From Gobbledygook to Plain English: How a Large State Agency Took on the Bureaucratic Form Letter  

In an effort to reduce phone calls and improve customer service, the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries(L&I), in July 2001, launched 'Plain Talk' – a year-long project to rewrite 100 bureaucratic form letters into plain English. Hundreds of thousands of form letters are used each year by L&I to process claims, to issue workplace safety and health citations, and to handle many other workplace issues. As the Plain Talk project manager, I decided to focus on the department’s highest-frequency form letters and now work with 12 programs to rewrite them into clear and simple language. The effort is backed by a strong message from the governor and agency director, high-quality training, ongoing mentoring, and “reality check” usability testing. The project is due to be completed by the end of June 2002.

Botka, Dana Howard. STC Proceedings (2002). Articles>Language>Writing>Minimalism

From Logocentrism to Ethocentrism: Historicizing Critiques of Writing Research      

Since the 1960s, attitudes toward empirical research on writing, including research on technical/professional writing, have shifted from encouragement to resistance. This essay traces these shifts in light of changes in writing research, psychology, and the rhetoric of science. In composition studies, an initial mild uneasiness about 'scientism' intensified with the rise of process models, suggesting a Romanticist defense of the mystique of creativity. More recent post-modernist denunciations of scientific methods as immoral have other Romanticist overtones. In technical communication, a long-standing interest in workplace writing practices allowed a smoother integration of empirical analysis with descriptive studies of writing contexts. However, as in composition, recent critiques in technical communication suggest that empirical methods should not be employed. These critiques too tightly circumscribe the values that may be considered humanist and cut off important avenues of inquiry and critique that historically have advanced both the sciences and humanities.

Charney, Davida. Technical Communication Quarterly (1998). Articles>Rhetoric>Writing

From Page to Stage: How Theories of Genre and Situated Learning Help Introduce Engineering Students to Discipline-Specific Communication      

This article describes a discipline-specific communication course for engineering students offered by a Canadian university. The pedagogy of this course is based on North American theories of genre and theories of situated learning. In keeping with these theories, the course provides a context in which students acquire rhetorical skills and strategies necessary to integrate into a discipline-specific discourse community. The authors argue that such a pedagogical approach can be used to design communication courses tailored to the needs of any discipline if the following three key conditions are met: assignments are connected to subject matter courses, a dialogic environment is provided, and the nature of assignments allows students to build on their learning experiences in the course.

Artemeva, Natasha, Susan Logie and Jennie St-Martin. Technical Communication Quarterly (1999). Articles>Education>Engineering>Writing

From Plain English to Global English

Make your documents easy for EFL users to read and understand, and communicate successfully with people all over the world. About one billion people use English as a foreign language (EFL). You can avoid most pitfalls of cross-cultural communication by using global English.

McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2001). Articles>Writing>Localization>Minimalism

From Structured Abstracts to Structured Articles: A Modest Proposal    

Work with structured abstracts--which contain sub-headings in a standard order--has suggested that such abstracts contain more information, are of a higher quality, and are easier to search and to read than are traditional abstracts. The aim of this article is to suggest that this work with structured abstracts can be extended to cover scientific articles as a whole. The article outlines a set of sub-headings--drawn from research on academic writing--that can be used to make the presentation of scientific papers easier to read and to write. Twenty published research papers are then analyzed in terms of these sub-headings. The analysis, with some reservations, supports the viability of this approach.

Hartley, James. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (1999). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Writing

From Technical Writing to Knowledge Engineering  

This paper describes one writer's journey from capturing disparate bits of information as a technical writer in a large corporation to creating knowledge bases of related and evolving data, information, and knowledge. It illustrates how information development professionals can leverage their communication skills into highly-valued, interactive positions, working on teams with domain experts, information technology and information retrieval professionals, and end-users.

Knodel, Elinor L. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Writing>Knowledge Management>Technical Writing

From Technical Writing To Marketing Communication: Growth From Common Ground  

If you think marketing communications are written by an entirely different brand of writer—in a version of the language wholly unlike the one you employ— then think again. Marketing and technical communications do share common ground. And by expanding the horizons of this landscape, you can move into marketing writing. To begin, you must explore what the disciplines share, what attributes are peculiar to marketing communications, and how you can go about developing your skills in this field.

Baker, Dina. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Writing>Marketing>Business Communication

From Text to Module

For some time now, machines have been constructed and built using modules. i.e. encapsulated and reusable standard components. In manuals, the modular approach has only slowly been gaining acceptance. With XML and a wide variety of editing tools, the technical prerequisites for the change are by now only a matter of the individual requirements – a right solution can be found for virtually every purpose. But for technical communicators the question arises what needs to be considered when texting under these changed conditions. This language tip is intended to be a basic aspect: how can one determine whether a text component is suited as a module?

Nickl, Markus. tekom (2005). Articles>Language>Technical Writing

From Writer to Content Provider

As a regular user of the web or even as a writer for online magazines, you may not have picked up on a trend I've noticed from my contacts with web entrepreneurs. Increasingly, those who aim at selling big on the Net understand that attractive prices, huge inventories and responsive online ordering aren't enough to spark fantastic traffic. They call the missing ingredient 'content' and crave its power to inspire repeat visits.

Yudkin, Marcia. Yudkin.com (2001). Articles>Web Design>Writing

From Writing Documents to Meeting User Information Needs  

As professional Technical Communicators, we constantly struggle with the question 'Is what we produce being used and is it making a difference?' Too often, we base our measures of success on our own views of what makes a good document, Help system, or other information product. Through broader and more detailed analysis, and by measuring success based on how our information products affect others, we can increase the effectiveness of our information products and increase our value to our users and companies.

Hurst, Bob, Cindy Line and Kerry Newberry. STC Proceedings (2003). Articles>Writing>Usability>Assessment

The Front Line of Tech Writing

Tech writing for browser-assisted online help systems does resemble 'writing for the Web' in some significant ways – but there are substantial differences, too.

Roberts, Jennifer. Contentious (1999). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing

Fruit Flies Like a Banana: Writing Unambiguously

Ambiguity has a way of creeping into your writing without your noticing it. Here are five of the biggest culprits.

Henning, Kathy. ClickZ (2001). Articles>Writing>Web Design

Functional Redundancy and Ellipsis as Strategies in Reading and Writing  

Redundancy is widely seen as a kind of linguistic cholesterol, clogging the arteries of our prose and impeding the efficient circulation of knowledge. However, I will argue that, just as a more thorough understanding of cholesterol reveals the existence of good cholesterol (HDL) as well as bad (LDL), so a broader view on the principle of redundancy reveals its effectiveness in certain situations, particularly beyond the sentence level. In this article I aim to revive the beneficial or functional sense of redundancy and show that functional redundancy in writing need not be a contradiction in terms. I believe a discussion of redundancy should include its opposite, ellipsis, so I will define both terms, emphasizing the beneficial sense of each, and then show how they appear in both reading and writing. In the latter part of the article, to illustrate the pervasiveness of redundancy and ellipsis, I will discuss examples of each in document design and in figures of speech. My attention will mainly be on technical writing, but the principles I will discuss may apply to other genres, too.

Grant-Davie, Keith. JAC (1995). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric

Functional Spec Tutorial: What and Why

Functional specifications (functional specs), in the end, are the blueprint for how you want a particular web project or application to look and work. It details what the finished product will do, how a user will interact with it, and what it will look like. By creating a blueprint of the product first, time and productivity are saved during the development stage because the programmers can program instead of also working out the logic of the user-experience. It will also enable you to manage the expectations of your clients or management, as they will know exactly what to expect.

Mojofat. Articles>Writing>Specifications>Technical Writing

Functional Specification

A functional specification (or sometimes functional specifications) is a formal document used to describe in detail for software developers a product's intended capabilities, appearance, and interactions with users. The functional specification is a kind of guideline and continuing reference point as the developers write the programming code. (At least one major product development group used a "Write the manual first" approach. Before the product existed, they wrote the user's guide for a word processing system, then declared that the user's guide was the functional specification. The developers were challenged to create a product that matched what the user's guide described.) Typically, the functional specification for an application program with a series of interactive windows and dialogs with a user would show the visual appearance of the user interface and describe each of the possible user input actions and the program response actions. A functional specification may also contain formal descriptions of user tasks, dependencies on other products, and usability criteria. Many companies have a guide for developers that describes what topics any product's functional specification should contain.

Whatis.com. Articles>Writing>Specifications>Functional Specifications

Functional Specification Standard  

In general terms, the functional specification states what the proposed system is to do, whereas design is how the system is to be constructed to meet the functional specification. However in writing it, some consideration of design issues must take place, to ensure a realistic system is specified.

Software Reality. Articles>Writing>Specifications>Functional Specifications

The Fundamentals of Persuasive Writing

What are the characteristics that make copy effective? Why does one ad make a lasting impression and sell merchandise, while another falls flat and doesn’t generate enough revenue to pay its own cost? Virtually all persuasive copy contains the eight elements described in this article.

Bly, Robert W. Bly.com. Articles>Rhetoric>Writing>Rhetoric

Gender-Neutral Technical Writing

In recurring discussions on the TECHWR-L list, many technical writers argue that they write in 'correct English' and are not going to change their style just to suit the political-correctness police. 'I won't use 'they' as a singular pronoun because it's not grammatically correct' and 'Using contrived phrases such as 's/he' is just too awkward' are arguments I've heard frequently in the debate. But using 'incorrect English' or contrived phrases is neither the goal nor the outcome of gender-neutral writing.

Hollis Weber, Jean. Technical Editors Eyrie (2002). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing>Gender

Gender-Neutral Technical Writing

Gender-neutral writing uses language that does not stereotype either sex nor appear to be referring to only one sex when that is not the writer's intention. In this article, you'll see why gender-neutral writing is important for technical writers to use, what gender-neutral writing is not, and how you can use gender-neutral writing in the documents you develop.

Weber, Jean Hollis. STC Northeast Ohio (2002). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing>Gender

Gender-Neutral Technical Writing

Gender-neutral writing uses language that does not stereotype either sex nor appear to be referring to only one sex when that is not the writer's intention. In this article, you'll see why gender-neutral writing is important for technical writers to use, what gender-neutral writing is not, and how you can use gender-neutral writing in the documents you develop.

Weber, Jean Hollis. TECHWR-L (2002). Articles>Writing>Style Guides>Gender

Geography of the Blogosphere: Representing the Culture, Ecology and Community of Weblogs

Maps of any aspect of the Internet call for different approaches than traditional cartography for two reasons. First, any attempt to map the Internet using the Internet as a medium changes the thing it sets out to represent. Second, Internet maps are more than pictures of static—or at least relatively slow moving—features but are representations of ever changing systems of relationships. The blogosphere is an example of explosive growth in the number and complexity of interrelationship and community made possible by the Internet.

Packwood, Nicholas. Into the Blogosphere (2004). Articles>Writing>Environmental>Blogging