Hands-on Technical Writing

Courses on Business Communications: General and Technical
  • Course:Hands-on Technical Writing
  • Course ID:TECHWRITE Duration:2 days Where: Your Office (7+ Persons)
  • Available as a private, customized course for your group at your offices or ours and in some cases as a WebLive(TM) class.

  • Download Course Description (PDF)

Course Outline

  • Introduction
    • Need for technical writing
    • Definitions
    • Technical writing process:  Step by step
    • Typical technical writing products
  • Audience Analysis
    • Identifying your audience’s “problem”
    • Classes of audience
    • Intuitive analysis
    • Interviewing representative members of your audience
    • Selecting audience analysis methods
  • Research
    • Searching the literature
    • Interviewing subject matter experts
    • Using hands-on experience and demonstrations
    • Selecting research approaches
  • Structuring Your Document
    • The executive summary
    • The news reporter’s questions
    • Information chunking
    • Bottom-up structures
    • Top-down structures
    • Sidebars
    • Selecting a document structure
  • Evaluating Results
    • Evaluating clarity
    • Evaluating correctness
    • Evaluating consistency
    • Evaluating completeness
    • Evaluating appropriateness
    • Reporting evaluation results
  • Editing
    • Structural editing
    • Content editing
    • Copy editing
  • Wrap-up:
    • Course recap
    • Highlights from students’ perspective