Book Design

An overview of the typical components of a printed technical book and the typical content, format, style, and sequence of those components.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Articles>Document Design>Publishing

Business Correspondence and Resumes

This chapter focus on business correspondence-general format and style for business letters as well as specific types of business letters.

McMurrey, David A. Io.com. Careers>Resumes>Writing>Business Communication

Content and Development

As a writer, you need to know some strategies for developing the content for a writing project: what topics and subtopics to include, what to write about, how to think of material to cover concerning a topic.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Style Guides

Cropping and Sizing Graphics

Use this study guide to learn how to crop and size graphics in several different applications. Cropping is not particularly problematic, but sizing is.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2004). Design>Graphic Design>Image Editing

Developing Indexes

As a technical writer, you'll typically have to create indexes for the print books and for online helps you develop. The type of index we mean here is the classic back-of-book index that shows page numbers on which topics and subtopics occur within the book. An online index is much the same except that you supply hypertext links rather than page numbers.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2004). Articles>Editing>Indexing>Technical Writing

Finding, Narrowing, Outlining Topics

In a technical-writing course, the ideal starting place is a workplace problem requiring some writing as part or all of the solution. With such a project, the audience and problem are there to help you narrow the topic. However, if you begin with a topic, it's harder to narrow. You are likely to end up with ten-pound textbook on automotive plastics, residential solar energy in the home, or La Niña. Narrow the topic and some careful research—the result will be a practical, useful document that doesn't go on forever. Narrowing means selecting a portion of a larger topic: for example, selecting a specific time period, event, place, people, type, component, use or application, cause or effect, and so on. Narrowing also means deciding on the amount of detail to use in discussing those topics.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Style Guides

Grammar Exercises: Fragments, Comma Splices, Agreement, Parallelism

Select the sentence that avoids errors in grammar (you may have to scroll to see all of the items), and then press the Click here ... button.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Interactive

Graphics and Tables

One of the nice things about technical writing courses is that most of the papers have graphics in them — or at least they should. A lot of professional, technical writing contains graphics — drawings, diagrams, photographs, illustrations of all sorts, tables, pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, flow charts, and so on. Once you get the hang of putting graphics like these into your writing, you should consider yourself obligated to use graphics whenever the situation naturally would call for them. Unlike what you might fear, producing graphics is not such a terrible task — in fact, it can be fun. You don't have to be a professional graphics artist or technical draftsperson to produce graphics for your technical writing. There are ways to produce professional-looking graphics with tape, scissors, white-out, and a decent photocopying machine.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online. Design>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration

Power Tools for Technical Communication Instructors Manual  

A PDF version of the instructors manual for Power Tools.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Books>Education>Textbooks

Online Technical Writing: an Online Textbook

This text is used by students in online technical-communication courses worldwide as well as the online courses below taught by David A. McMurrey, Tim Altanero, and Devorah Feldman at Austin Community College (ACC) in Austin, Texas USA.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online. Books>Education>Textbooks

Online Tools for Online Writing Teachers  

When you teach online technical writing courses (where the primary method of communication is e-mail and where class materials are mailable through various Internet facilities), you face a number of challenges. Teaching writing courses online can be time-consuming -- not what we want in such a labor-intensive field of instruction. This paper reviews a number of software tools that can reduce these problems and add advan-tages not normally available in the conventional face- to-face classroom. (Omitted here is discussion of common Internet tools such as lTP, telnet, vi and other such facilities.)

McMurrey, David A. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Education>Online

Online-Help Modeling Project

The following includes the instructions for creating a model of a small help project and how to name and send it to your instructor.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2004). Academic>Course Materials>Documentation>Help

Organization

This section was part of a chapter made up of the following: Content—provides strategies for thinking of useful content for writing projects, in other words, developing the content of a project. Organization—provides strategies for reviewing the sequence and arrangement of the contents of a writing project. Transitions—provides review strategies for checking the coherence of a writing project, in other words, the 'flow' of the project as created by the transitions.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Style Guides

Power Tools for Technical Communication

You may find this website rather different from the obligatory websites for other textbooks. I've packed in nearly 200 exercises, quizzes, projects, and other sorts of activities that will keep your students busy all semester!

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>TC

Recreating the Technical-Writing Classroom on the World Wide Web  

Many of the limitations inherent in technical-writing instruction on the World Wide Web can be overcome by intelligently designed web sites. Web-based instruction here refers to courses, in either the corporate or academic setting, where most ofthe instructional materials are supplied over the WorId Wide Web and where students and instructors communicate and exchange writing projects through e-mail. Acknowledging that few instructors have the expertise or technical support to create such web facilities, this paper makes available annotated Per1 source code for instructors ’ use or customization.

McMurrey, David A. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Education>Instructional Design>Online

Resources for Writing Business Plans

A business plan is a document used to start a new business or get funding for a business that is changing in some significant way. Business plans are important documents for business partners who need to agree upon and document their plans, government officials who may need to approve aspects of the plan, and of course potential investors such as banks or private individuals who may decide to fund the business or its expansion.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Articles>Business Communication>Planning>Writing

Sentence-Style Revision

Problems involving sentence-style cause writing to be unclear, wordy, unemphatic, and difficult to read. But sentences with these kinds of style problems are not necessarily grammatically incorrect—--nor do they violate any of the commonly accepted standards of usage. Yes, perfectly wretched, unreadable writing can be perfectly error-free! Federal, state, and local government—as well as academicians and lawyers in general—have long been the primary resource for wordy, pompous, and just plain bad writing. However, with the Plain English Movement, William Clinton's 1998 Presidential Memorandum on Plain Language, and similar events in state and local governments— government writing is becoming less and less an easy target. This chapter reviews some of the most common sentence-style problems, showing how to recognize them and how to fix them. Surely many others exist —we've just not trapped and labeled them yet. But in the wilds of bad writing, being able to recognize and revise sentence-style problems covered in this chapter will take you a long way—and enable you to recognize other types of problems as well.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Style Guides>Minimalism

Strategies for Peer-Reviewing and Team-Writing

When you peer-review other people's writing, remember above all that you should consider all aspects of that writing, not just--in fact, least of all--the grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Articles>Collaboration>Editing>Writing

Technical Reports

The assignment in this unit is to learn about technical reports, their different types, their typical audiences and situations, and then to plan one of your own. Specifically, your task in this unit is to pick a report topic, report audience and situation, report purpose, and report type.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Reports>Technical Writing

Transitions

This section was part of a chapter made up of the following: Content—provides strategies for thinking of useful content for writing projects, in other words, developing the content of a project. Organization—provides strategies for reviewing the sequence and arrangement of the contents of a writing project. Transitions—provides review strategies for checking the coherence of a writing project, in other words, the 'flow' of the project as created by the transitions.

McMurrey, David A. Illuminati Online (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Style Guides