By Ellen Cecil-Lemkin and Jennifer Conrad, Co-Editors
Welcome to a new year and a new semester! We hope that your break offered everything you needed to start the semester feeling replenished and perhaps even energized. This time of year offers a chance to reflect on and evaluate our opportunities, successes, and habits to determine what we’d like to maintain, modify, or remove going forward. In line with this practice, the editors for Another Word have considered ways to update and revitalize our blog. To this end, we have a couple of announcements we’d like to share with you all.
First, expect to see a lot of new voices on our blog! Last year, we released our first call for proposals to which we received many wonderful ideas for blog posts. Our editors thoroughly enjoyed reading and selecting proposals that will be excellent additions to our blog. You’ll have the opportunity to read posts on accessibility, attentive silence, identity, labor issues, pandemic narratives, and more. We are excited to share the selected posts with you throughout the year! If you’re interested in being published on Another Word and missed 2021’s CFP, don’t worry! We will open a call for proposals towards the end of the year.
Second, as part of our writing center’s continued commitment to accessibility (read our Accessibility Statement), we will be making some updates to Another Word to increase its screen reader compatibility. These updates will include adding alt-text to images, formatting hyperlinks appropriately, and coding heading levels correctly. While our recent posts have incorporated these features, many of our older posts need some behind-the-scenes editorial work to become more accessible. Our plan is to start with some of our most frequently read posts and eventually move our way through our entire archive. If you were an author to one of our previous posts and would like to be involved in the updating process, please let us know and we’ll be happy to include you.
Although what 2022 will bring remains far from certain, we hope that you’ll join us in looking forward to new opportunities to share ideas and grow our community together!
The photograph that appears in our header was taken by Brenna Swift at Owen Conservation Park.