Academic Projects

For my final exam, I chose to create a technical report related to disability and/or accessibility that focused on the various learning spaces that were created out of necessity due to schools shutting down as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. I performed research to find out ways that educators were having to adjust to try to continue with children’s education (additionally to the ways in which I was personally aware).

The purpose of this assignment was to evaluate the editing skills we developed throughout this semester. Chicago Manual of Style was the style guide we needed to adhere to throughout the document. We needed to take care to not introduce new errors into the document.
I learned to try to use both hard copy and electronic copies to be able to more clearly see any errors that may be present. I also learned a great deal about using the Chicago Manual of Style and how it has a vast amount of rules that apply to almost any grammatical situation.

For this assignment, we were to create a research document related to digital culture for use on SHSU’s Iris Technical-Communication Suite’s blog. This would be a public facing document for academic use that would discuss the topic of technical communication in relation to rhetoric, composition, business, and media studies. I chose to discuss the shortage of minority groups and women in STEM and ways that organizations such as Code.org are trying to make computer science and coding more accessible and widely offered in schools, as well as encourage participation by girls and women in those fields.

In this assignment, we were to make a logical argument in the form of an Unsolicited Proposal that would address an issue to which we would propose a solution. The first step we took was to perform an Audience Analysis to aid us in making our argument. This Audience Analysis aided in the successful completion of the proposal.
My proposal was a request to my neighborhood’s homeowners association (HOA) to place a hand sanitizer station at the communal mailboxes (the request was fictional, the HOA is actually very good about keeping the mailbox area clean). The issue I was placing emphasis on was that if everyone in the neighborhood must use the mailboxes, there was a potential for the spread of germs and illnesses. My proposed solution was to place a hand sanitizer station at the mailboxes to try to mitigate the spread of said germs and illnesses.

This was a team assignment in which we worked together to provide an evaluation of Sam Houston State University’s website for the Master of Arts in Technical Communication website and make recommendations on things we believed could be improved. We were ultimately responsible for turning in our own report. We based our recommendations on Nielson’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. I learned how the usability heuristics can help a website be easier to view and promote smoother interactivity. It was interesting to analyze a website using the heuristics, because it is easy for the helpful features to go unnoticed until the heuristics help you look for them.
Our team was able to work well with one another and work on our designated portions. Our finished report is an informative document that was hopefully helpful in making updates to the website.