Graduate Student, English
Doctoral Candidate, Purdue OWL Coordinator
Liberal Arts
Thesis Title: Networks of Communication in Emergency Medical Services
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Richard Johnson-Sheehan
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About
My dissertation provides one of the first lines of inquiry into emergency medical services (EMS) communication via professional and technical writing and medical rhetoric. My research adds to these fields by incorporating perspectives of writing in a discipline from writers in a discipline, re-introducing memory to the canons of rhetoric, and extending genre theory and activity theory to include assemblage theory and the role human memory plays in genre, activity, and documentation. Additionally, as a member of the EMS and academy communities, I address the gap in engagement between these areas by using ethnographic research methods, including participant-observation, surveys, and interviews.
Based on results from data, I offer instructors practical teaching suggestions for preparing students to communicate through writing in medical fields. Specifically, I suggest instructors discuss how students in pre-health majors translate information to both expert and lay audiences, and provide students with opportunities for writing to real audiences either through developing community partnerships with health facilities or creating medical internships. In providing these suggestions, I draw from my research findings in which participants reported the importance of medical professionals learning writing “on the job.”
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