for herself, today we want to make sure to say to Cheryl that we see you, we appreciate you, and we are deeply grateful to you for all that you have done and continue to do for ATTW!

Let us also acknowledge that while this award is overdue, we are thrilled to have the chance to honor Cheryl and to encourage all of our colleagues in ATTW to express their thanks and congratulations to her. You may find that as much as we have tried to celebrate her best qualities, we have understated them. Interpersonally, Cheryl not only offers wise counsel and guidance, she also challenges us to achieve great things. She has both the patience and confidence in our ability to learn from mistakes as well as successes. She is generous with her time and places a high value on one-on-one interaction as a way to pose and solve problems. Take as one bit of evidence the success of her former graduate students (some of whom are themselves ATTW fellows!). When you have your chance to talk with Cheryl, you’ll join the ranks of our colleagues who come away feeling honored that she holds you to a high standard with confidence that you can succeed.

We are honored to welcome Dr. Cheryl Geisler to the community of ATTW Fellows as a representative of the very best kind of colleague we could hope to have!

Citation for Mark Zachry
Elevated to ATTW Fellow, March 2019
Written by William Hart-Davidson

It is with gratitude and joy that we elevate Professor Mark Zachry of the University of Washington to the status of Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing. Mark’s scholarly productivity, national and international leadership have contributed in significant ways to the field and to our organization. And, of course, Mark has also played a strong role, as editor of ATTW’s journal Technical Communication Quarterly along with several award-winning collections of research, in shaping the overall research agenda of our field. His service also includes an impressive legacy as a teacher and mentor of students and colleagues who have themselves built successful careers in Technical Communication.

Mark is truly a research innovator in the field of Technical Communication. His careful theoretical work in pieces such as “Genre ecologies: an open-system approach to understanding and constructing documentation” published in 2000 and co-authored with Clay Spinuzzi is widely cited and deeply influential. Indeed, the genre ecologies framework proposed in that piece has gone on to become a generally accepted model in the field, though at the time the core ideas were quite new and disruptive of both theoretical and pedagogical approaches to genre. The central implication of the genre ecologies framework argues that the scope of research on written discourse must shift, dramatically, from a focus on relatively discrete communicative artifacts (texts) to a system of interdependent communicative actions. Not a subtle shift. It was a shift that literally demanded whole new research traditions in the field. And it turns out to have been an important change that presaged the networked, social-media saturated world we live in today.
But Zachry did not stop at arguing for such a shift from a theoretical perspective. Indeed, his earlier empirical and archival work had already adopted the systemic approach that would eventually be known as the genre ecology framework, producing insights that helped to demonstrate just where the fields’ research might go. Mark recognized that the transition would mean preparing researchers whose work had primarily focused on text analysis – ranging from close interpretive reading to more systematic corpus studies – to begin looking more broadly at human behavior, in group and organizational settings, without losing the systematic approaches that had brought rigor and value to textual studies.

Mark’s contributions also include outstanding service to ATTW. Mark served two terms as Editor of TCQ, including one as a co-Editor with ATTW Fellow Charie Thralls. During that time, Mark helped to modernize the journal’s review process as content-management systems became standard in academic publishing. He also worked to get the journal indexed more broadly, a move which helped to boost the journal’s overall quality, citations, and submission rate. Mark moved the journal with him from Utah State to the University of Washington, a process that allowed him to document processes and ensure that each subsequent transfer of the journal’s editorial home would be a smooth one. In short, Mark applied his own expertise as a technical writer and as a researcher of distributed work to our house organ, helping it to become the respected source of cutting-edge research it is today!

In the last ten years or so of his career, Mark has encouraged this kind of work by writing about research methods, mentoring graduate students in a highly-productive research group at the University of Washington. He has consistently published the best quality research in our field in journals and edited collections – for which his work has been recognized with awards for outstanding article and edited collection, among others. He has also led workshops and transformed curricula – most notably in graduate education in Human-Centered Design and Engineering. At Washington and Utah State, Mark built a reputation as an outstanding mentor and teacher. Mark has been honored for outstanding teaching throughout his career by the Society for Technical Communication with the Jay R. Gould award for Excellence in Teaching, truly one of our field’s highest honors.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Mark is among the most respected and valued members of the field of Technical Communication. This is all the more true for the way his work has pushed the field to become more interdisciplinary, to engage with allied areas of interest such as Human- Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.
For all of these reasons, Mark Zachary has had a transformative impact on our field and has more than earned recognition as a Fellow of the Association of Teachers of Technical Communication.

Geisler and Zachry Elevated to ATTW Fellow

Congratulations to Dr. Cheryl Geisler of Simon Fraser University and Dr. Mark Zachry of University of Washington, who were elevated to ATTW Fellow at the 2019 ATTW Conference in Pittsburgh, PA on March 13, 2019.

The citations read by Bill Hart-Davidson will be posted here soon.

ATTW Fellows are named and honored for their major contributions to the organization and to the discipline of technical communication.

The Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) is an active professional organization of teachers, researchers, and practitioners of technical communication. Formed in 1973 to encourage dialogue among teachers of technical communication and to develop technical communication as an academic discipline, the organization boasts an international and interdisciplinary membership. ATTW produces Technical Communication Quarterly, a leading academic journal, and it collaborates with Taylor & Francis/Routledge to publish the ATTW Book Series in Technical and Professional Communication.

ATTW Announces 2019 Graduate Research Awards

ATTW is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2019 ATTW Graduate Research Awards. In our commitment to advancing graduate students in the field, the award’s purpose is to support and advance the research of graduate students in the latter stages of their PhD programs.

Congratulations to the following recipients for their potential contributions to research in technical and professional communication:

Postcolonial Technologies & Magic Language: Critical Discourse of GhanaPostGPS
Edzordzi Agbozo, Michigan Tech

Ways to Move, Ways to Map: Making Space for Neurodiversity in Design
Leah Heilig, Texas Tech University

A Techne of Marginality: Theorizing from Black Minds to Hold White Bodies Accountable
Cecilia D. Shelton, East Carolina University

#MeToo, Multi-Layered Platforms, and Platforms of Power
Sarah Warren-Riley, Illinois State University

The Graduate Research Award recipients presented their work at a featured session at the ATTW Conference in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 and were honored at the awards ceremony.

The award selection committee was really impressed with the quality and potential contributions of these research projects as well as the others submitted.