Write Stripes

Three topics that would interest me most for the collaborative project are: stem cell research, school vouchers, and social security reform.

Our group has decided to study the stem cell debate as the topic for our voter guides.

Seeing as Andrew’s and my topic is a little obscure (net neutrality), if anyone is interested in reading a little bit about it here are two Op-Ed articles that do a good job of presenting each side:

- http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/06/09/newmark.internet/index.html is pro “net neutrality”

- http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/06/09/mccurry.internet/index.html is against “content regulation”

Four topics of interest to me for the collaborative project are:
- Handling of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay
- Funding of higher education in SC
- Federal energy policy
- Internet neutrality

For anyone who missed class, Russell and I are doing our collaborative project on net neutrality if you would like to join our group. If you are interested drop me an email at ahager@clemson.edu

The three election issues I would be most interested in discussing for the collaborative project would be stem cell research, oil costs / energy alternatives, and immigration issues dealing with amnesty and border security.

For anyone who missed class today! Come work with Michaela and me on Immigration Issues for the collaborative project!! Send an email to either mcudney@clemson.edu or ameisbu@clemson.edu. Have a lovely weekend everyone!
ali*

Today in class we discussed possible topics for our collaborative project. I found some interesting issues online, both state and national.
An important issue for South Carolina is the growing concern about energy fuels and the costs and environmental effects associated. Many SC and NC farmers are proposing replacing the cash crop tobacco with crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes that can be used to make sugar-based ethanol as an energy source. This energy source is very efficient and much cleaner than fuels presently used.
Another issue I looked into was that of allowing vouchers to be given to lower income, minority children for private schools. This is a nationwide issue that has been debated for the last few years.
I was also interested in the issue of the government giving grants to Black and Hispanic colleges. I had not heard of this issue before, and I would like to learn more about it. It would be interesting to compare views on affirmative action and related topics to some of the opinions on the issue of grants given to minority colleges.
The topic that my group eventually decided on is that of immigration, amnesty, and border security. This issue is creating a huge concern within our country. We have decided to use a college student audience.

If you weren't in class today 9/7 me and meredith are doing health care reform if you want to join our group me at cwhitak@clemson.edu if you would like.

In an upcoming election, I would be extremely interested in learning more about stem cells- more about stem cell research, funding, the pros and cons of such research, etc. I think it is a really misunderstood issue that a lot of people don't even try to educate themsleves on because they feel overwhelmed by the information already out there. I am also interested in budget deficits and alternative fuels.

Three election issues:
Voting via the internet
Oil Companies
Regulation of money in elections

For the collaborative project I am interested in health car reform, welfare reform, and also education issues.

Some key issues with the upcoming election that I thought were interesting are:
1) Net neutrality
2) Rising oil prices and alternative forms of energy
3) policies concerning the war in Iraq

For the collaborative project, I'm interested in the following issues:
1. Stem Cell Research
2. Oil Companies/Gas Prices/Energy Alternatives
3. Exit Strategies in Iraq War

There are many different topics and issues that would be of interest to college students for determining who to vote for in the coming Presidential election. One I think would be good to educate the public on would be the Social Security crisis and what reform measures have been taken recently and why it is seemingly so hard to change the laws now that the system has been in place for so long. I studied this recently in my intermediate macroeconomics class, and I feel it would be good for students to understand this issue as it will greatly affect their lives in the next few decades. Another good issue to focus on would be the Iraq war, the current political and social situation in that region, and the different views on how to bring that conflict to a close and restore peace in the region. I think arguing about whether or not we should have gone to war in the first place in Iraq gets very messy very quickly as people’s political ideologies get in the way of rational argument, so I feel it would be best to just discuss exit strategies and ways to help Iraq continue to develop into a stable democracy and ally. Finally, I think a good issue to educate college voters on would be energy reform and how to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I think that it would be very important to know where a candidate stood on that issue and how he would plan to aid researchers and/or pass laws to discover new ways to produce energy more efficiently and in a cleaner/less environmentally impacting way.

After interviewing Sonya Moore, a nurse that has worked in a variety of medical disciplines, I gained a new perspective on the importance of technical communication. The daily writing was what I expected: writing charts, diagnoses, and prescriptions. She said that classes she took in nursing school helped her to learn the ways of technical communication, but thought it would be beneficial to take medical terminology classes as an undergraduate to be prepared for higher schooling. She stressed the importance of technical communication to prevent injury and death among patients. She has witnessed errors in technical communication where patients received medicine they were allergic to and had serious complications. What interested me was how she discussed the importance of your tone and body language with a patient. Certain ways of speaking will make the patient listen more intently so they take their medications correctly, but his language differs among children, teenagers, and the elderly. Another part of technical communication I found interesting is the use of a transcriptionist. A doctor will record his diagnoses and care plans onto a tape and a transcriptionist will listen to the tapes and type them up. This could be a major source of error in technical communication if something is typed wrong or spoken incorrectly. I realized how important technical communication is in the medical field because you are dealing with people's lives.

This week I interviewed Mark Williard of Williard Ferm Architects. The thing that most surprised me was the volume of technical writing involved in architecture. I had always thought of architectural communication as mainly visual, but that is not the case. I also learned about the extreme importance of technical writing in architecture, because most lawsuits can be traced back to bad communication between the architect and the client.

This week I interviewed Mike Henson. He is a professor here at Clemson but he has had previous experience in other fields of Microbiology. The most important point that he made throughout the entire interview was that the integrity of your writing was the most important aspect of it. I knew that writing with integrity was important but I never thought about it being the most important thing. I asked him what his writing said about him. He said that he hoped his writing says that his "curiosity in the lab allows him to ask the appropriate questions and to get correct answers and to do it with integrity." He also stated that he would rather get something right and not publish than to get something wrong and publish it. I had never thought that integrity was the most important part of writing but if you do not have the trust of your audience then you have nothing.

Last week I interviewed Bridget Allen, a neonatal nurse and neonatal outreach educator. She has also worked as a staff nurse, transport nurse, and nurse manager throughout her twenty-seven year career. She was extremely helpful in explaining to me the importance of technical writing in the field of nursing. Technical writing has altered with each position she has taken on, and it has evolved as technology and patient needs have changed. I was surprised at the various forms of technical writing she did in each of the areas she worked in. As a staff nurse and transport nurse she mainly did patient charting, while as a nurse manager she wrote reports explaining trends and statistics. Now, as an educator, she develops presentations, handouts, and lecture materials. So, it is important to be flexible and willing to develop new writing skills as you progress in your career. The writing she does is also used by several people; nurses, physicians, and patients in eight hospitals and five health departments. This helped me to really understand how important communication through technical writing is. The effects of such writing spread far and wide, and so technical writing must be skillfully completed in order to communicate accurately, understandably, and efficiently. Another topic that I found interesting was the effect of the relatively new system of charting by exception. This system of technical writing has been an important development in nursing. It is when only those things that are out of the ordinary are focused on. This structure has significantly altered technical writing in nursing, and is an important system nurses must learn and follow in their career. It has helped to end the problem of repetitive and lengthy reports that previously took up time and energy that could be spent on other important responsibilities. Also, technical writing done by others in the field of nursing is very important in developing lectures and presentations. Most of Mrs. Allen’s information comes from nursing and medical journals, textbooks, and online sources. Researching others’ works is an important part of Mrs. Allen and other nurses’ careers. So, it is important to have skilled technical writers to relay important information in every field, including nursing. Finally Mrs. Allen’s advice was that I should make sure to develop good writing skills as a student, and also to shadow an experienced nurse. Practice makes perfect, so with time your writing will develop if you have formed a strong foundation to build on.
Meredith

After discussing technical writing with Professor John Meriwether in Clemson University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, I was left with one prominent point – what is most difficult about scientific writing is being able to compress months, or even years, worth of research into an article short enough for publication. The length could be as short as a few pages for a review or as “long” as twenty pages for a major article in a premier journal. He also stressed the importance of technical writing at every stage of a scientific endeavor. He told of a graduate student who had taken meticulous notes (around 500 pages) in a three-ring binder for her thesis research only to have all the pages fall out one day in the lab. Of course, she had forgotten to number the pages and had to spend months recreating her notes by sorting through the pages and repeating experiments. The moral, he said, is to always count on something unexpected happening; you should plan for someone to recreate your entire life’s work from your lab notebooks. When I asked him about writing outside of research, he mentioned correspondence among colleagues and administrators, preparing lectures, and writing examinations. He felt those entering a career in academia tended to be well prepared for their scholarly writing – all university researchers have written and defended both a thesis and a dissertation. Undergraduate preparation should focus on basic grammar and the formation of detailed notes and reports in laboratories.

I interviewed Mark Hastings, the engineering manager in charge of software development at Itron, where I am a co-op. The answers I recieved from the interview were very close to what I expected to hear and as a result, there were not many suprises. I had some experience in the field from the summer and saw how technical writing was used in documents that explain projects and how they can be used for presentations to explain ideas and concepts to people at the company. I did learn from the interview, however, how important technical communication is. Mark explained how important it is to communicate ideas that are technical in a way that is clear yet concicse in order to keep the attention of someone who lacks the technical knowledge of the field. This communication may involve writing, but it can also take advantage of audio and visual aids which helps to keep the information attractive for someone who does not know the technical aspect of the topic. He emphasized how important it is to be able to communicate to various kinds of people, whether it be for someone who is financially oriented such as upper management or for someone who is people oriented such as marketing. I learned that the most effective way is not necessarily the most technical way, but the way that is shortest that clearly explains the point. Keeping technical communication shorts maintains the audience's attention span and thus is more effective in communcation ideas to them. Being able to relay the information through documents, presentations, memos, and conversations is a very important skill as from Mark's experience those who can do this effectively advance faster in the work place. Mark also stressed the importance of collaboration that is used in the field as documents written for programs must be able to clearly communicate the workings of a program in a way so that a non-technical user can understand. Collaboration provides different view points that can be used to better construct these technical writing documents as well as others for the most effective communication possible.

Today I interviewed Dr. Broderick, an anesthesiologist, who currently works in Florence, SC. The interview was very informative to me, showing a side of medicine which I had never really paid attention to before. Most of the technical writing Dr. Broderick comes into contact with on a daily basis are in the form of medical journals, continuing education articles, and occasionally referencing textbooks. It was apparent during the interview that large technical writing assignments were not a significant part of Dr. Broderick’s everyday work, although the smaller technical writing including memos, notes on charts, orders for drugs and care, and patient exams were very common. As Dr. Broderick explained, the number one problem causing hospital medical errors today is lapses in communication due to poor technical writing skills, especially including the illegibility of doctors’ orders. This may be due to the inattention and lack of emphasis on technical writing within the medical field; while every other field has emphasized technical writing skills more and more, medicine has stayed fairly stable in its emphasis (or lack there of) of proper, and more importantly accurate, technical writing.

After conducting the interview with Renae Morgan concerning the importance of technical writing in the Information Technology profession, I was surprised about the information that I received. I asked her several question concerning her background in technical writing and its importance in the IT field. From my inquiries, I learned that MetLife places a lot of importance on technical writing due to their continued correspondence with business partners and clients from other companies. When writing programs and Test Plans, she is responsible for thoroughly capturing the testing process in written words for the business partners. Several times within her career at MetLife, she has observed failures in technical writing. Such failures in communication have been caused by business partners not providing the functional design documents necessary for programming, by the testers failing to document all testing efforts that were completed (thus preventing effective replication of the defect), and the developers failure to thoroughly describe the application to the business partners. Such failures in communication can have several different effects. Sometimes, they push deadlines back, which can cost people their raises and MetLife its clients. To improve the technical writing within MetLife, they have developed a new process called SPS (Single Process Set) that all testing and design documents must follow. This enhanced process will create a more uniformed, detailed document to assess the different aspects of a program. Since the summer of 2006, each employee has been asked to attend 2 training sessions that introduce SPS to them and explains how it will work. This process should improve the communication within the company and improve their ability to serve their customers. Before this interview, I was not aware of the level of technical communication within the company. Afterwards, I realized that though I am not in an English major or field, writing still plays a very important part in communicating the ideas and thoughts behind computer programs.

After my interview today with Sandy Garner, a former Interior Designer, I was surprised at the point that kept coming up in our conversation: the importance of communication. Sandy said that as an Interior Designer/ Decorator, communication and knowing how to communicate effectively are the top priorities. According to Sandy, if you don't know how to communicate the basics of a project, idea, or design, it is difficult to move a project to the more advanced steps that do require technical writing. She kept stressing that you must first establish yourself as knowledgeable and easy to understand and communicate with in the first stages of getting to know the client. Otherwise, such highly technical subjects Interior Designers must communicate to clients, like building codes, will be difficult to convey. I was also very interested in the training and preparation part of the interview. Like me, Sandy graduated college with a Psychology major. She ended up in the field by chance, so she had almost no vocation- specific training before she got in to the field. Although she was not trained in her undergraduate courses, she told me how surprisingly easy it is to catch on to the correct ways of communicating technically on the job. Sandy stressed the like anything, you can decide how quickly you learn by the amount of time you spend talking to other professionals and spending time outside of work practicing different ways of presenting technical information.

Today I interviewed Dr. Brent Copeland, DMD in Anderson, SC about the ways in which he uses technical writing in his field. Dr. Copeland has been in practice for the last twenty years, and he was able to give me a lot of insight into his work, such as composing a few business letters every week and other writing that any businessman would do. However, there are types of writing he does that I was not aware dentists did, such as communicating with other specialized dentists (endodontists, perio, ortho, oral surgeons) who operate on his patients and report back to him about the procedures done to the patients. Once a patient’s mouth has been “worked on,” the other dentist sends Dr. Copeland a formal business letter, the patients chart, or a business card that details the procedure, which teeth were worked on, and any recommendations for further care. Also, Dr. Copeland told me that he has never done any formal research or reported in a medical journal, but that usually this is reserved for dentists who are professors at dental schools. Another type of technical writing he had recently worked on was a “Practical Personnel Manual” that he brought in a consultant to help him develop, which is basically a manual that he has new workers read when they are hired that sets out the rules and office policy, the mission statement for his practice, and basically helps communicate more efficiently with new employees. All of this was very interesting as I have shadowed dentists before, but have never seen this side of the job before, the “business” side that is so important to running a practice.

I gathered much information from my meeting with Packaging engineer Sean Connolly of TTI in Anderson about the kinds of technical writing done in Packaging. Many of the things that Sean told me I had expected him to say. For instance, he talked about writing reports, spec sheets, and emails to coworkers about projects. He also talked about writing many lab reports in college and at his first job at Fujifilm. I was surprised when he told me he does not do much technical writing at his job at TTI. I learned that as a marketing and graphics-based engineer, most of his work includes designing on the computer with software programs like Artios and Cape, and the majority of his writing is emailing his coworkers, boss, and customers. I was intrigued to learn that Sean had gotten the opportunity to publish some of his research in Packaging and Forestry magazines. He told me that writing for these publications was difficult, because he had to give the most important information in a limited amount of space, which was a major constraint. I was surprised to hear that he had the experience of going to conferences to discuss his and other Packaging engineers' publications. Sean said that he used to read many articles written by other Packaging scientists to help him with his research and publication writing skills. Although Sean does not do much report writing or extensive technical writing at his job, he is still very involved in some types of writing in the Packaging industry.

I found it very surprising how Mr. West, the pharmacist at CVS/Pharmacy, insisted that the most important technical communication he uses is basic writing and communication skills, which, apparently, aren’t used as often as they should be. He said that, yes, a C.V. is important to keep up, and directions for drugs are a necessity, but as far as talking with patients and doctors, being able to clearly express your advice and questions is crucial, and probably the most technical communication that you’d ever have to do on the job. However, when I asked him about collaboration with colleagues, he said that it was vital that clear, concise notes should be left by his partner pharmacist so that patient’s problems were solved in a timely fashion, since sometimes solving the issues takes many days and phone calls to different people.
He said that if you were in a more academic setting, then writing grants and journal articles would be more likely, but at a retail pharmacy, there is mostly conversation with patients and doctors and colleagues.
He didn't have many suggestions on what students should learn before becoming pharmacists except to have experience in talking and dealing with many different kinds of people.
I was surprised to learn how uncommon it is that basic communication sometimes is a barrier or constraint to efficient and productive work. I found it interesting that he emphasized this point so much too.

The range of technical writing in the medical field can vary depending on the place of work and the discipline you choose to enter. If you own your own practice you may do more technical communicating daily than a physician that works in a hospital. When owning a business you have to send business letters, oversee payrolls, and discuss with sales representatives what types of medicines you want to use in your office. As a researching physician you would be responsible for writing grants, proposals, and articles for academic journals. Any type of doctor would communicate through many ways daily. Doctors must write on patients' charts, talk to patients and their families about treatments, communicate with other doctors, and write prescriptions so that it creates effective communication with the pharmacists.

The range of technical writing in my field is really large, if you take in the whole scope of pharmacy as a discipline. On the academic side, there are journal articles, grants, proposals, lectures and presentations. On the retail or hospital side—or the “practice” of pharmacy—there are execution reports, directions to the doctors in patient’s charts, and directions as to how to administer or take the drugs. There is such a wide range, that there really is a lot of technical writing in the field of pharmacy.