Technical Writing Introduction

• Write effective technical documents, manuals, and white papers
• Assess your audience and develop documents to meet their needs
• Build effective sentences and sections that explain information clearly
• Employ diagrams, tables, charts, and other graphical tools effectively
• Create informative content that your readers will understand and use

• Introduction to Technical Writing

• Benefits of effectively communicating technical information
• Dealing with common writing problems

• The Writing Process

Getting ready to write

• Eliminating misconceptions that stall technical writing
• Driving your document design with scenarios
• Focusing on a document's purposes

Assessing your audience

• Identifying your purpose and the reader's purpose
• What the audience brings to the table

Covering the knowledge domain

• Exposing tacit knowledge
• Knowing when you've "covered it all"
• Organizing using the audience's scenarios

• Ensuring Clarity and Readability

Writing technically

• Discriminating between the three levels of information
• Determining information needs with the OODA loop

Architecting sentences that communicate

• Creating sentences with clarity
• Building clarity through sentence focus
• Solving common grammar problems in technical writing

Managing style in technical writing

• Evaluating readability using the Given/New technique
• Ensuring consistency with a style guide
• Eliminating reader recycling

• The Mechanics of Writing

Working with words

• Selecting the right words
• Editing for concision

Editing for quality

• Knowing when and what to edit
• The editing triage
• Editing throughout the document process
• Two strategies for rewriting

• Structuring Information for Understanding

Leveraging and formatting tables and lists

• Organizing data to support readers' scenarios
• Determining when to use a list
• Exploiting tables for highly structured data

Maintaining document structure

• Building cohesive documents with Given/New
• Applying useful headings to support skimming

Methods of development

• Problems-methods-results
• Effect and cause
• Order of importance

• Designing Your Document

Audience-driven document design

• Relating document structure to the audience
• Recognizing the varieties of user manuals
• Developing reference manuals and white papers

Determining the document types

• Post-positive vs. pragmatic documents
• Implementing the right document format

Building documents

• Tutorials and standard operating procedures
• Designing two styles of tutorials
• Structuring sentences and sections
• Handling introductions and conclusions

Prototyping the document

• Testing for success
• Levels of prototypes

• Developing the Look of Your Document

Designing the appearance of your page

• The technical document reading process
• Fonts
• White space
• Alignment

Conveying information with graphics

• Chunking the document
• Employing photos, drawings and graphs
• Focusing graphics