Alan Oak's experience and training in prose writing extends from professional and technical writing to creative fiction and non-fiction. He has published academic essays, interviews, personal essays, newspaper articles and technical articles. During his six years at Nortel and CSC, he wrote numerous proposals, reports, training documents and memos. He continues to do periodic professional writing for clients. His knowledge and proficiency in professional writing was recently expanded with the completion of his BA in English with a Professional Writing concentration from Ellis College of the New York Institute of Technology, which he completed in spring of 2008. Alan graduated cum laude from Ellis with a 4.0 GPA in all his coursework at Ellis. Alan is currently a graduate student in English at the University of Texas at Brownsville, where he has a 4.0 GPA and serves as founding president of the English Graduate Advancement and Development Society (EGADS!). As EGADS! president, he continues to do professional writing, including grant requests and organizational communications. His graduate training has enhanced his skills in research and argumentation, which he applies to all his creative and professional writing. Alan has made a special study of writing for the Web, and those writing skills are augmented by his skills in website creation and management. He served as webmaster for the Lone Star Community of the Society for Technical Communication from mid-2007 to mid-2008. At that time, he served as a column editor and copy editor for the community's newsletter, Technically Write, and contributed numerous articles on writing for the web, including:
While serving as layout editor for The UTD Mercury, the student newspaper at the University of Texas at Dallas, in 1999, he contributed articles and preformed copy editing, in addition to creating layout, custom ads, and collaborating with the printers. His personal essay on homeschooling, "Giving Up the Gold Stars," has been published in Life Learning (November/December 2006) and republished in Otherways Magazine (August/October 2007). His personal essay on the election of Barack Obama, "The Audacity to Hope Again," was included in Hope, Change & Obama: A Collection of Essays on an Historic Election by NLS Publishing (2009). Alan is an enthusiastic writer of fantasy and science fiction, and he participates actively in several writers groups. He incorporates narrative techniques into his professional and technical writing where appropriate to increase emotional impact and persuasiveness. Recently, Alan wrote eulogies for the zombie personas of the band, The Widow's Bane, and delivered them during the band's first CD release party and concert. He is actively collaborating with The Widows' Bane to revise the band's persona stories and to write song lyrics. |
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