Of interest to
Prospective Students Current Students Business & Industry Faculty & Staff Alumni Visitors

Kathryn Riley
Professor of English and Chair
Lewis Department of Humanities
Editor, BCQ
Email: riley@iit.edu
Voice: 312.567.3566
Fax: 312.567.5187

Siegel Hall, Suite 218
3301 South Dearborn
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, IL 60616 USA

 Fall 2009 office hours: M 10 a.m.-noon, and by appointment.

Fall 2009 classes:
COM 425-01 Editing
COM 529-01 Technical Editing
Both of these are Internet classes; students should access course materials via their Blackboard account in myIIT.

Kathy Riley, 2006
 Business Communication Quarterly Linguistics for Non-Linguists 4/e

• Vita (PDF)
• Resources
•  Copyright form for BCQ authors

Recent and upcoming activities:
 • Co-author, with Frank Parker, 5th edition of Linguistics for Non-Linguists: A Primer with Exercises (Allyn & Bacon, 2010).
• Co-author, with Jo Mackiewicz, Visual Composing (Prentice-Hall, in preparation).
• Session on "Publishing in Business Communication Journals," with David Russell (editor, Journal of Business and Technical Communication) and Robyn Walker (editor, Journal of Business Communication), for Assn. for Business Communication 74th Annual Convention , Portsmouth, VA, November 2009.
• Program Committee, 2009 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS), November 2009.
• Co-PI, NSF Grant, "Ethics in the Details."
• Editorial Review Board, Texas Tech University Press Series in Technical Communication and Rhetoric.

NSF Grant: "Ethics in the Details"
Work continues on "Ethics in the Details," a 3-year project supported by a National Science Foundation grant for $238,663 and administered through the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Profession (CSEP) by PI Michael Davis (Humanities/CSEP), with co-PIs Kathryn Riley (Chair, Humanities) and Vivian Weil (CSEP/Humanities).

"Ethics in the Details" involves collaboration with engineering faculty and engineering graduate students at the IIT, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Howard University in Washington, DC. The grant funds workshops that teach faculty and students to develop "micro-insertions"––small ways to add ethical issues to problems in the graduate engineering curricula. The grant team is also assessing this method in graduate courses and in a nanotechnology research lab at UIC. Examples of ethical issues covered include whistleblowing, national security concerns, conflicts of interest, and cross-cultural differences in ethics.

In addition, the grant supports development of a Web-based "Ethics In-Basket," an archive of ethics problems that can be accessed from anywhere, to disseminate ethics problems to engineering faculty worldwide. Graduate students in IIT’s Technical Communication program are helping to develop the Website and edit the problems. The site itself is being tested for usability at IIT’s Usability Testing and Evaluation (UTEC) with assistance from UTEC director Susan Feinberg.

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