Technical and Professional Writing Commons^™

11. Handbook Basics, David Mcmurray

Sexy Technical Communications

A handbook, as we are defining it here, is a combination of concept, instruction, and reference information focused on a specific topic for a specific audience's needs.

12. Titles, Abstracts, Introductions, Conclusions, David Mcmurray

Sexy Technical Communications

Formal technical reports over eight to ten pages contain several components that deserve their own focus because they are important in technical reports and because people are unfamiliar with them: Titles explores strategies for making document titles specific but not paragraphs long. Abstracts provide several kinds of summaries of the report contents and conclusions. Introductions get readers ready to read reports by indicating the topic, purpose, intended audience, contents, and orther such matters. Conclusions shape how readers view and understand the report upon leaving it.

17. Common Page Design, David Mcmurray, Jonathan Arnett

Sexy Technical Communications

Page design means different things to different people, but here it will mean the use of typography and formatting such as you see in professionally-designed documents. Our focus here is technical documentation, which implies modest, functional design.

18. Headings, David Mcmurray, Cassandra Race

Sexy Technical Communications

One of the most useful characteristics of technical writing is the use of headings. Headings are the titles and subtitles you see within the actual text of much professional scientific, technical, and business writing. Headings are like the parts of an outline that have been pasted into the actual pages of the document. Headings are an important feature of professional technical writing: they alert readers to upcoming topics and subtopics, help readers find their way around in long reports and skip what they are not interested in, and break up long stretches of straight text. They make text easy to …

27. Articulating Technical Information, David Mcmurray, Jonathan Arnett, Tamara Powell

Sexy Technical Communications

The ability to explain complex, technical matters with ease, grace, and simplicity so that nonspecialist readers understand almost effortlessly is one of the most important skills you can develop as a technical writer. This ability to "translate" or articulate difficult-to-read technical discussions is important because so much of technical writing is aimed at nonspecialist audiences. These audiences include important people such as supervisors, executives, investors, financial officers, government officials, and, of course, customers. This chapter provides you with some strategies for articulating technical discussions, that is, specific strategies you can use to make difficult technical discussions easier for nonspecialist readers …

30. Basic Patterns And Elements Of The Sentence, David Mcmurray

Sexy Technical Communications

This section is a quick review of the fundamentals of the sentence. If you encounter unfamiliar terminology in this textbook or in your class, refer to this section for help. For more on sentence grammar, see English Fundamentals by Emery, Kierzek, and Lindblom (Macmillan) for a thorough discussion of sentence grammar, along with exercises.

33. Strategies For Peer-Reviewing And Team-Writing, David Mcmurray

Sexy Technical Communications

Peer reviewing (also called peer-editing) means people getting together to read, comment on, and recommend improvements on each other's work. Peer-reviewing is a good way to become a better writer because it provides experience in looking critically at writing. Team writing, as its name indicates, means people getting together to plan, write, and revise writing projects as a group, or team. Another name for this practice is collaborative writing—collaborative writing that is out in the open rather than under cover (where it is known as plagiarism).

37. Logic: Recognizing Fallacies, Steve Miller, Cherie Miller

Sexy Technical Communications

I often read comments on blog posts or articles or Facebook discussions which accuse the writer of committing a specific logical fallacy and thus declaring the argument thoroughly debunked, typically with an air of arrogant finality. While the debunker may feel quite smug, intelligent participants consider him quite sophomoric.*text annotation indicator In reality, he's typically failed to even remotely understand the argument, much less apply the fallacy in a way that's relevant to the discussion. Surely this fallacy deserves a proper name and should be listed with other fallacies. Thus I'll define "The Fallacy Fallacy" as "Improperly connecting a fallacy …

38. Usability Testing, Cassandra Race

Sexy Technical Communications

I will never forget a Christmas Eve many years ago, when the kids were finally asleep and Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus began the assembly of the much desired "brand name" doll house. Out came the tools, out came a hundred or so tiny plastic parts, and out came an instruction sheet written by someone clearly from another land far away. After several hours of attempting to decipher some of the worst instructions ever written, we recruited a neighbor's 12 year old, a seasoned veteran in the world of dream houses, and the assembly was completed in time for Christmas …

42. Standard Operating Policies And Procedures, David Mcmurray, Tamara Powell

Sexy Technical Communications

This chapter introduces you to policies and procedure documents and to standard operating procedure documents. Click on the links, below, to see samples.

Hand-washing policies for health care personnel

Accounting policies and procedures

Standard operating procedures: pouring dental impressions

The Role Of Occupational Branding In The Professionalization Of Technical Communication, Chelsea Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the relationship between professional identity and professional status by exploring the quest for professionalization within technical communication. An established professional identity is crucial to an occupation's professionalization process, as it enables members of a given field to create a common sense of being and facilitates a recognizable personal and collective identity. Such recognition is vital to an occupation's rise to professional status, as it creates a distilled image of the ideal practitioner for outsiders and forms the basis upon which claims of expertise may be made. By constructing the meaning surrounding their profession, members are able to …

Sexy Technical Communication, Tamara Powell, Jonathan Arnett, Monique Logan, Cassandra Race, Tiffani Reardon

2016 Faculty Bookshelf

Sexy technical writing…we’ve got to be kidding, right? But no, we aren’t. Good technical writing is powerful and clear and gets the job done. It brings people together and solves problems. Good technical writing purrs and hums like that BMW you plan to be driving someday.What’s not sexy about that? On the other hand, poor technical writing skills may lead to a lifetime of asking people if they want fries with that…or worse, selling vacuum cleaners door to door. There’s no need to ask what’s not sexy about that!

WE – your textbook authors – are a team of dedicated …

The Why, How, And Best Practices Of Creating, Editing, And Maintaining A Professional Blog, Elizabeth Haas

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Agro/Hort 403/803: Scientific Writing And Communication—A Peer Review Of Teaching Project Inquiry Portfolio, Brian M. Waters

UNL Faculty Course Portfolios

Scientific writing is a skill that is useful for science students, since many of them will write about their research in a thesis, dissertation, or in journal articles. The goal of my course is to provide students with practice and training in scientific writing so that after they take the course they are confident and ready to write drafts independently. The class uses many learning activities, such as reading, writing, peer reviewing, revising, and class discussions. However, the first two iterations of the course did not have built-in ways to practice sentence and paragraph editing, or to gauge quality of …

The Write Stuff - Winter 2016 (Vol. 13, No. 1), Research Medical Library

Write Stuff 2016

• Publishing patient information in case reports
• Changes to NIH grant policies, grant application forms and instructions, and SF424 guidelines
• Microsoft Word 2013: Tips for using Comments, Change Tracking, and other features
• Citing unpublished material in a research paper
• Winter and spring schedule for the Research Medical Library webinar program
• Unusual terms used in scientific writing and publishing: Uniform requirements/ICMJE recommendations

Personas: A Strategy For More Inclusive And Usable Reproductive Health Tracking Technologies, Anna R. Paul

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this report, I argue for the inclusion of personas in the development process of technologies that are designed to allow users to collect and track their health information. Personas provide a profile of a user and their needs, goals, and contexts. This tool can help designers to better understand their users, in order to create better, more usable end products. I examine one particular self-tracking technology, smartphone applications that allow users to record information about their menstrual cycles. Many of the most popular period tracking applications available today only meet the needs of a narrow user group, resulting in …

Extending Writing In The Disciplines (Wid) To Train Mechanical Engineering Gtas To Evaluate Student Writing, Nancy Barr

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Beyond first-year composition, the undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum provides few opportunities for students to develop technical writing skills. One underutilized path for students to strengthen those skills is the required sequence of laboratory courses, where students write reports that are evaluated by graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), many of whom speak English as a second language. Historically, engineering GTAs have not been trained in formative assessment techniques to help students improve their technical writing skills. This dissertation details a comprehensive study of a GTA training program implemented in a large mechanical engineering department. Situated within the field of Writing Across the …

"Unblackboxing" Technology Through The Rhetoric Of Technical Communication: Biometric Technology And Ghana's 2012 Election, Isidore Dorpenyo

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this project, I seek to “unblackbox” technology; by which I mean, I seek to, in the words of Latour, “open up” or “debug” the biometric technology used by Ghana for its 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections. Through the process of “unblackboxing,” I demonstrate the value of technical communicators to technology studies by analyzing technical documents that accompanied the biometric verification device which was adopted and used by Ghana to conduct its 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections. I argue in this dissertation that technical documentation does not merely accommodate users to technologies, but also it provides avenues to articulate broader …

“Uh Oh. Cue The [New] Mommy Wars”: The Ideology Of Combative Mothering In Popular U.S. Newspaper Articles About Attachment Parenting, Julia Moore, Jenna Abetz

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Through critique of concordance, we argue that popular U.S. newspaper articles about attachment parenting perpetuate the ideology of combative mothering, where mothers are in continuous competition with one another over parenting choices. Specifically, article writers construct a new, singular metaphorical mommy war between pro-attachment parenting and anti-attachment parenting proponents by prepackaging attachment parenting and its debate, advocating for attachment parenting through instinct and science, and rejecting attachment parenting because of harm to children, relationships, and mothers. A minority of articles, however, avoided reifying this pro-/anti-attachment parenting mommy war by exploring the complexities of parenting beyond prepackaged philosophies. We explore the …

Delimitación Y Desarrollo De Las Lenguas De Especialidad: Actuales En La Definición De Los Géneros Discursivos En Las Lenguas Con Propósitos Específicos, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

This article presents a theoretical review of the evolution of Languages for Specific Purposes and explores its future development. The first part of the article defines Languages for Specific Purposes. The second part presents its objective in which it reviews the different evolutionary stages of this approach since it began in the early 20th century. Lastly, the article concludes with a review of its current problems and discusses the possible changes in the future.