The Cryptic World of Academia
When I recently embedded Brion McClanahan's rant against academia, including pretentious, cryptic journal article titles, dissertations or books, I had to chuckle It brings me back to an anecdote when I delivered a copy of my dissertation to the University of Houston administration as part of the process of completing the doctorate. My title (see the blog webpages) was deceptively simple; the administrative assistant looked at it and said, "I can actually read this title."This was intentional on my part; even coming up with a journal article title was sometimes a creative task. For example, I sometimes used a bipolar psychological scale called a "semantic differential". Osgood's monograph introducing the semantic differential was "The Measurement of Meaning". So when I wrote one of my post-doctoral articles, I came up with "What Readers Mean by 'Good Documentation'" Ir was a play on words any applied psychologist would immediately recognize, a type of inside joke.
A few weeks back, I got a copy of my dissertation chair (Richard Scamell)'s vita (academic resume). I scanned down to my friend Bruce Breeding's (see below) dissertation (all three of us office mates (including Minnie Yen) had Scamell. for a chair). Bruce has never discussed his dissertation or other research with me; I'm fairly unusual in the sense I was good at both abstract thinking as well as detailed. I could often debug a student's program in a glance and "see" the problem without going line by line. I could see layers and patterns in code and peel off layers. It would be difficult to summarize all my students' errors, but one illustrates. She didn't understand why the field wasn't displaying in her output. Her logic was correct and she was peinting the right field. But she had specified the field positions in a way she didn'ttake into account the justification of text in specifying output, so she was printing space-padding positions of the field.
Almost any MIS graduate student in a program patterned after the University of Minnesota's founding program is familiar with MBTI, a Jungian-influenced cognitive fit typology. I found it interesting (like reading one's horoscope) although not terrible useful or productive (in the sense of explaining little variance. Let me explain what I mean by 'useful', just what do you do in the real world: assign project teams on complementary cognitive fit measures? Or maybe you train team members on how to communicate to others with different cognitive fit measures? More importantly, if you look at team conflicts, can they simply be attributed to incompatible fit, vs. say differences in personality? So, yes, Brtuce's and my MBTI scores were almost diametrically opposed.
Bruce, as I've mentioned before, is a certified accountant. He's very detailed-oriented, "can't see the forest for the trees" type of guy. I'm wired very differently; I've always been very creative, have written poetry, songs, and short stories. I basically did my whole dissertation from scratch; neither Scamell or my other committee members contributed to the process; I learned by doing and gained in confidence. While in academia I was always juggling at least a dozen projects at the same time. I did want to do research with colleagues, including Bruce. I just spent an ungodly amount of time dealing with organizational politics and job hunting, 3 different universities in my last 3 years. When I tried to partner, e.g., with my former UH colleagues at conferences, I was forced into a leadership role; what I wanted them to do with was talk their passion and see if something popped up at me as interesting like it seemed when I read hundreds of papers in psychology or education. It;s difficult to explain the creative process. For example, I had been exposed to confirmatory factor analysis with marketing folks in research methodology courses. There had been few, if any, such studies in MIS. Zmud had published a famous papee in my field yielding some puzzling factors; I also hadn't seen a replication study, so I decided to do a small study while at UWM, seeing if Zmud's factors could be predicted (long story short, no). When I presented the paper at a DSI national proceeding, to my surprise, there wasn't an empty chait in the room. They LOVED my little paper and presentation. (Zmud didn't show, of course.). It was like my Sally Field moment (i.e., "You really, really like me.") I was in the zone; I had won the respect of my peers. I had nursed the project from its genesis; nobody to the best of my knowledge had ever published anything critical of the study. I was taking on a risk in challenging one of the classic papers in the literature.
So getting back to Bruce's dissertation title, it wasn't immediately obvious to me what the hell it meant. This isn't an attack on the study; it could be a worthy study with a title that simply sucks. It was the exact opposite of my attempt to draw an audience curious as to what I found to be 'good documentation, relative to their own assessments. Now, granted, everyone pays lip service to the necessity of good documentation, but it is not intrinsically a priority until its absence is noticed.
It wouldn't surprise me if Bruce brought up MBTI in his dissertation; even his spouse Susan has brought up MBTI during her post-stroke daily updates. I remember Bruce absolutely mystified by the creative aspects of my abilities, like "how does that even work?" A lot of it is based on hard work. It's almost as if your subconscious is working in the background, and you wake up one day humming a song you never heard before. Or you start writing something, and it seems to take on a life of its own, writing itself.
I have no idea how many readers I've drawn in terms of my papers and book chapters. Probably more than McClanahan's estimate of less than a dozen, including journal editors and authors. I know for instance, the University of Washington tried to recruit me back around 1987-88, despite my never having taken a technical communication course or being in contact with a single, faculty member. I've gotten maybe a dozen or so postcards from international academics asking for copies of papers.. Academia.edu has shown at least a handful of academics over the last couple of months checking out a 30-year-old article. And, of course, I have enough of an ego to Google myself. Now being cited, say, by 10, doesn't sound impressive, but it's likely most readers haven't written articles or books citing my paper, and I don't know the specifics of the analysis.At least a few of the extracts below are other academics citing my papers (versus the papers themselves).
Ronald Guillemette. Houston. "Application Software Documentation: A. Reader Measure." Olumhense Anthony Imoisilli. Pittsburgh. "Task Complexity, Budget ...
Collaborative writing, software engineering, and the universe ...
faculty.washington.edu › farkas › dfpubs
by DK FARKAS - Cited by 43 - Related articles
ment and the analytical literature that accompanies them. Of note in this regard are Ronald Guillemette's rationale for adapting rapid prototyping to documenta-.The Cloze procedure: An assessment of the understandability ...
https://www.sciencedirect.com › science › article › abs › pii
by RA Guillemette - 1989 - Cited by 10 - Related articles
Ronald A. Guillemette is an Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems and Mayfield Research Fellow at the University of Texas-El Paso. He received ...
Many scholars call for systematic empirical research in technical writing. This article reviews the Westley-MacLean communication model and provides an ...
Jane M. Carey - 1997 - Computers
Ronald A. Guillemette SoftDoc Minnie Yi-Miin Yen University of Alaska-
Jane M. Carey - 1995 - Computers
Chapter 13 THE EVALUATION OF USABILITY IN INTERACTIVE INFORMATION SYSTEMS Ronald A. Guillemette SoftDoc The importance of usability in ...The meaning of reading-to-do documentation - IEEE Journals ...
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org › document
by RA Guillemette - 1986 - Cited by 3 - Related articles
The meaning of reading-to-do documentation. Publisher: IEEE. 1. Author(s). Ronald A. Guillemette. View All Authors. Sign In or Purchase. to View Full Text. 1.
by RW Bailey - 1983 - Cited by 86 - Related articles
Ronald A. Guillemette, Predicting readability of data processing written materials, ACM SIGMIS Database, v.18 n.4, p.40-47, Summer 1987 · Donald P. Ballou ...Domains of Educational Objectives: An Information Systems ...
https://www.tandfonline.com › doi › pdf
by RA Guillemette - 1991 - Cited by 6 - Related articles
RONALD A. GUILLEMETTE. Consultant. Normal, D1inois. INTRODUCTION. Evaluations in information systems (IS) education serve a number of purposes. such ...
... An Alternate Method for Developing Documentation. Prototyping: An Alternate Method for Developing Documentation (pp. 135-141). Ronald A. Guillemette.
academic background - UAA College of Business and Public ...
https://business.uaa.alaska.edu › directory › documents › yen_m-141500
Minnie Yi-Miin Yen and Ronald A. Guillemette, "Minimalist Design of Instructional
Assessing the Use of an SQL Minimal Manual in Self-Instruction / Ronald A. Guillemette and Minnie Yi-Miin Yen; 9. The Impact of Production Emphasis on ...
Jul 1, 1986 - Ronald A. Guillemette. Pages: 40-40. doi>10.1145/1113523.1113532. Full text: PDF. Documentation constitutes a significant, primary interface .
What is usability in the context of the digital library and how ...
scholarworks.sjsu.edu › cgi › viewcontent
by J Jeng - 2005 - Cited by 200 - Related articles
Jan 1, 2005 - Guillemette, Ronald A. 1995. The evaluation of usability in interactive information systems. In Human factors in infor mation systems: Emerging ...
by VA McEwen-Beeman - Related articles
Ronald Guillemette, “Usability in Computer Documentation Design: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations," IEEE Trans. Prof. Comm.,. December 1989BEB: Update Status
For unfamiliar readers, Bruce Breeding was my best friend during my PhD student days back at the University of Houston; we shared an office with Minnie Yen. Bruce suffer 2 strokes at the beginning of June, the second one (at the hospital) massive.
Well, the biggest news is Bruce is finally off formula and on a soft pureed type diet. He has had recurring intolerance issues with the formulas leading to occasional purging during physical therapy. He continues to progress in standing and walking with minimal assistance. Susan and Bruce are very devout Protestants, and Susan is elating that Bruce will attend his first church service in months this weekend (with her driving him).
They have him on an accelerated program (say, 6 vs. 4 hours a day) in part because apparently Bruce's coverage ends this month. Susan hasn't mentioned specifics--I would assume CORBA is not an option. Susan isn't really addressing what happens later. I think she's probably enrolling him in Medicare, but she hasn't mentioned if he's going home (to Austin vs. Irving) at the end of the month, if she'll be taking over rehabilitation or what. But she is waxing enthusiasm over Bruce's progress these last few weeks in Irving.
