[ATTW-L] [EXTERNAL] Obituary of Dwight W. Stevenson

[Zappen, James P.]

I worked with Dwight Stevenson and J. C. Mathes at Michigan for several years shortly after Designing Technical Reports: Writing for Audiences in Organizations was published and often did consulting work with them. I used their book in my technical communication classes for many years thereafter. When colleagues told me that they thought that technical communication was intellectually or morally bankrupt, I suggested that the best way to actually engage engineering students in ethical issues was not to preach at them but to ask them to address the multiple audiences and users of their technical work and the multiple issues that these audiences represent: efficiency and cost, yes, but also worker health and safety, environmental protection, product liability, and much more. I owe Dwight and J. C. so much for enriching my own and my students’ professional lives!

Jim Zappen

From: ATTW-L <attw-l-bounces at attw.org> On Behalf Of Carolyn Miller
Sent: Thursday, April 3, 2025 5:38 PM
To: attw-l at attw.org
Subject: [EXTERNAL][ATTW-L] Obituary of Dwight W. Stevenson


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I have just learned of the death of Dwight Stevenson last month, at age 91. Most of you will not remember him, but for many of us old-timers in ATTW, he, along with his collaborator JC Mathes at the Department of Humanities in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, was central to the formation of technical communication as a teaching and research enterprise in the 1970s. Dwight was named an ATTW Fellow in 1987.

I attended the first summer conference that Dwight and JC organized at Michigan, in 1975, and it illuminated in a whole new way what I was then trying to learn how to teach. They based the conference in large part on an early draft of their textbook, which was published in 1976 as Designing Technical Reports: Writing for Audiences in Organizations (Bobbs-Merrill). JC and Dwight developed a teaching paradigm for technical writing that I believe was the first not to be based on the current-traditionalism of composition textbooks, and it shaped my teaching for years afterwards. And incidentally, I remember that Dwight was the first person I’d ever encountered who was careful to avoid the generic masculine pronoun.

A link to the obituary is below.

Carolyn Miller

[748F87AF-426E-41CF-8BFD-18E8DF0A42ED]
Dwight Stevenson Obituary (10/07/1933 - 03/10/2025) - Ann Arbor, MI - Ann Arbor News<https://obits.mlive.com/us/obituaries/annarbor/name/dwight-stevenson-obituary?id=57990057>
obits.mlive.com<https://obits.mlive.com/us/obituaries/annarbor/name/dwight-stevenson-obituary?id=57990057>


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