Welcome to Issue 8.2 of Xchanges!
which features three scholarly research projects by undergraduate students. Two of our writers attend the University of Washington (Matthew Hertogs and Chloe Stiggelbout) and one attends Missouri Western State University (Jennifer Heater). As a result of an open call for papers circulated in Summer 2012, these undergraduate students submitted their article-length projects for double-blind review to the Xchanges faculty review board. We know that in reading their work, you too will be impressed by the rigor of the primary research in which these students engaged and the secondary research in which their projects are grounded.
Matthew Hertogs’s essay "Typing vs. Handwriting Notes: An Evaluation of the Effect of Transcription Method on Student Learning” engages with an issue of increasing importance in university classrooms and among college students and their professors. How is retention of information affected by the method by which students record notes during classtime? Using a variation of the NOTES evaluation system created by Stahl, King, and Henk, Hertogs assessed the notes of a sample group of students and measured the differences between type-written and hand-written notes in two different classes. As Hertogs concludes, “As technology advances and becomes an increasingly integral part of education, it is crucial for researchers to continuously study how these technological advances impact students’ notetaking.”
In the essay “Words or Visuals: Which Speaks Louder,” Jennifer Heater considers the many factors technical communicators must weigh when choosing images to accompany text in the documents they produce. Heater argues that in technical communication curricula, students’ educations in aspects of visual rhetoric must be expanded so that the choices they make as professionals can be sound, in terms of the ethics of the decisions they make when incorporating images and the efficacy of the conveyance of a message in a multimodal document.
Chloe Stiggelbout’s essay "Writing to Acceptance: How Students Learn to Write the Medical School Cover Letter" engages with the issue of genre education, particularly as it concerns the writing of documents associated with applying to medical school. By discussing a survey and an interview, Stiggelbout reveals the multiple “ways” to write in the genre of the “medical school cover letter.” The experiences of Stiggelbout’s interviewee suggest that some of these methods produce success . . . and some don’t. By learning the wide parameters for success in this genre—which can be learned from books, peer review, and mentor feedback—medical school applicants can navigate genre expectations with greater success.
These students’ research projects suggest the wide array of subjects writing and technical communication undergraduate students are pursuing today in Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication programs. After reading the engaging work of these undergraduate scholars, I am confident that students will be inspired to emulated their research rigor, in the domains of primary and secondary research, and faculty will be motivated to push their own students towards such levels of accomplishment and textual clarity.
--Julianne Newmark, Xchanges Editor