A Short Guide to Writing about History is an ideal complement for any history course intended to teach students to think and write like historians. This engaging and practical text will teach students how to go beyond reporting the basic dates and facts of their history books and show them how to infuse their writing with their own ideas and unique perspective. Covering brief essays and the documented resource paper, the text explores the writing and researching processes, different modes of historical writing (including argument), and offers guidelines for improving style as well as documenting sources. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1018/thumbnail.jpg

This user-guide provides instructions for operating Tardigrade 1.1.3, a cybersecurity software for Nollysoft, LLC. This guide instructs users step-by-step on how to set security controls, risk assessments, and administrative maintenance. Tardigrade 1.1.3 is a Risk Assessment Enterprise that evaluates the risk level of corporations and offers solutions to any security gaps within an organization. Tardigrade 1.1.3 is a role-based software that operates through three modules, Cybersecurity Assessment, Internal Control, and Security Requirement Traceability Matrix.

As widely recognized, the voices of community members have been severely overlooked in scholarship. This dissertation reports on interviews with 36 community partners from the three most common types of university-community partnerships in composition and rhetoric: Youth mentored in their writing by first-year composition (FYC) students; Non-profit staff acting as clients for upper-division professional writing students; and Community members (including adult literacy learners, youth slam poets, and rural teachers) working with graduate students in a community literacy practicum or engaged research course. The project offers a theoretical rationale for listening to community voices, combining theories from community development with critical raced-gendered epistemologies to argue for what I term "asset-based epistemologies," systems of knowing that acknowledge the advantages marginalized communities bring to the knowledge production process in service-learning. The dissertation also suggests a reciprocal, reflective storytelling methodology that invites community partners to analyze their own experiences. Each set of community members offered a distinct contribution to community-based learning: Latino/a high school students mentored by college students revealed the need to nuance traditional outcomes-based notions of reciprocity. The high school students experienced fear about interacting with college students, a response that I understand through Alison Jaggar's concept of "outlaw emotions." To mitigate this fear, the youth suggested emphasizing cultural assets and relationships, leading to what I term "relational reciprocity." Non-profit staff detailed their complex motivations for collaborating with professional writing courses, challenging the often-simplistic representations of non-profit partners in professional writing scholarship. Invoking the theory of distributed cognition, I use non-profit staff insights to describe how knowledge circulates in non-profits and how students can interact and write more effectively in organizational contexts. Community members who interacted with graduate students in a range of projects used the term "openness" to describe healthy partnerships, and I build from their stories, along with insights from bell hooks and Maria Lugones, to detail a disposition of openness needed for engaged work. This disposition includes open communication, open structures, open minds, open hearts, and open constructions of self and others. The dissertation concludes with an argument for attention to "relational literacies" in both service-learning practice and scholarship.

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<p>“Entrepreneur” is a broad concept which encompasses many types of businesspeople. This dissertation aims to shed light on two distinct forms of entrepreneurs by applying writing, activity, and genre research (WAGR) analysis to two separate entrepreneurial ecosystems. By examining the genre ecologies used by these entrepreneurs to achieve their goals, we can differentiate between them. The WAGR approach employed in this study focuses on three aspects of networks: the participants' goals, their use of genres, and the connections between goals and genre-use. The case studies in this dissertation revolve around two business accelerators; however, these accelerators differ significantly in the types of businesses they support. Spaceworks Tacoma exclusively accelerates art-oriented businesses with fewer than five employees, particularly those owned by entrepreneurs from marginalized backgrounds. These Spaceworks businesses start small and anticipate remaining small. On the other hand, Start-Up Chile (SUP) accelerates businesses centered on disruptive technology with the aim of rapidly scaling into large organizations.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The key finding of this research is that the entrepreneurs in the case studies not only diverged in their genre-use but also in the goals they sought to accomplish using genres. The most significant genre for microenterprise entrepreneurs in this study was the oral elevator pitch, which aimed to attract new customers. While these microenterprise entrepreneurs were focused on achieving business success, their real priority was improving their community, and this orientation was evident in the genre ecology they employed. On the other hand, high-growth entrepreneurs followed distinct stages where they initially focused on data gathering and iterating their product or service, then shifted their attention to marketing and seeking investment. Genres such as the business plan, business case, and slide-based business pitch, which were scarce or nonexistent at the microenterprise accelerator, were quite popular at SUP. The business pitch served multiple purposes at SUP, including receiving feedback from peers, progressing through the acceleration program, and establishing a reputation. Moreover, apart from genre-use, the objectives of these entrepreneurs were markedly different: the Spaceworks entrepreneurs had a local focus, whereas the SUP entrepreneurs were concerned with industry-level change.</p>

The focus of this research is on the involvement of narrative learning within technical communication and the benefits that such an involvement can bring to the field. I analyze literature from within technical communication to determine how narrative is perceived, as well as the traditions in technical communication that made the field resistant to the use of narrative in the past. These findings are considered with respect to the history and definition of narrative, as well as to how narrative can improve learning outcomes when compared to expository learning approaches commonly used in technical documentation. While narrative is not a new concept to technical communication, this thesis offers new insights through a multidisciplinary approach that considers the work of philosophers and narratologists that are relatively unknown to the field. Philosophers Daniel Dennett and Jerome Bruner, as well as narratologists Gerard Genette, David Rudrum, and David Darby, show that narrative forms the basis for the construction of reality and that all human learning is based on the stories that we construct to give meaning to the world. Research studies conducted on the efficacy of narrative based learning are discussed in detail and an analysis of the areas where narrative use would most benefit technical communication is provided. Recommendations are made for the future use of narrative in technical documentation and for further research on the implementation and cost of narrative solutions.

Copyright law, in general, is a multi-faceted and sometimes difficult to understand process. Although it is law, it is often not straight-forward and cannot be applied universally. While the concepts of copyright infringement and plagiarism may sometimes overlap, many confuse one for the other or think they are the same offense. This thesis is intended to serve as a primer to some basic aspects of copyright law for technical communicators, including issues surrounding public domain works, the fair use doctrine, the copyright clearance process, as well as why we should be concerned about our current copyright laws. Over the past few decades, Congress has increased the number of copyright extensions, and these extensions are pushing out works that were to expire into the public domain. This thesis provides details about the growing copyright reform movement to explore the possibilities of making our culture more egalitarian and democratic when it comes to the exchange of ideas and information. Those who support copyright reform believe current copyright laws increasingly favor corporations and special interest groups rather than the public, and insist on a balance in copyright laws to loosen some of the restrictions. This thesis illustrates the importance of the knowledge of copyright and its associated laws for technical communicators especially in these current times. With the growth of the Internet within the last 20 years, some of the core concepts of how copyright works for the analog age present some challenges when translated into our digital age. Young professionals - particularly those working in web-based media - are faced with some contradicting ideas on copyright, sharing, and piracy, especially when surrounded by peers who perpetuate incorrect notions about these topics. Technical communicators also need to be aware of the risks they run if they choose to ignore the law (or choose to remain ignorant of it), but, on a deeper level, they also need be prepared to deal with the philosophical and ethical inquiries that tie into the concept of copyright. This thesis also provides practical applications of the knowledge of copyright laws for technical communicators.