Research

Below are the links to user’s guides I wrote for Canary Systems, Inc. for their 2015 release. Because I am bound by a confidentiality agreement, I cannot provide physical copies directly to others without written consent from the company. However, you can download the guides I created using the links below.

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.

In late 2013, I wrote this short (293-word) article about the spacecraft Voyager 1 becoming the first man-made object to leave our Solar System. The This piece places the accomplishment in the context of Voyager winning a race against its predecessors, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. I consulted the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's 2012 study on an effect called "The Pioneer Anomaly," which explained what forces were acting on the Pioneer probes as they traveled deeper into space.

I wrote this usability report in late 2014. It includes the test plan, personas, heuristic evaluations, and results of the usability test I performed for the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's English department's Job Clearinghouse website prototype, developed from May to September 2014. I included various appendices to the report to show the forms for test I administered, including questionnaires, product reaction words, and agreements to be recorded. I observed how users interact with technology and what their reactions are to a website that's still in a prototype stage. I found their reactions to be invaluable in determining what users expect from a webpage and how they react to a piece of technology that was above their abilities to use it.

This report helped the head of the English department and the university's IT department see the benefits of having a dedicated web portal for English and Professional Writing students, and that it is a feasible project for replacing a more rudimentary and restrictive wiki.

This is the academic progression paper I submitted to the Society for Technical Communication as part of their Summit 2014 in Phoenix, Arizona. I focused on four principles both novice and technical communicators can use to prove how valuable they are to their employers. I combined the four principles from Robert Reich’s 1991 book The Work of Nations with aspects of iFixit.com to prove them in action. This paper gave way to a roundtable presentation I gave at the summit on May 20, 2014. This paper gives technical communicators a case study of how iFixit uses the four principles to show how it is an advocate for users and individuals can use the strategies to prove themselves as a valuable asset to their employers.

In late 2013, I wrote about the NASA spacecraft New Horizons making its final journey to the dwarf planet Pluto. I focused on how its instruments can be used to prove that Pluto is, in fact, not a planet, despite protestations from the public and the scientific community. Here, I wrote for an interested, but not attentive audience. I wrote this article as if it would appear in Popular Science or some other scientifically-oriented magazine. This gives interested readers a chance to learn about complex system, the spacecraft, and how its instruments can be used to finally prove that Pluto is not a planet.