Technical Report Writing Today

Book excerpt: Technical Report Writing Today provides thorough coverage of technical writing basics, techniques, and applications. Through a practical focus with varied examples and exercises, students internalize the skills necessary to produce clear and effective documents and reports. Project worksheets help students organize their thoughts and prepare for assignments, and Focus boxes highlight key information and recent developments in technical communication. Extensive individual and collaborative exercises expose students to different kinds of technical writing problems and solutions. Annotated student examples—more than 100 in all—illustrate different writing styles and approaches to problems. Numerous short and long examples throughout the text demonstrate solutions for handling writing assignments in current career situations. The four-color artwork in the chapter on creating visuals keeps pace with contemporary workplace capabilities. The Ninth Edition offers many new examples, exercises, samples, and articles, the latest information on using electronic resumes and documenting electronic sources, more on group work, and new Ethics and Globalization sidebars that highlight these two important topics in the technical communication field. Chapter exercises have been labeled to guide students in various goals: You create, You analyze, You revise, and Group. In this revision, the authors have focused on streamlining and updating key chapters, rather than on substantially changing the text's effective organization. Chapter 1: Definition of Technical Writing has been thoroughly revised to include complete sections on ethics and globalization. Theoretical sections have been updated to include current thinking about the role of communication between people. New exercises and examples are included. Chapter 2: Profiling Audiences, has been completely revised to feature current thinking about defining audiences, including an emphasis on the tasks that audiences must perform after reading, and a section on creating audience profiles. Worksheets have been revised, and a section on meeting quality benchmarks has been added. Chapter 3: The Technical Writing Process, substantially updated, offers a current description of the document creation process and includes recent thinking on information design. Chapter 6: Designing Pages, has been revised and simplified to make the complex process of page design easier for students to grasp. Chapter 12: Memorandums and Informal Reports, heavily revised, now includes more emphasis on, and new examples of, the IMRD report format. The chapter also includes a focus section with an expanded treatment of email. Chapter 15: Recommendation and Feasibility Reports presents a new feasibility report created by a small business to determine whether or not to market an item. Chapter 18: Oral Presentations now focuses on PowerPoint. The theory of oral reports is expanded to include recent criticisms of PowerPoint presentations and advice on creating effective presentations. Appendixes include A Brief Handbook (Appendix A), focusing on the sentence, punctuation, and mechanics issues most relevant to technical writing; and Documenting Sources (Appendix B), covering the most up-to-date APA and MLA methods for documenting print and electronic sources. The text-specific instructor web site features such resources as sample syllabi, a transition guide, an assessment guide, and chapter-by-chapter teaching suggestions. The student site offers additional student samples (including web sites built by their peers), cha