Engl 316Technical Communication

Elements of Good Technical Writing

Many elements come together to create effective technical writing: content, organization, style, design, and ethical, legal, and cultural considerations.

• Content refers to the overall claims, discussion, conclusions and recommendations of a text. It also assesses how an author addresses an audience and how they produce and present information.
• Organization encompasses the document's structure and usability.
• Style refers to a document's mechanics: sentence structure, grammar, word choice, and tone.
• Design describes the text's physical layout: headings, page design, visuals aids, etc.
• Ethical, legal, and cultural considerations refer to the way a document considers legal and ethical issues. It also addresses how sensitive a document is to cultural diversity.

This course will address each of these aspects and provide guidelines for creating effective technical documents as well as tips for evaluating other's documents. Lannon provides an excellent checklist of these categories on the inside back cover of your textbook. Take time to read through these questions and answer them in relation to Jones's article on electronic life guarding.

Mechanics

Your textbook has already provided you with information on creating effective sentences. In addition to sentences, mechanics describes such things as spelling, punctuation, and grammar—the basics of edited American English. Some students have already overcome mechanical weaknesses in their writing. However, most students continue to struggle with these writing basics on some level. As we discussed earlier, good mechanics will enhance your ethos as a writer. No matter how brilliant your ideas or how sophisticated your reasoning, if your document is sloppily written or grammatically incorrect, readers will be less likely to trust what you say. Research shows that good mechanics do not necessarily create good technical writing; however, it's impossible to be a good technical writer without having good grammar.

Since students have different strengths and weaknesses in following conventions of edited American English, this course individualizes instruction in these conventions as much as possible. To help you master mechanical principles, you will take a diagnostic exam that will help you identify your strengths and weakness regarding principles of grammar, punctuation, etc. Based on this diagnostic exam, you will be able to complete online grammar tutorials to help you improve your mechanics. Contact your professor for information about this Grammar Mastery program. There will be a concluding grammar exam as part of the final exam for this course.