Scott P. Sanders is Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of New Mexico where he has taught technical and professional writing and editing since 1984. He has served as director of the English Department’s professional writing, internship, and undergraduate programs; he served as Department Chair from 1997 to 2005 and as Interim Chair until August of this year.
His research interests include editing, popular science writing, persuasive strategies for business and technical writing, communication ethics, and the rhetoric of visual design for the printed and electronic page. In 1989, he received the National Council of Teachers of English award for the “Best Article on Theory of Technical or Scientific Communication.” In 1990, he received a Distinguished Educator Award from the Public Service Company of New Mexico. Sanders was General Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication for several years in the 1990s. In fall 1996, Sanders lectured for the US State Department on the visual rhetoric of persuasive business documents (brochures, flyers, and newsletters) at three universities in Poland.
Sanders has consulted widely in New Mexico, contracting with dozens of organizations, including Sandia National Laboratories, Public Service Company of New Mexico, the National Center for Genome Research, Honeywell, TRW, the GAP, and others. His articles, commentaries, and reviews on technical writing theory, practice, and pedagogy have appeared in numerous professional journals and in anthologies. He is the co-author (with David A. Lind) of The Physics of Skiing, a general audience book on the mechanics of skiing and the physical properties of snow published by Springer (1997; second edition, revised, 2004).
In 1998, he was named an Associate Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication and he has long served the local Kachina Chapter as President, Treasurer, Job Bank Coordinator, and Education Liaison. In 2000, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers Professional Communication Society awarded Sanders a Third Millennium Medal. Sanders enjoys gardening, cooking, fly-fishing, and golf.
He lives in Albuquerque with his wife of 31 years, Margy, who is a biostatistician with UNM’s Department of Family and Community Medicine. They are the parents of three grown children, two sons (one living in Houston, the other in Denver) and a daughter, who is completing her senior year of college at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.