#25113
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
#14335
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
#31097
Tables make information easy to find and understand and are often used for illustrating comparisons among similar data. A table usually consists of a heading row and one or more body rows and may also contain a title.
McMurrey, David A., Jana Owens, Jacqueline J. Pulido and Thomas A. Moore. Illuminati Online (2004). Design>Document Design>Software>Adobe FrameMaker
#31096
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
#18156
For this project, you'll create a style guide for at least two markedly different technical publications. Your style guide will be used by technical writers on your documentation team to get these publications in conformance with each other, as well as other publication.
Rogers, Will. Illuminati Online (2002). Academic>Course Materials>Style Guides
#31098
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
#14336
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
#14331
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
#15037
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
#14325
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
#18464
Online Technical Writing: Abstracts
An abstract is a summary of a body of information. Sometimes, abstracts are in fact called summaries--sometimes, executive summaries or executive abstracts. There are different kinds of abstracts—your technical report uses two types: the descriptive abstract and the informative abstract.
#10791
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
#31099
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
#14334
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
#14324
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
#20498
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
#14332
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
#25114
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
#20497
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
#14333
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
