I’ve not done so well with my “four posts/month” blogging goal, lately. I finally pushed out my post on Giving criticism after it sat in my draft folder for the past month and a half. But, I’m back to talk about what I’ve been up to.

ACM SIGDOC 2016

My paper with Jan Spyridakis on the documentation feedback tool we developed for my dissertation experiment was due last week so we were working on that throughout April. I’m looking forward to presenting it this September at SIGDOC 2016. I think this tool has a lot of potential to help writers learn more about how readers are interacting with their content and I’m looking forward to hear about other applications that people will see for it.

IEEE PCS 2016

Jan & I had our paper on the benefits (and the necessity) of testing best practices in context accepted to the PCS 2016 conference in October. This paper reviews the benefits and perils of applying best practices and examines how best practices and their application can be improved to everyone’s benefit. The paper was also due towards the end of April. While I haven’t been blogging, Jan & I were very busy whipping these two papers into shape.

Mercer University

I accepted a faculty position in Mercer University’s Technical Communication department. Mercer is located in the state of Georgia and I’ll be teaching at the Macon campus. This will be a big change in career, residence, climate, industry, and pretty much any other aspect you can imagine. After visiting Macon, Mercer, and the TC department, I was hooked. I’m looking forward to the new adventure that starts this fall.

Actually, the adventure started in April, as well, as my wife and I began scoping the logistics of the move. Exciting times.

STC

The 2016 STC Summit starts next week. I submitted a presentation proposal that was not accepted. That was a little disappointing, but given all that I have on my list of things to do this month, it was a blessing in disguise. The silver lining is that my presentation will be a webinar this December. See more about the webinar at: Plan Your API Documentation by Understanding the Audience, Market, and Product.