Kevin Wannell

My Name is Kevin Wannell, and I am an aspiring technical writer from Ottawa Canada.

I spent my childhood in Ottawa, Canada, and later moved to Peterborough to pursue a Cultural Studies major (with a minor in International Development Studies) at Trent University. After obtaining my undergraduate degree, I spent the next few years paying off my student loans by taking on some service industry jobs, and briefly considered becoming a chef before deciding to broaden my horizons with some international work.

I got my first taste of instructional design pie while working as an ESL teacher for the Incheon branch of the Sogang Language Program in Seoul, South Korea. Over the course of 14 months, I wrote endless lesson plans and managed groups of children ages 5-13; all with the help of some wonderful native co-teachers. While I found combing massive piles of written assignments for spelling and grammar errors tedious at first, it quickly became one of my favourite parts of the job and jump-started my own interest in the intricacies of the English language, as well as written communication in general.

On returning to Canada and the frozen wasteland that is Ottawa in February, I spent the year working at the Bridgehead Production Center in Ottawa, as well as writing some fun pieces for a local gaming blog (my first stab at instructional design since Korea). I decided that a career in technical writing would be my best shot at getting the most out of this new obsession with writing; To that end, I registered for the Technical Writer course at Algonquin College, and the rest is history.