Posted on by Bob McMichael

Creative Non-fiction

I’ve published numerous creative non-fiction pieces over the last 30 years, including two books with my students. I’ve taught creative writing in high school for the past 8 years, focusing on fiction, poetry, as well as creative non-fiction, including memoir. As a college student I wrote feature articles regularly for the Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s award-winning student newspaper, and have taught journalism units in my English classes. Below is a list of a few of my publications.

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Posted on by Bob McMichael

Business Writing

As the VP of Sales & Marketing for eight years in a small aviation company, I created all of the business’s business documentation, from press releases to advertising copy to highly technical equipment operation manuals to online and print catalog descriptions of complex aviation equipment, and more. If it needed to be in written form, I produced it. I had no experience in business before this opportunity, and the research and writing skills I developed from high school through earning a doctorate enabled me to use those skills to grow this company from a small mom-and-pop to an international market leader.

For the past 35 years I’ve written lots of other business-related documentation, including op-eds and letters to the editor, public relations articles, grant applications, annual reports, white papers, and non-profit organization newsletters.

All of this writing experience has helped me in each successive project. For example, most recently I’ve been a teacher (from 2012 to 2022); anyone who knows much about education knows that teachers don’t make a ton of money and never have enough funding for all of the projects they want to bring to the classroom. Thus, grants. I wrote applications for grants to improve technology not only for my own classroom but the for entire school, as well as for specific projects with specific classes of students. These grants totaled thousands of dollars, from organizations such as the Idaho Humanities Council, Idaho Power, Idaho Rangeland Resource Commission, Northwest Professional Educators, and the Upper Country Educational Foundation. Apparently, I’m good at writing grant applications.

Click on the thumbnails below to see some of this material.

Press release

Product Catalog

Technical writing: Operation Manual

Public Relations

Posted on by Bob McMichael

Academic Writing

This sample of my academic writing was published in the journal American Music. It’s a modified version of a chapter from my doctoral dissertation, and is the result of a thorough peer-review editing process.

If you’re not familiar with this process, it’s pretty cool, and usually results in a vastly improved piece of work that gets published. Peer-reviewed journal publications are the gold standard in scholarly writing. The process goes like this:

  1. The author or authors submit a piece to a specific journal or journals (in my case here, the journal’s editor knew of my work and asked me to submit a specific chapter of my dissertation).
  2. The journal’s editor replies (sometimes it takes months to get a response), indicating whether the journal wants the piece, or not.
  3. If they want it, they ask the author to list several experts in their field who might be good reviewers of the work (for this publication, I supplied the journal with five scholars in my field whose work I admired).
  4. After several months, I received a reply from the editor with extensive comments from three anonymous reviewers, and I was instructed to edit my work based on their suggestions and criticisms. The time-frame for revision varies by publication, but in my case they asked me to respond with a revised essay within two weeks. I was also asked to provide the journal editor with a summary of my revisions, and any issues with specific comments from the anonymous reviewers.
  5. After working hard on the revisions, I submitted the essay and summary letter to the editor. A couple of weeks later, after he and his editorial board reviewed my revised essay, they informed me they would publish it as is. Sometimes an author is asked to submit to a second round of comments/revisions, or the journal could decide to reject the work.
  6. Once the “final” piece is typeset and ready to publish, some journals will provide the author a proof for a quick copy review to make sure that nothing obvious was missed. In my case, I caught a few typos and noted them.
  7. About 9-12 months after initially submitting my work, I received a few copies of the published journal in the mail. The rigorous, lengthy process produced a piece of work that involved lots of minds and a few hearts and which was much, much better than the original. You can view/download the entire essay at the link below.
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