We are proud to announce an accomplishment for Cosmographer Tenzing Briggs, who in the past month was awarded the Technical and Business Category Writing Award by the Rhetoric & Writing Department for the 2023 Student Writing Awards.
The work that received the award was a style guide for Katog Choling, a religious nonprofit Buddhist center in Northeast Arkansas, created for the Fall 2022 Technical Writing and Editing course taught by Dr. Cynthia Nahrwold. In the cover letter of the style guide submitted for the 2023 Awards, Tenzing explains the challenges that come with creating such an organization’s style guide.
“There are two key elements important to the content and its context,” Tenzing says. “As a religious organization, most Katog Choling publications are written by and for people familiar with Buddhist practice.” Tenzing highlights how this can be an issue, saying, “Katog Choling occasionally has volunteers who are novice or non-Buddist writers and editors—and the gap between their knowledge of Buddhism and more complex Buddhist theory can affect the quality of publications.” He continues, “This gap can especially affect the document design, or organization of chapters and subsections, because Buddhist practices often rely upon visual cues that indicate how to pronounce a prayer or what vocal rhythm to use—cues that a non-Buddhist editor might not realize should be implicit within the text.” One example Tenzing mentions is the visual design for mantras, saying,
“Mantras must look different than the body text within prayer booklets, because mantras are treated a specific way in Buddhist practice (e.g. having a differing spoken rhythm than the body text, or being repeated multiple times) and thus need to be instantly recognizable on the page so that the Buddhist practitioner can recite accordingly.”
“Moreover, since Katog Choling’s staff is entirely made up of volunteers, the staff and I also knew that a Style Guide would immensely help streamline operations,” says Tenzing. “There are multiple different publications being worked on by Katog Choling staff, and often the leaders of each project work independently, which can cause difficulties whenever their project encounters challenges—this style guide provides a unifying resource for helping when challenges arise, for style as well as knowledge, like how to format across Adobe products.” By recognizing these challenges, Tenzing was able to create a comprehensive Style Guide that did “not just establish style but also informed readers of the different projects running simultaneously across Katog Choling and of who to turn to for advice on tools like Adobe InDesign, WordPress, and WordPress plugins.”
This work was developed before Tenzing became a Cosmographer; it was developed throughout classes in Fall 2022 and Spring 2023, but Tenzing still feels its impact with work at COSMOS. “I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity of working at COSMOS I’ve had for the last year,” Tenzing remarked, “because my COSMOS work is the kind of editing I fell in love with in my first graduate editing courses, especially when I made the Katog Choling Style Guide.” He went on to say, “If I had not been given the chance to work at COSMOS, I would not have been able to hone my skills to my current extent for using style guides and applying stylistic edits. In my COSMOS work—where I help proofread and reformat conference or journal submissions, according to each conference’s individual style guide—I daily strengthen my editing skills.”
Tenzing finished by saying, “One thing that is amazing about work at COSMOS is how you will not only learn skills that are useful outside the classroom, but you will also learn a great many things from your research center colleagues and strengthen your ability to work cooperatively with others.”