Technical and Professional Writing Commons^™

6. Progress Reports, David Mcmurray

Sexy Technical Communications

You write a progress report to inform a supervisor, associate, or customer about progress you've made on a project over a certain period of time. The project can be the design, construction, or repair of something, the study or research of a problem or question, or the gathering of information on a technical subject. You write progress reports when it takes well over three or four months to complete a project.

7. Writing Instructions, David Mcmurray, Jonathan Arnett

Sexy Technical Communications

The focus for this chapter is one of the most important of all uses of technical writing—instructions. As you know, instructions are those step-by-step explanations of how to do something: how to build, operate, repair, or maintain things. When you finish this chapter you will be able to: Analyze and evaluate a set of technical instructions Write clear and accurate instructions with an introduction and conclusion Develop and design an instruction manual for a specific audience

10. Recommendation And Feasibility Reports, David Mcmurray, Jonathan Arnett

Sexy Technical Communications

This chapter addresses a loosely defined group of report types that examine a situation, evaluate the evidence, and render a judgment. Some Rather Fine Distinctions... The reports in this loosely defined category are variously called feasibility reports, recommendation reports, evaluation reports, assessment reports, and who knows what else. They all do roughly the same thing—provide carefully studied opinions and, sometimes, recommendations. There are some subtle differences among some these types.

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