Blog 1: Topic Interests
Blog 1: Topic Interests
One topic I might explore in technical communication is education. Although I do not plan to teach as part of my career, I have a vested interest in tutoring concepts to people, especially when it comes to helping them write. I might consider looking at how to create effective supplemental materials, handouts, and presentations for student use. Another topic I would be interested in exploring is health interventions. I learned a bit about health interventions in my previous Health Psychology course, and I think the concept would carry over well into technical communication. Basically, I could look at how to effectively create educational and promotional materials to help people change their negative health behaviors, whether that involves smoking, drinking, or any other kind of public health concern. Both topics involve mostly developmental goals, so I would be interested in adopting theoretical approaches to create effective documentation.
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ReplyDeleteI think the topic on creating promotional materials to help people change negative health behaviors would be an interesting topic. Does that mean looking into how promotional materials affect people and can aid them in quitting the behavior, or are you more interested in researching what kind of material would best aid people to quit the behavior?
DeleteI think it could go in either direction. The first question sounds like an evaluation of already existing materials, and the second one asks how people might create effective materials. I doubt I am the only one who thought of using knowledge from health psychology to develop better technical communication, but that is what I am hoping to find out. If it turns out that researchers have already taken that route, I could see how effective their materials are and aim to improve them. If not, I could suggest bringing the two fields together to develop better materials. Overall, my goals may change depending on what I find.
DeleteHi Ashton,
ReplyDeleteLike Brooke, I also like the 2nd topic you mentioned about health intervention in concert with examining how effective a specific technical communication practice/document is. There are various directions you may take for this type of investigation, even tweaking the research goals as you discover prior research, but the gist of the topic overall seems ideal within a PTW research context.
Keep reading up more on this and once a viable focus surfaces that might interest you, let me know and maybe we can set a brief Zoom meeting to tease out further what you have in mind, ok? Am here... :)