Education

Ph.D.Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst - 1981 (Dissertation Advisors: Emmon Bach, Barbara H. Partee and Edmund L. Gettier)

B.A. Mathematics, Carleton College - 1976

Professional Affiliations

• Society for Technical Communication
• ACM Computer Society (and Special Interest Group in Documentation, SIGDOC)

Works Finished

Before the Web, when your location still meant your x and y coordinates on the globe and not your URL, and when Kinko's hadn't yet invented the verb to office-- apparently now abandoned--I held down some interesting assignments:

BRS Software Products is a text retrieval software company. BRS provided search engines and online services a decade before the Web was invented. They were country, when country wasn't cool.

• Senior Technical Writer, Software Development Services 1993-1994
• Supervisor, Documentation and Training, Assembler Software Development 1989-93
• Documentation and Training Specialist, Assembler Software Development 1988-89

Responsible for a wide range of information products. Initial responsibilities included the preparation of training materials and documentation in hardcopy and online formats for end-user, system administrator and technical audiences. Subsequent assignments added managerial responsibilities, preparation of collateral materials and active participation in the software design process and standards maintenance- all within a lively software development environment.

• Designed courses for both external and internal use. Trained end user, internal development, sales, administrator and technical support audiences. Topics ranged from interface and database design, to Unicode, to WordPerfect, to SGML.
• Active in design sessions for hypertext, document conversion, annotation, hierarchical structuring and e-mail applications.
• Prepared marketing collateral materials (press releases, brochures, newsletters).
• Established procedures for standards conformance (ISO 9000, Unicode, SGML,...) to aid software development lifecycle.
• Represented BRS at professional organizations and User Group meetings.
• Active in development team of Microsoft Windows GUI (in compliance with Microsoft Windows Interface Design Standards).

The Department of Communications at Robert Morris College, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was home from 1983-86. I was an Assistant Professor and

• Helped establish a Communications Management major.
• Headed courses in Document Design.

The Communications Design Center at Carnegie Mellon University is a center for research in document design and corporate communications. I worked there from 1983 to 84.

• Supervised writers in the revision of The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel - the "Bible" of the steel-making industry, and wrote technical chapter on Ladle Metallurgy.
• Conducted market research, interviews and user protocol analysis of book users.

Some Related Matters from 1976 till 1988

Here are some other projects that have occupied my interest:

• Conducted training sessions on "Intercultural Communications and Thai Business Practices" for Westinghouse senior management being relocated to Thailand.
• Acted as consultant for Curriculum Development and Educational Training at Ramkhamhaeng University, Thailand.
• Provided consulting services for a school that wanted to develop programs for international students.
• Conducted training sessions on "Forms and Office Procedures Design" for New York State employees concerned with readability criteria, forms analysis and design, and using writing to get things done.
• Taught courses in numerous aspects of linguistics (semantics, syntax, conversational analysis) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and on a Visiting appointment at the State University of New York at Albany. At times I have thought that my interests in semantics and conversation were quite separate from my writing interests. But as the Web develops, the two converge as the reinvention of writing continues.