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Projects

This section is devoted to highlighting my thoughts and research on the importance of usability testing for technical writing and design.
Usability was an important focus of my graduate technical writing studies, considering the notion that all documents (ideally) serve an intended use; in particular, I learned that usability testing is a needed practice to determine whether or not interface designs (both physical and representational) are intuitive and appealing. 
 
The following samples are included:
 
  1. Usability essay - Included as an example of research writing on the topic of usability, featuring my views and opinions on what other usability specialists claimed in their own observations of users, testers, and interfaces.
  2. Usability presentation - Slideshow created in conjunction with the research essay on usability testing, including uses of visual content with proper citation/attribution.
 
This section is devoted to highlighting my skills in producing instructional documents, such as guidelines and different forms of documentation.
Instructional writing was a prominent area of my undergraduate education, which I continued to develop throughout my graduate education. In regards to the latter, I was tasked with creating instructional writing within groups, and gained experience using annotations to illustrate my understanding of my intended audiences (as well as my own thought processes). 
 
The following samples are included:
 
  1. Piktochart help system - Included to show my documentation skills within a collaborative setting, and my contributions to developing a working online help system; in turn, I also included reflective writing that documents what I learned as the appointed group manager.
  2. Composition syllabus - Included to show my abilities to not only develop longform guidelines, but to also demonstrate the capability to articulate the decisions I made regarding content, layout, and presentation (as well as logical/philosophical reasonings behind what I wrote).
  3. On-boarding document - Included as an example of documentation writing in conjunction with my graduate assistantship as a technical writer for UALR's Collections and Archives department at Ottenheimer Library. 
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This section is devoted to technical writing projects demonstrating an emphasis on visual content, including online/multimedia composition.
 
In my undergraduate professional/technical writing courses, I tended to follow fairly simple document layouts, and avoided heavy use of images (and other media) out of underdeveloped practice with graphic design. As a graduate, I was expected to use (and experiment with) more elaborate visual components, as well as working with pieces of audio and video.
 
The following samples are included:
 
  1. Theater brochure - Included to show my ability to work with the symmetrical/spatial elements of a folded brochure document, and to also demonstrate uses of coloration and images to be visually attractive (and appropriate) for audiences who would want to visit such a theater. 
  2. 3DS manual - Included as a combination of my documentation practices with a larger emphasis on visual design; in particular, the manual shows my skills in drafting an instructional document with special considerations of content spacing and layout using a horizontal framework.
  3. Personal narrative - Included to illustrate skills with multimedia usage, with a particular focus on embedding audio and video elements; also included to highlight experience with nonlinear design work for presentations, including considerations of movement and grouping.
  4. Website (HTML/CSS coding) - Included to show basic practices in programming with HTML and CSS, and reworking/reformatting an earlier written document into a website framework (including the addition of multimodal composition).
This section features samples of a publishing project that demonstrate my abilities to pitch, outline, and market a hypothetical product.
 
Publishing was a fairly new area of education for me as a graduate, and went beyond many of the ideas and practices I clung to as an undergraduate. However, I found publishing to be an interesting field that included opportunities to apply my technical writing skills to a different professional context than my larger focus on documentation.
 
The following samples (taken from a larger project portfolio) are included:
 
  1. Book proposal - Included to demonstrate my ability to pitch and outline a book idea based on considerations of target audiences and existing content.
  2. Table of contents / Chapter outline - Included to show further work in planning the book's overall structure and organization.
  3. Development and design - Included to show further work in planning the book's overall visual elements and physical dimensions.
  4. Book marketing plan / E-book memo - Included to highlight my considerations of how the book will be promoted to its intended audiences, as based on factors of marketing research, media outlets (with an additional focus on E-book platforms), and relation to similar literature.
  5. Reflective essay - Included to share my thoughts and experiences on proposing and developing a (fictitious) book, and to discuss what I learned about publishing.
 
For more information >>
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