Ken Rainey Award for Excellence in Research – Nominations due 4 November

Ken Rainey Award for Excellence in Research – Nominations due 4 November

Ken Rainey, a professor at Southern Polytechnic State University and an STC Fellow, produced major research studies that provide ongoing benefit to the field of technical communication. Ken passed away in the fall of 2006, but during his years of service to STC, he designed and published many studies that helped connect what is taught in the classroom with what technical communicators do in the workplace.

To celebrate and honor Ken Rainey’s passion for research that results in improvements to technical communication, especially to practice, the Ken Rainey Award for Excellence in Research has the following goals:

  • Acknowledge the importance and value of exemplary research to the field of technical communication.
  • Encourage quality and excellence in technical communication research by honoring those whose research studies have made an outstanding contribution to the field.
  • Recognize research that makes an outstanding contribution to practice as a priority, but research that strengthens or extends curricula will also be considered worthy of this award.

All research methods will qualify for this award. Examples are (a) empirical work that a researcher describes as quantitative, qualitative, case study, ethnographic, naturalistic, survey, usability, archival, bibliographic, etc., or (b) modeling or other new approaches not yet applied to technical communication studies.

Nominees must be current members of the Society for Technical Communication and need to have been STC members for at least twelve months prior to the nomination. STC members are eligible regardless of other STC honors or awards received (Fellow or Associate Fellow, President’s Award, and so on). Current members of the Ken Rainey Award for Excellence in Research Committee, STC Research Grants Committee, and STC board of directors are not eligible to be nominated for this award. This award will not be given twice to the same person.

Nominees must fit one or both of these categories:

  • An STC member who has conducted a lifetime of quality research that has made significant contributions to the field of technical communication.
  • An STC member who has made a significant contribution to the field of technical communication due to a high-quality, single empirical study or a high-quality set of related empirical studies.

Although nominations for both categories will be accepted each year, the award committee will decide each year which category of researcher will be recognized. A person’s longevity in the field will not be a factor in the award.

Self-nominations are allowed, as are nominations from anyone else in the field.

For additional details please refer to the Ken Rainey Award guidelines.

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