STS Writing Specialist

Excellent communication is valuable in any field; in an interdisciplinary program it has an added specificity: to allow engineers to speak with policy makers and code designers to confer with ethicists. In the bigger picture, excellent communication allows its practitioners to make these cross-pollinations fruitful--to connect different areas of study in productive and innovative projects without losing coherence, specificity, or depth.

To help strengthen writing across STS and raise its profile in the program, we have appointed Kevin DiPirro as the new Writing Specialist for STS. 

In his sixteen years as a writing faculty at Stanford, Kevin has developed expertise in identifying and assessing the troublesome areas of communication in writing instruction—the nooks and crannies of various syllabi or assignment sheets or writing/presentation prompts or paper commenting—that sometimes can block a meeting of the minds between instructors and students.

Specifically in STS, Kevin wants to help facilitate these points of communication on both ends, to work with both faculty and students to better bridge the expectations and the specific means of meeting those expectations in writing and presentational work. 

Kevin's aim is to be receptive to learning more about what faculty want out of their courses and their assignments from their students and to aid in any retools of designs and practices that may further those outcomes.

Additionally, he is interested in knowing what specifically marks out STS as a field of study, what kinds of various writing works it undertakes—what might cohere these works as thoughtful interdisciplinary work—and what orients the culture of STS. The more encounters Kevin has with faculty and with students, the more he can learn about this exciting area of study as practiced at Stanford and help contribute to its dynamic work.

Resources For STS Majors

Kevin DiPirro can meet with you individually in his office hours on Monday's from 9-11AM in Building 200, Room 5 at any stage of the writing process to go over your STS writing work.

Generally, the sooner in the writing process you can bring in the work, the more valuable that work will be. Rather than thinking about whether you have an extra half hour to spend, I’d consider that half hour doing focused collaborative work on your project to be an investment worth probably an hour and a half of your own time.

During office hours, Kevin can assist you with:

  • assignment assessment 
  • brainstorming 
  • mapping 
  • organizing 
  • revising drafts
  • revising/polishing prose
  • first-year writers
  • Honors Thesis writers

Additional resources include:

RESOURCES FOR FACULTY AND TA'S

The STS Writing Specialist can also assist Faculty and TA's with:

  • Strategizing to get the best back from students' written work
  • Reviewing STS writing assignments such as: syllabi descriptions, assignment handouts, prompts and questions, and essay commenting.