SCENARIO - Texas A&M University
Scenario
You are an assistant department head with an university considering purchase of a new information system. A committee of nine employees from departments across the university have been asked to determine if a new information system is definitely needed and if so, what kind of system should be purchased to replace the current one. What should a new system be able to do that the current one can’t do?
The committee, which meets every two weeks for five months, surveys departments throughout the university, interviews key individuals from areas throughout the university, emails surveys to employees, brings lists of needs discussed in other university meetings. Once the data has been collected, the committee chair, Sam Wilson, asks if you would compile the committee’s report for submission to the operations VP of the university. Creating the report will require analysis and summary of all the notes, memoranda, emails, and testimonies of individuals in the organization, as well as minutes of the committee meetings.
Your task, to compile a report that accurately reflects the results of the six months of study, clearly will state the recommendations of the committee and the different parts of the university. You will need to write in such a way that the report can be easily read by everyone in the organization as well as the Board of Governors, which will have to approve funding for a new system. But the Board, and the Executive Officers, must be convinced of the need for a new system based on the report.
You realize that you have to resolve a number of issues: how to design the report
--what elements should be included--how these elements should be arranged and presented to ensure that the report is read correctly and fully by those who will make the decision on whether or not to purchase a new system, how to organize the content so that even casual readers will know what the committee has recommended and what information it wants included, and how to persuade readers to accept the conclusions of the committee.
“This should be an easy report,” remarks Kevin Gaither, a member of the committee. “Over 90% of the people we have talked to believe that we have to have a new system.”
“Perhaps,” you reply. “But knowing that we need a system and convincing the Board that the money will be well spent is another matter. Board members have not been involved in the daily discussions the way we have been. They don’t have the same perspective we have; they don’t have to use this information system. In addition, the reasons we give for needing a new system are far from unanimous: a number of people giving the same reasons say these in different ways. Summarizing a study that accurately reflects what we’ve discovered the past six months is not going to be easy. In addition, the Board will want to be convinced that the cost is justified.”
“You can do it,” Kevin remarks. “You are the best writer in the group. And, the rest of us will help you once you get a draft. My problem is that I never know how to get started.”
Lisa and Darren, two other committee members, nod in agreement. Sam then asks if you can have a working draft in two weeks. “Send us all a copy by email. I want everybody to read the draft and come ready to make helpful comments. We will meet in three weeks to give everyone adequate time. This is an important report, but we need to get it done.”
An Overview of Technical Writing
► The Matter of Definition
► The Substance of Technical/Business/Workplace Writing
► Writing at Work Versus Writing at School: Eight Basic Differences
► Writing and Communicating at Work
► The Foundations of Effective Technical Writings
► The Nature of Technical Writing
► The Qualities of Good Technical Writing
What is “technical” writing, a label for writing people do as part of their jobs or their professions and careers?
The Matter Of Definition
Technical writing refers to writing done in a work environment. Technical writing may also be called professional or business writing, or workplace writing, because it occurs in a business or work setting. In contrast, academic writing is prepared in your course work. It is writing for school learning activities. While many of the characteristics of academic writing apply to work-related writing, “technical” writing (or workplace writing) and academic writing have different goals. These differences define each type of writing.
The Substance Of Technical/Business/Workplace Writing
Throughout your educational experience, teachers have given you writing assignments that require you to show that you have mastered concepts and facts. Teachers use writing assignments to determine if you have learned what they wish you to learn. In school, your teachers become a captive audience: They are paid to read what you write (no matter how good or bad, how clear or muddled it is), to assess the accuracy of the content, and to determine a grade for the assignment. The grade and their comments help you know if you have met their performance objectives.
You write for teachers knowledgeable about the subject you are addressing in your assignment. They expect a specific response and will read what you write to determine the correctness of the content. Even when you do not express yourself clearly, professors, because of their expertise in the subject and their role as evaluators, can usually figure out what you are trying to say. And, in most cases, teachers work diligently to understand your intended meaning.
Academic writing follows a predictable sequence. In a typical class, you submit assignments which are graded and then returned to you. Your teachers assign and then expect assignments to be submitted by a specific date. These written assignments have relevance for a specific course of study for a specific time period, usually several months (a semester or term). Even if you work as a part of a project team and develop a team-written report, you will be working with students who have an academic background similar to yours. Everyone on the team knows that the effectiveness of the assignment will affect the grade.
Writing At Work Versus Writing At School: Eight Basic Differences
Workplace, business, or technical, writing differs significantly from academic writing because writing at work and writing in school have different purposes.
Writing at Work Achieves Job Goals: Communication in the business organization helps it achieve its goals. Without effective communication, the organization cannot function. Communication among individuals, as well as among departments within the organization, and with individuals in other organizations becomes the means by which the organization operates. Communication will be written, virtual, electronic, oral, or some combination. For example, you may talk with other employees and then follow up what you have said with written documents—such as a letter or a report.
Communication also enables the individual employee to complete job tasks. Job effectiveness requires effective writing and speaking. While correctness and accuracy in use of English remain chief concerns when you write, your purpose is not to convince anyone that you know a subject for the sake of receiving a grade. You write to persuade other employees or clients, to instruct them on how to perform specific tasks, or to inform them about issues important to them. But your main purpose is to help you perform your job within the organization.
Writing at Work Addresses a Variety of Readers: The reader for whom you write will no longer be a single reader, a professor, a specialist in the subject area. Employee communication surveys indicate that employees write to many readers who have varied educational and technical backgrounds, but most often to people who are less knowledgeable about a topic than they are. Your supervisor, for example, may have majored in a field of study very different from yours, or your supervisor’s responsibilities may have channeled his or her technical knowledge into other areas. For example, you may report directly to a person whose educational background has been in physical chemistry or electrical engineering but whose responsibilities may now be in personnel management, data base administration, quality control, or financial analysis. You may have been hired because you bring a specific kind of expertise to the organization, an expertise that your immediate supervisor does not have. One of your tasks is to share your expertise with your supervisor and other employees who may lack the expertise and knowledge you offer. Yet, they need to be informed about your work as they do their own jobs.
You will often need to communicate with employees from other departments outside the organization. They will read what you write based on their on job responsibilities, cultural and work backgrounds, educational profiles, and technical expertise. Early in your career, you may find yourself supervising employees who have a level of vocational expertise you have not had the time or opportunity to acquire. Their view of various job-related issues may differ markedly from yours due to differences in age, education, cultural and geographical background. You may also find yourself writing to clients or customers outside the organization. Unlike students with whom you took classes in college, those with whom you work and communicate will not have the same educational and technical background that you do. Your ability to communicate with them will depend heavily on your ability to perceive the unique background each brings to the job and the way their backgrounds differ from yours.
Given the international dimension of business, you may need to communicate with customers, clients, and employees in other countries. Your organization may have offices throughout the world. You may have clients in several countries. You may want to sell your company’s products to the European Union or to corporations located on the Pacific Rim. NAFTA may have opened new business opportunities in South America, Canada, and Mexico.
Writing at Work Addresses Readers with Different Perspectives: These readers, all of whom have their own job tasks and who come from a variety of educational, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds, will not approach what you write as your professors did. They feel no commitment to read what you write unless your messages are useful to them as they do their own work. They will not read all documents completely. As you write for different readers both inside and outside the organization, you will need to remember that each reader brings a different background and attitude to your message. Each reader will approach your message with his/her job responsibilities in mind. Each will be interested in how your message affects his/her job goals. When you communicate with readers from other countries and cultures, differences between that reader’s culture and your own culture may vary significantly.
International readers will approach communications with a perspective different from yours. Communicating with readers in China, Mexico, and England will require different approaches for dealing with each group.
Writing at Work Creates Excessive Paperwork and Email: We live and work in an Information Age where the quantity of information grows rapidly, where people have more to read than they can ever hope to read. As a result, few documents—paper or virtual—are read completely. Most are skimmed. Because business writing is not material for leisure reading, your readers—all involved in doing their own jobs—will read as little as possible, and they will read only the parts of a document that will be helpful to them. As they pick up your report or see your email subject line, they will immediately be asking: What is this? Why should I read it? How does it affect me? What am I going to have to do? Readers will want to find the main points and ideas quickly, and they will become impatient if they are unable to find them by glancing at the page. They will not usually read any document completely or bother to respond to it unless the message at the beginning indicates that they should do so. How they respond to the first few sentences of your writing will often determine how much more of it they read.
In short, on the job, your readers are not a captive audience, as your teachers have been. They do not have to read what you write. If you want your writing to be read, you must make your message clear and easy to read. You must also make your message as interesting and relevant as possible. Because your readers will likely read selectively, conciseness and clarity are basic ingredients of effective business communication. Mechanical correctness will still be a desirable quality, but correct writing that cannot be read easily and quickly will not be read.
Writing at Work May Be Read by Readers Unknown to the Writer: Because you will write to a variety of readers, these readers fall into two main categories: (1) the primary reader(s), to whom the writing is addressed, and (2) the secondary reader(s), who will received copies of what you write because the information pertains to their job responsibilities. Because of the prevalence of email, you really have no idea who will read what you write, as any message may be forwarded. Reports sent as email attachments can be easily forwarded. Documents posted online on an organization’s website are far from secure from prying eyes and hackers.
Whoever your known reader will be, you should always anticipate unknown readers who may receive copies of your reports or email. Because photocopies can be made and easily distributed, even paper documents can be easily distributed.
You cannot underestimate the problem that unknown readers present. Copies of your reports and letters will be placed in files accessible by readers who may not know anything about you or the situation you are writing about. Yet, these documents will often be used in assessing your performance and in determining your promotion potential. Your written communications document your work. How well you write suggests how well you have done your job. Readers who know little about you will make decisions about your competence based on what you say, even though they know little, except by inference, about the issue your report addressed. Unknown readers may also use your report to gain understanding of a work situation they nave inherited with a new job assignment. In short, on the job, what you write becomes much more than a knowledge indictor upon which a professor determines your grade.
Writing at Work Has an Indefinite Life Span: Nearly everything you write for an organization will remain in the organization’s data base indefinitely. Because known and unknown readers may use the documents you write for an indefinite period of time, the problem of trying to determine who will likely read what you write is further complicated by the length of time that each document is accessible and usable. While academic writing is done in response to assignments, applicable only for a specific semester, course and professor, workplace communications have no specific life span. They can be read and then used in ways you never intended or envisioned.
Writing at Work Creates Legal Liability for the Writer and the Organization: Unlike academic writing, prepared and used to evaluate your knowledge of a given academic subject, writing at work can be used against you in lawsuits. Once your sign your name to a report or letter, your signature makes you responsible for the content. You need to remember the indefinite lifespan of work place documents and the difficult of knowing just who will read what your write. You also need to remember that people may use your writing for reasons you never considered, and they make take sentences and even paragraphs out of context for use in situations unrelated to the issue you were addressing in your original document. They can then use what you say to support claims against you and the organization you represent. Because we live in an increasingly litigious society, designing documents that will prevent their misuse should be one of your primary goals.
Writing at Work Uses a Variety of Written Documents: Most of the academic writing you have done includes essays, essay examinations, research papers, and laboratory reports. All are directed to your teachers. However, surveys show that at work, employees can expect to write a variety of documents not relevant to academic writing assignments: letters, email, information and procedure memoranda, proposals, progress reports, project reports, feasibility studies, economic justification reports, policy statements, travel reports, news releases, speeches, training procedures, budget forecasts, employee evaluations, user documentation, and perhaps articles for publication. What you write will change with your responsibilities, the kind of job you have, and your position in the organization. How you write each document will depend on the topic being discussed, the situation leading to the document, your readers’ needs and perspectives, and your purpose in writing.
While writing in school has taught you important concepts such as paragraph development and correct, effective sentence development, your task on the job will be to apply these techniques to the design of whatever you need to write to perform your job.
Writing And Communicating At Work
You are probably wondering how you can learn how to develop such a wide range of documents and deal with the range of communication demands. The answer involves your learning, understanding, and then practicing a method of writing, one that you can apply to any document. The segment called “Composing” explains this method. During this course, we will apply these principles to various documents.
Being able to write well is critical because communication is critical to an organization.
Organizations produce technical writing for internal and external use. Internally, documents such as memoranda and email are common types of communication. These documents enable members of an organization to share information and ideas. These documents show that work has been done or is being done.
Many examples come to mind. The director of information services studies and reports on the feasibility of purchasing and installing a new computer system. A director of payroll services may write instructions to employees on how to apply for leave without pay, how to select and apply for new insurance options; a university department prepares a proposal to a state government offering to provide research services; an architectural firm prepares progress reports to inform clients of the status of contracted building programs; an insurance company writes letters accepting or denying claims by its policyholders. A financial services organization writes letters to clients about their investments or prepares lengthy investment recommendation reports to clients. Human Resources analyzes the potential of developing a self-insurance plan for the company rather than buying medical insurance from a standard insurance company. The personnel department instructs new employees about company policies and procedures. Many of these kinds of documents are written collaboratively. Employees write reports to record their work and send copies—either in paper or as email attachments—to those in the company who need to be informed.
The amount and variety of communication done in an organization has grown rapidly during the past three decades. Survey research indicates that college-educated employees spend about 20% of their time at work writing. In fact, most college-educated workers rank the ability to write well as very important or critically important to their job performance.2 Writing/speaking are the two ways that you perform your job tasks. For that reason, when you look at job ads, you will note that “excellent communication skills” is required for most positions requiring a college degree.
The manufacture of information has become a major industry in its own right. Much of that information is research related. Many government agencies, scientific laboratories, and commercial companies make research their principal business. They may undertake this research to satisfy their internal needs or the needs of related organizations. The people who conduct the research may include social scientists, computer scientists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists—the whole array of professional specialists. They record and transmit much of this research via reports. The clients for such research may be government agencies or other institutions that are not equipped to do their own research. Reports may, in fact, be the only products of some companies and laboratories.
Much technical writing goes on at universities and colleges. Professors who do research publicize results in books, journal articles, papers for professional societies. Many faculty also write grant proposals to fund their research. Effective grant writing requires skills in proposal development, progress reports, and summary reports. In short, knowing how to develop documents for any occasion will assist you in pursuing your career and achieving career goals.
Many organizations prepare reports for public use. For example, a state department of natural resources is entrusted not only with conserving woodlands, wetlands, and wildlife but also with making the public aware of these resources. State and federally supported agricultural extension services have as a major responsibility the preparation and dissemination of agricultural information for interested users. Profit-earning companies have to create and improve their public image and also attract customers and employees. Airlines, railroads, distributors of goods and services, all have to keep in the public view. Pamphlets, posted notices, World Wide Web sites, and radio and television announcements are commonly used to meet these needs.
A broad and sound foundation in the essential elements of workplace writing is a tremendous asset for those who write technical documents, for it gives them versatility both on and off the job. They can write a good letter, prepare a brochure, compose a report. In this comprehensive sense, they are simply writers. The same writing skills that are important in a college classroom are important on the job. Surveys show that workers rank writing skills in this order of importance
1. Clarity
2. Conciseness
3. Organization
4. Correctness—use of standard English
As the previous examples of technical writing make clear, audience awareness is tremendously important to successful technical writing. What is appropriate for your professional colleagues may be inappropriate for the general public. In matters of definition, for example, terms are not normally defined if the audience is expected to know them. But the indispensable corollary to that proposition is that terms have to be defined when your audience, for whatever reason, cannot be expected to know them. Sentences can be fact-filled when the audience is highly professional and highly motivated. However, when your readers do not share your motivation, profession, and enthusiasm, you should slow your pace and make your prose less dense. In technical writing, you have to know your audience as well as your objectives and adapt your style and material to both.
The Foundations Of Effective Technical Writings
To write clearly and effectively begins with five imperatives which underlie every chapter in this book
1. Know your reader.
2. Know your objective.
3. Be simple, direct, and concise.
4. Know the context in which your communication will be received and used.
5. Design your communication with imperatives 1-4 as guideposts.
The Qualities Of Good Technical Writing
Because the qualities of good technical writing vary, depending on audience and objective, we cannot offer you a list that applies equally to everything you write. However, some qualities are apparent in good technical writing. Good technical writing
• Exemplifies effective design. It makes a good impression when it is picked up, handled, and flipped through or read online.
• Has been so designed that it can be read selectively—for instance, by some users, only the summary; by other users, only the introduction and conclusions; by still other users, the entire report.
• Has a rational and readily discernible plan, such as may be revealed by the table of contents and a series of headings throughout the report.
• Reads coherently and cumulatively from beginning to end.
• Answers readers’ questions as these questions arise in their minds.
• Has the necessary preliminary or front matter to characterize the report and disclose its purpose and scope.
• Has a body that provides essential information and that is written clearly, without jargon or padding.
• When appropriate, uses tables and graphs to present and clarify its content.
• Has, when needed, a summary or set of conclusions to reveal the results obtained.
• Conveys an overall impression of authority, thoroughness, soundness, and honest work.
• Can stand alone and be understood by readers who were not part of the initial readership.
• Makes a positive statement about the writer and the organization.
Beyond all these basic characteristics, good technical writing is free from typographical errors, grammatical slips, and misspelled words. Little flaws distract attention from the writer’s main points and call into question the writer’s literacy.
Questions to Consider
1. What kinds of writing do you anticipate you will need to do in the early years of your career? What do professional publications in your field suggest about communication in your career field?
2. Bring one or more examples of technical writing from your discipline. Be ready to explain how these examples reflect the characteristics of technical writing. How do you know that the examples you have selected are technical writing?
3. How is technical writing used in your disciplinary area? Email a faculty member in your discipline. Ask that faculty member about the kind of writing he/she does and the kind of writing that people working in your discipline-related industries do.
4. Professional associations will often publish articles in a magazine or on the association’s official website that describe a day in the life of a prominent individual in the field. Locate such a news article for a professional in your field. How much of his or her typical day includes speaking and writing? How much email does he or she have to answer? What kinds of letters, memos, and reports does he or she have to write? Summarize your findings in a one-page memo to your instructor.
5. Examine a document you have received from your university. Is the document easy to read? If not, how would you improve it? Does this document exemplify the characteristics of good technical writing? How and why?
6. Examine the reports under on the RTI website. Be prepared in class to discuss the reports. Which one is the most effective from your perspective as a new reader? Why? Which report makes the best first impression? Why?
7. Examine the document below, which was written for a broad audience. Do you
think it exemplifies the qualities of good technical writing? Why or why not?
Implications of Recent Clinical Trials for the National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III Guidelines
I. Cleeman; C. Noel Bairey Merz; H. Bryan Brewer, Jr; Luther T. Clark; Donald B. Hunninghake*; Richard C. Pasternak; Sidney C. Smith, Jr; Neil J. Stone, for the Coordinating Committee of the National Cholesterol Education Program, Endorsed by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, American College of Cardiology Foundation, and American Heart Association
Abstract
The Adult Treatment Panel III (ATP III) of the National Cholesterol Education Program issued an evidence-based set of guidelines on cholesterol management in 2001. Since the publication of ATP III, 5 major clinical trials of statin therapy with clinical end points have been published. These trials addressed issues that were not examined in previous clinical trials of cholesterol-lowering therapy. The present document reviews the results of these recent trials and assesses their implications for cholesterol management. Therapeutic lifestyle changes (TLC) remain an essential modality in clinical management. The trials confirm the benefit of cholesterol-lowering therapy in high-risk patients and support the ATP III treatment goal of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) ................
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