Graduate Thesis Portfolio Proposal: "Technical Communicators as Wordsmiths of Tools"

This is my graduate thesis portfolio proposal, written in 2014 for the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. I consulted many professional journals, including Technical Communication Quarterly, The Journal of Business and Technical Communication, IEEE's Transactions on Professional Communication. In addition, I consulted my graduate, undergraduate, and teaching textbooks in technical communication. All this information helped me build my professional ethos of "wordsmithing," the idea that technical communicators use words to craft experiences for users, giving those people the tools they need to solve problems. As part of my proposal, I submitted my idea to my committee, comprised of English Professors Karen Gulbrandsen and Stan Harrison, along with the head of the English department, Jerrold Blitefield. My proposal was accepted by my committee and I began work on the site in the spring of 2014.

I used Microsoft Word to compose this publication.