16. Book Design Overview

The following provides an overview of the typical components of a printed technical book and the typical content, format, style, and sequence of those components. Certainly, no single user guide, technical reference manual, quick-reference document, or other such document would actually have all of these components designed and sequenced in precisely the way you are about to read. Instead, this review will give an overview of the possibilities—let\u27s say the range of possibilities. Before you begin reading the following, grab a number of hardware and software books so that you can compare their content, style, format, and sequencing to what is discussed here

34. Information Structures

The main parts of a technical-writing course focus on applications—ways technical writing skills are applied in the real world. However, these applications use varying combinations of information infrastructures. An information infrastructure is (1) a type of information content (such as descriptive writing), (2) a way of organizing information (such as a comparison or classification), or (3) both. The information infrastructures reviewed in this appendix are the ones commonly used in technical writing. Of course, there are other infrastructures—maybe some that scholars of technical writing have not yet pinned a label on, but these are the most common and the most readily visible. And of course some of these infrastructures blend together. The main thing is that by knowing these, you have the intellectual tools for quickly organizing and structuring just about any writing project

24. Writing Process: From Audience to Rough Draft

The writing process takes you from the very beginning of a writing project—finding topics and analyzing audience and purpose—all the way to the end—writing and revising the rough draft. The following chapters focus on some of the key phases of that process: Strategies for team-writing Audience Analysis Brainstorming and invention Narrowing Outlining Note-taking Libraries, Documentation, Cross-Referencing Strategies for Peer-Reviewing Power-Revision Technique

25. Audience Analysis

The audience of a technical report—or any piece of writing for that matter—is the intended or potential reader or readers. For most technical writers, this is the most important consideration in planning, writing, and reviewing a document. You adapt your writing to meet the needs, interests, and background of the readers who will be reading your writing. The principle seems absurdly simple and obvious. It\u27s much the same as telling someone, Talk so the person in front of you can understand what you\u27re saying. It\u27s like saying, Don\u27t talk rocket science to your six-year-old. Do we need a course in that? Doesn\u27t seem like it. But, in fact, lack of audience analysis and adaptation is one of the root causes of most of the problems you find in professional, technical documents—particularly instructions where it surfaces most glaringly. Note: Once you\u27ve read this chapter on audience analysis, try using the audience planner below. You fill in blanks with answers to questions about your audience and then e-mail it to yourself. Use the audience planner for any writing project as a way of getting yourself to think about your audience in detail

33. Strategies for Peer-reviewing and Team-writing

Peer reviewing (also called peer-editing) means people getting together to read, comment on, and recommend improvements on each other\u27s 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)

19. Bulleted and Numbered Lists

Lists are useful because they emphasize selected information in regular text. When you see a list of three or four items strung out vertically on the page rather than in normal paragraph format, you are likely to pay more attention to it. Certain types of lists also make for easier reading. For example, in instructions, it is a big help for each step to be numbered and separate from the preceding and following steps. Lists also create more white space and spread out the text so that pages don\u27t seem like solid walls of words. Like headings, the various types of lists are an important feature of professional technical writing: they help readers understand, remember, and review key points; they help readers follow a sequence of actions or events; and they break up long stretches of straight text. Your task for this chapter is to learn about the different types and uses of lists and to learn their specific format and style

4. Business Plans

A business plan is a document used to start a new business or get funding for a business that is changing in some significant way. Business plans are important documents for business partners who need to agree upon their plans, government officials who need to approve that plan, and of course potential investors such as banks or private individuals who may fund the business. A business plan is very much like a proposal, except for at least one big difference. The business plan seeks to start a new business or significantly expand an existing business. A proposal, on the other hand, seeks approval to do a specific project. For example, a business plan might seek funding to start a software company to create computer games. A proposal, on the other hand, might bid to do the development work for some specific computer game. Caution: In a technical writing course, treat a business-plan project as a writing project, not as a real-world business plan. This chapter should not be viewed as a definitive guide for writing a real-world business plan

6. Progress Reports

You write a progress report to inform a supervisor, associate, or customer about progress you\u27ve 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

22. Graphics

One of the nice things about technical writing courses is that most of the papers have graphics in them—or at least they should. A lot of professional, technical writing contains graphics—drawings, diagrams, photographs, illustrations of all sorts, tables, pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, flow charts, and so on. Once you get the hang of putting graphics like these into your writing, you should consider yourself obligated to use graphics whenever the situation naturally would call for them. Unlike what you might fear, producing graphics is not such a terrible task—in fact, it\u27s fun. You don\u27t have to be a professional graphics artist or technical draftsperson to get graphics into your technical writing. The Internet has advanced our sources for graphics immensely. And, if you are still living the 1970s, you can produce professional-looking graphics with tape, scissors, white-out, and a decent photocopying machine