EN219
Technical and Report Writing
Unit One Lecture
Required Reading:
Technical Writing For Success: All of Chapters 1, 2, and 18. As well, from Chapter 10, pp. 190 - 193 on the summary; the "Inside Track" on Economy, pp. 135 - 138; and the "Inside Track" on Clarity, pp. 188 - 189.
Professional Journal Assignment:
For Unit 1 please complete the following assignments in your journals: consider the ethical dilemma presented in Question 5b on Page 17; consider Question #2 in the "Stop and Think" exercise, 2.1, on Page 22; and consider the "Real-Life Crisis" on Page 27. Please be clear in your journals to which assignment each entry belongs.
Introducing Technical Writing
Before I begin the first lecture, I would like to point out that I will be spending very little time repeating all the information in the readings. Instead, I will be touching here and there on several things in the readings in some detail. The lectures may range from careful readings of the textbook examples to information not supplied by the textbook. The student, though, should come prepared to the lectures with an understanding of the section's required readings. The lectures are meant to be in addition to your careful reading not in place of it. For the purposes of your summaries, the focus in these lectures on a particular topic or the lack of a focus on a particular topic has no bearing on the importance of those topics. If the textbook says something that is very important and I can think of no way to express it better, I will not repeat what the textbook says. Many important items are left out of the lectures while appearing in the textbook. Hopefully, though, between the two, the student will have a complete understanding.
For those of you lucky enough to have taken EN101 - College Composition, you may remember that the course finished with a Persuasive Essay where an argument was put forward in an essay and defended with evidence. The writer's hope is that the Persuasive Essay will convince the reader, through its facts and reasoning, to adopt the point-of-view of the writer. In a way, though, we can think of all writing as having something to do with persuasion because we always want the reader to think something positive about us. Even in the most informal letter to a close friend, we probably want that person to think fondly about us. Our desire to persuade a reader to adopt a particular view is even more pronounced in formal writing situations, such as the professional environs that is the focus of technical writing. The view that we want the reader to adopt may involve something as important as wanting the reader to enact our solution to a particular problem that has been outlined in an informal proposal to something as seemingly insignificant as wanting the reader of our memo to adopt a belief that we are the best candidate for more responsibilities or a future promotion.
If we always look at writing as an attempt to persuade someone to some idea, then our job as writers in a professional setting will be much clearer. It will also be clearer how we distinguish technical writing from academic and creative writing. Out of the four excerpts given in the textbook, it is easiest to understand the purpose of the excerpt of technical writing. Why is that? Writing in the professional world needs to be efficient, so there can be no question as to the purpose of a piece of technical writing. It is, as the textbook says, always directed at the reader's needs. We persuade the reader that we are doing our task well by not being noticed, hopefully at all. Not being noticed does not mean that we are not trying to persuade someone of something, though. Consider, for example, the technical writing excerpt. It is meant to inform the reader of the products offered; it is also meant to persuade the reader to purchase the product from the catalogue and not from a competitor. At first glance, we might not notice another reader who needs to be persuaded by the writer. This reader is almost always present in every situation in which we write professionally. Even if we are writing a set of instructions on how to assemble a set of shelves, this other reader is there. We want this other reader to always be persuaded that we are doing the best possible job. For the writer it could be his or her most important reader: the boss. For the most part, this course will prepare you for many of the most common professional writing situations, but we will still need to be aware that sometimes we will be called upon to negotiate between what the boss feels his (and the reader's) needs are and what we know the reader's needs are. We, of course, are always right. Some bosses, for instance, might want more graphics while some might want less. Not being wedded to our first copy will help. We need to be flexible enough, it should go without saying, to be able to write something "correctly" in several different ways.
How do we impress others – readers, co-workers, bosses – when writing in a professional setting? As the textbook says, we never forget the needs of our reader. This is the cardinal rule of technical writing. However we break down the purposes of a piece of technical writing, whether we are providing information, giving instructions, or prohibiting something, the ultimate purpose will always be to fulfill the needs of the reader. Aside from that, we know that all technical writing must be free of mechanical errors and must be as easy to read as possible.
As for the other excerpts in the chapter, they are also directed at readers. The E.E. Cummings poem, for instance, tries to get the reader to "experience" a car's first trip through its unusual rhythms and punctuation rather than to allow the reader simply to read about it, such as in the personal essay. Both the poem and the personal essay are relatively informal. In neither a research paper nor in technical writing should we see a phrase like, "Owning a car is not all it's cracked up to be," which is a cliched phrase that may work to increase a sense of familiarity between the writer of a personal essay and his or her reader but which is still a dead metaphor (a metaphor that we no longer read as a metaphor: what is being cracked up, after all? What does that mean? Breaking apart? But it is not breaking apart which sounds like a good thing. If we really look at most cliches, few of them seem to make much sense). Since we will be covering cliches more in a future unit, I'll move on. So, academic writing and technical writing also do not use cliches. It should be relatively clear from our reading that technical writing is much closer to academic writing than it is to literary writing or imaginative writing. Both the research paper and the catalogue entry are highly organized with a style that implies a distance between the writer and reader as well as having an informative tone. The main difference between the two is, as it was said earlier, technical writing always has an explicit and obvious purpose. In the academic world it is widely considered impossible to foresee what breakthroughs will come from any given piece of research. Academic writing, as the textbook says, "expands on thought," but it may not necessarily have to know why it is expanding a particular thought. Technical writing has to understand why it is doing what it is doing.
Unit One Lecture Continued - the remainder of the lesson is password protected.