Introduction
Welcome to my website. My name is Dr. Michael Downing and I’ve been teaching English and writing courses at various colleges and universities in Pennsylvania for more than 30 years. I have also worked as a professional writer and technical journalist for a number of years and am the founding editor of the August Wilson Journal.
I currently teach at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, where I spend a fair amount of time teaching students how to create and publish content on the internet. In my classes, we cover the technical aspects of working on the back end of a website along with critical legal considerations relating to copyright and libel. Of course, we also work through the writing itself: audience, purpose, style, tone, length, developing multiple drafts and adding reputable sources through hyperlinks.
Disclaimer:
I tend to write with my students. This blog, then, is a laboratory/sandbox intended to accompany them through the content-creation and publishing process. As such, you might encounter slight inconsistencies from time to time which might appear to be errors but are actually experiments and/or teaching tools. For example, I’ve played with posting images in linear fashion, collage, and slide show just to see how WordPress handles the differences. I did not go back and correct for consistency (as I would if I were managing a website professionally), preferring to keep multiple examples so students can see multiple options.
My Writing Wanderland 