Technical Writing Essentials

Technical communication is interactive and adaptive communication (more on this idea in Chapter 1). Adaptive to whom:' Well, technical communication, more than any other rype, is centered on readers. This means you're brainstorming, writing, and revising with your readers' needs in mind. These needs will affect your writing style, your diction, your choice of visuals, and your overall document design, all of which have important ethical and legal implications for you and the company for which you work. Effective technical writers must learn to employ informed and flexible processes for writing and speaking, including finding or creating ideas about which to write, collecting evidence and essential data, planning and drafting, editing and proofreading, and designing or presenting a message meant for specific readers. All of this requires technical writers to analyze different aspects of audience, purpose, and context to convey information clearly and efficiencly in written, oral, and visual media. Throughout this book, you'll learn the communication strucmres ( or genres) typically used by technical writers in science and engineering and about the processes that produce them, as well as their organizational and stylistic conventions ...