Bradford Connatser is a scholar and practitioner of technical communication. He has spent the last 35 years writing and editing technical documents. He has contributed to the field of technical and science communication, having published dozens of articles in leading trade magazines and scholarly peer-review journals. He has received dozens of awards for his work from the Society for Technical Communication, the Public Relations Society of America, and the U.S. Department of Energy. He taught English composition, technical writing, rhetoric, creative writing, and journalism at Temple University (Philadelphia), Maryville College (Maryville, Tennessee), and Pellissippi State Community College (Knoxville, Tennessee). He holds a B.A. degree in English from the University of Tennessee and an M.A. degree in English from Temple University.
Along with teaching at the college level, Bradford developed the journalism, rhetoric, technical-writing, and creative-writing courses that he taught at Maryville College, where he also managed the school newspaper and served as advisor for its yearbook. He developed and taught a distance-learning course in business communication at a college in the early 2000s and won several teaching awards for his student-centered approach (one at Temple and another at Maryville College).
Once he left the academy, he accepted a position as the Publications Manager at EPRI, where for over a decade he managed several technical-communication interns from the University of Tennessee and several in-house writers, editors, and illustrators. In this professional environment, he continually trained a staff of mostly electrical engineers and technicians to improve their writing, while teaching other professional communicators in the field and at conferences and while continuing his scholarship. During this period, he authored several articles and research papers, most notably “Teaching and Unteaching Engineers to Write in the Workplace: An Editor’s Perspective” and a chapter in a technical-communication textbook on conducting an internship.
He captured the “tribal knowledge” of fabrication employees at a company that manufactured nano-indenters as a way to teach the management of the company how the sausage is made, authoring an article on that experience to teach other technical communicators best practices. He created a book and software application for the apprentice training program of Alcoa Aluminum in Tennessee, including a scenario wizard that walked apprentices through real-life circumstances and quizzed them along the way.