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Subject:call for narratives From:Dale Sullivan <dsulliva -at- MTU -dot- EDU> Date:Tue, 20 Oct 1998 15:45:22 -0400
Call for Narratives
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So, you always wanted to be a paperback writer . . .
Jerry Savage (Assistant Professor of English and Tech Comm at Illinois
State) and
Dale Sullivan (Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Tech Comm at Michigan
Tech) wish to collect narratives showing experiences of the professional
communicator's life and to
bring them together in a book titled something like _Imagining the
Profession: Stories
of Technical Communicators_. Our primary audience will be under grad
tech
comm students who need an introduction to the field.
You pick the stories--they should be true stories or stories based on
real events.
They can be written in first person: "I rolled out of bed and pulled on
my blue
jeans, wondering all the time whether a .pdf file would be better than
. . ." They can
be in third person: "She walked down the row of cubicles, catching
glimpses of . . ."
The stories should let us see problems and their solutions, but they
also should let
us see working environments and personality types. Political dimensions
of professional life are also important for students to understand.
Stories can be about consulting work or about work performed by
employees. Remember the students--write something that will hold their
attention and experience the world of work. Think of _The Soul of the
New Machine_ or _Double Helix_ as long versions of the type of thing
we're after.
Stories should be from 3 to 10 pages in length (single spaced), should
be in .rtf format,
and should be sent to Dale Sullivan at <dsulliva -at- mtu -dot- edu>. Deadline for
submission is
January 15, 1999. Contact us early if you wish to discuss possible
topics.