Author: Tom Deans

Addison Kliewer did not initially plan to become a technical writer. As an undergraduate honors student majoring in English at the University of Texas, Austin, he envisioned an academic career in publishing, teaching, or even writing books. He was drawn to how storytelling can be enriching and insightful, fascinated by how clothing symbolized identity and status in classic literature like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. Multiple visits to his university’s career center where he learned about technical writing, along with his parents’ guidance (two former technical writers), changed everything. It wasn’t the writing career he had originally envisioned, but the…

Writing and technology—either together or separately—have always played a big role in my identity. I was a middle-class Brazilian kid in the early 1990s. So I would write about my feelings in a journal, read and replicate poems, play the synthesizer, and eventually type on our family Windows 98 computer.  As a teenager, some of the first times when I remember finding genuine community were not necessarily in school environments, but online, and to the sound of the dial-up internet. It was the early popularity of email and MSN; RPG online forums, Myspace, Orkut (a proto-version of Facebook, owned by…

During my formal education as an English and Portuguese language and literature undergraduate major in Brazil, I learned English through traditional methods like timed exams, grammar drills, and textbooks, and was mostly discouraged from using technology. This approach left me feeling inadequate, and I soon internalized that “writing in English was not for me.” Despite teaching English to Brazilians, I never felt confident in my written pieces in English. Everything changed when I started volunteering at CAPA, the Academic Publishing Advisory Center— a writing center in southern Brazil where I acted as a translator and tutor, translating faculty and graduate…