James S. Miller

Nancy V. Wood, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Texas at Arlington, taught courses in rhetoric and composition, American literature, and Milton and also served as Director of First Year English, Department Chair, and Assistant Vice President of Undergraduate Academic and Student Affairs. She created the training program for the graduate teaching assistants who teach the freshman argument classes at the university.  Perspectives on Argument, developed in the context of this program, underwent constant classroom testing of both content and classroom activities.  Other argument textbooks of the time tended to present issues as having only two sides, pro and con, with the possibility of one side “winning.”  Perspectives on Argument took a different approach by suggesting that issues may invite a variety of perspectives and that common ground and eventual consensus are also possible outcomes.

Much of Wood’s academic career focused on what freshman students need to become successful college students. While a graduate student in English at Cornell University, Wood taught study skills to Cornell students. Later at the University of Texas at El Paso she created the Study Skills and Tutorial Services, a university-wide program that provided academic support to 12,000 students a year.

Wood is also the author of Essentials of Argument, Writing Argumentative Essays, and College Reading: Purposes and Strategies (Prentice/Pearson).  

James Miller is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where he teaches courses in 20^th century American literature, digital rhetoric, and composition.  His scholarship focuses on issues of public memory and the formation of middle-class identity in twentieth-century America, as well as the role commodity culture plays in shaping historical consciousness. His published work has appeared in such journals as American Studies, The Journal of American Folklore, and The Public Historian. In addition to Perspectives on Argument, Professor Miller is the author of several other rhetorical studies and argument readers, among them, The Eater Reader (Pearson).

Susann Ragsdale

James S. Miller serves as software architect of the Microsoft team that developed the CLR and as the editor of the ECMA and ISO Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) Standards. Prior to joining Microsoft he was part of the World Wide Web Consortium’s senior management team and served on the research staffs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Artificial Intelligence Lab, the MIT Lab for Computer Science, Digital Equipment Corporation, and the Open Software Foundation. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT and has been a member of the Brandeis University faculty.

Susann Ragsdale was the original documentation manager for the CLR team, and currently is a consulting technical writer. Before the CLR, she was a lead writer for COM (Microsoft’s Component Object Model). This followed a long and diverse career in consulting on multiprocessor supercomputers, simulation systems, test systems, and integrated circuits.