Analyzing an Organizational Web Site  

The Web is still so new that there is very little consensus about what an organizational Web page should be and what purpose(s) it should serve. You will start this exercise by examining some organizational Web sites (preferably organizations in your field). You will develop criteria by which to judge organizational sites, and then use those criteria to evaluate a single Web site, with the site’s creator as your audience. Your criteria will doubtless include elements like the elegance of the design and should certainly include the navigational system and other Web page practicalities. They should also include the fundamentals that are important in all technical documents: suitability to purpose(s) and audience(s), content, organization, and tone.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Web Design>Evaluation

Audience Analysis of a Usenet Newsgroup  

For this exercise, you will be working with and expanding on the concepts of audience discussed in the textbook by completing these preliminary tasks: · Selecting a Usenet newsgroup that discusses issues in your field · Writing and posting a relevant question to the newsgroup · Collecting responses to your question After completing these tasks, you will write a report in which you evaluate your success in adjusting your communication to your chosen audience. In the process of completing this assignment, you will gain a more sophisticated understanding of audience and get better acquainted with the kinds of interactions with professionals and students that are possible on the Internet.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Audience Analysis>Online

Career Resources: Writing a Resume

The Career Center: Writing a Resume section contains information that can be helpful when you are preparing to write a resume.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Careers>Resumes>TC

Collaboratively Planning and Preparing a Memo  

A great deal of writing in the workplace is done collaboratively, and it’s important to get practice not only in writing, but in writing with others, which can be a very different process. In this exercise, you will write a memo collaboratively with another student, following the directions for assignment 1, text pages 153- 156, in Chapter 5 (“Collaboration in Workplace Communication”). You’ll also revise an information sheet.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Collaboration

Constructing an Organizational Web Site  

Many business people and scholars see computer-mediated communications as the inevitable future of business and technical communication. Certainly we are seeing meteoric growth on the Internet. Increasingly, companies are relying on computer-mediated communication for external and internal communication, and Web page design and construction are becoming more and more a part of what professionals do on the job. For this exercise, you will be working with a team to develop an organizational Web site.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Web Design

Creating a Visual  

Research in visual design has demonstrated that tables are “the best way to show exact numerical values” when the reader needs to compare those values. In other cases, when comparison of exact numbers is not vital, other visuals may be more appropriate. Effective professional communicators analyze their audience’s need for the data and the purpose of the visual to determine the best presentation.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Graphic Design

Designing Visual Aids for a Presentation  

In addition to preparing and reading documents, professionals spend much of their time communicating their ideas orally. These oral exchanges take many forms—from informal telephone conversations to speeches in front of large audiences. During their careers, most professionals are required to give formal presentations—often they must give presentations on a regular basis.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Presentations>Visual Rhetoric

Editing Documents Collaboratively  

In this exercise, you will work in a group of four students to collaboratively edit an information sheet about your campus library. As a group you will decide what type of collaborative relationship will work best for this exercise. After reviewing and editing the document, you will individually prepare a short report about the exercise for your instructor.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials

Effective Scannable Resumes

The Career Center: Writing a Resume Effective Scannable Resumes section contains information that can be helpful when you are preparing to write a resume. It discusses how many companies are using OCR scanning to pick keywords out of a resume and enter them into a database. This section can help you write your resume so it will allow for effective scanning.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Careers>Resumes>TC

Evaluating Correspondence  

The ability to recognize effective correspondence is valuable. It will not only allow you to assess what may have gone wrong in a transaction, but also to plan for better communication in the future. Professional communicators understand the importance of being critical about their writing. They are able to evaluate the documents they produce, recognize potential problems, and make the necessary adjustments. They can also appreciate well written documents, learning communication strategies that they might use in the future. In this exercise you will practice your ability to evaluate correspondence. Using the criteria outlined in Chapter 14 (“Correspondence”) of Technical Communication, 5e, you will analyze a letter sent to a professional journal in your discipline. You will present your analysis in a memo written to your instructor, so you will have an opportunity to develop your own correspondence writing style.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Correspondence>Evaluation

Explaining Processes  

Process explanations have become an important part of the workplace. However, professionals don’t create process explanations only for auditors. Process explanations are used to communicate sequential activities to a variety of audiences and for many different reasons. As Technical Communication, 5e illustrates in Chapter 12 (“Creating Process Explanations”), several forms of process explanations exist, though they have some common characteristics that you should be familiar with. In this exercise you will revise a set of detailed instructions into a process explanation. You have to decide what type of information is most appropriate for your audience and the purpose of your document.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Writing

Formatting a Description  

A document’'s format leads readers to expect certain types of information. A memo format suggests something different from a newspaper column. Your task as a workplace professional is to meet the reader’s expectations by presenting information that readers need in an appropriate format. This computer file contains the description of a golf ball, written by a student who is an avid golfer. You can edit and format this description (or a selected portion of it) for a specific audience.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Editing

How to Create a Portfolio

So, you decide that you would like to create a portfolio. What do you do? Where do you start?

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson. Careers>Portfolios>TC

How to Organize a Portfolio

You have collected the pieces you would like to include in your portfolio. You have sorted through your collection and selected your best work. You have made entry cards for each piece to provide a good introduction for each sample. And you are ready to place your work, introduction page, entry cards, section dividers, and give-aways into your new leather portfolio. Where do you start?

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson. Careers>Portfolios>Information Design>Card Sorting

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)  

When you take a document and put it on a computer and make it available for people to look at with their Web browsers, their browsers read the text of the document, but ignore the format. The browsers ignore places where you hit return, put words in boldface and italics, skipped lines, made headings, etc. In order to make headings, italics, etc., you must code your documents with HTML. This file contains codes and examples of HTML that will help you learn the basics you need to start constructing your own Web pages.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>HTML

Job Searching on the Internet  

Many people look for jobs today by logging on to the Internet; after all, there are well over 100,000 companies on the Web today, and many of these companies post job listings on the Internet. Many other organizations that don't have Web sites use online services to publicize their job openings. This is particularly true in computer-related fields, but, increasingly, companies in other fields are using the Internet to find potential employees.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Interviewing

Organizing Paragraphs  

Just as Socrates said, ‘Every discourse must be organized, like a living being . . .,’ a document must be organized in a logical, coherent fashion, with its parts ‘composed in fitting relation to each other and to the whole.’ Although research has led to more sophisticated guidelines for creating reader-based documents, Socrates’ principles are still valuable. Writing organized, coherent documents is still a primary goal for technical writers—one you should follow as you develop your professional writing style. This file contains text about the refining, bleaching, and deodorizing processes of sunflowerseed oil. Your task is to make this text more organized and coherent so that readers will understand the process.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Editing

Organizing Sentences into Paragraphs  

This exercise will give you practice in organizing sentences into effective paragraphs. This computer file contains 12 sentences that you need to group, order, and connect so that you can create coherent, cohesive paragraphs.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Writing

Organizing Visual and Verbal Information  

For this exercise, you will create a two-panel brochure about carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) that could be distributed with other medical literature in your campus’s health center. The text and visual aids you will use are contained in this file, though they will require significant modifications using design principles presented in Technical Communication/5e.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Visual>Visual Rhetoric

Reading Technical Documents  

After you begin your career, your professional development activities will affect your potential to succeed. While you may engage in many activities specific to your discipline, reading and understanding professional and technical information will always be important. It would be a mistake to overlook this important skill that can be improved by developing strategic reading practices. In this exercise, you will read a scientific text—employing appropriate reading strategies—and then summarize that information for another reader who is less willing to invest time in the document. To write an effective summary, you must have a reading strategy that will allow you to quickly understand the purpose of the document, the hierarchy of its argument, its applications, and the limits of the author’s claims.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials

Researching on the Internet  

There are enormous advantages and disadvantages to using the Internet as a source for research. The Internet can be a very convenient way of finding up-to-the-minute data quickly and easily; however, it can also present difficulties for researchers, as it is not edited (as newspapers and magazines are). Anyone with the knowledge and access to a server can publish anything. As a result, it’s difficult to know whether your sources are reliable. Ideally, of course, the Internet should be used in conjunction with more traditional resources like journals and newspapers. (You should generally use as many types of reliable sources as possible in your research.) For this exercise, you will be searching for information on the Internet (preferably about a topic you’re working on in this or another class) and reporting on the search and the results. Your purpose in reporting on your search will be to recommend to your audience, which should be another student or even a professor in your field, whether or not she or he should use the Internet as a source for research. If so, how can she or he use the Internet most effectively for researching in your field? If not, why not?

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Online

Revising a Memo  

One of the best ways to practice writing memos, of course, is to get a job and write lots of memos to actual audiences, but practicing can certainly help. This computer file contains a memo that needs to be revised. In the current version, the main points are difficult to locate, and the supporting details aren’t well organized. You will work to improve this memo to make it work more effectively with its audience.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Editing

Revising Documents for Different Audiences  

In the most effective documents, the data is presented in the way most appropriate for the readers. It matches their expectations for the document, their purposes for reading, and their level of technical expertise. When professionals create documents, they must be mainly concerned with the primary reader. To ensure that you are thinking about your readers, it is often useful to create a reader profile, identifying their key characteristics. This profile allows you to shape the material into a more reader-friendly document. During this exercise, you are going to create an information sheet about melanoma. This exercise has two major stages. First you will complete an audience analysis worksheet by answering questions about your primary audience. Then you will revise text about melanoma of the skin, creating a one-page information sheet that could be distributed to students at a campus science exhibition.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Editing

Technical Communication Resources: Internet Resources

The General Resources: Internet Resources section of this site provides links to several resources for technical writers, including topical sites, e-zines, and online writing centers.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Resources>Directories>TC

Text-Based Document Testing  

Probably the most common type of document testing in the workplace is text-based. Text-based testing is common because it’s cheap and easy—with current word processors, running a test is as simple as selecting “Grammar” from the “Tools” menu in Microsoft Word or WordPerfect (6.0 or later). Text-based testing is very efficient at catching spelling errors (although it doesn’t catch homonyms, like accidentally substituting “threw” for “through”) and some grammatical mistakes. However, such testing doesn’t take into account visuals, forecasting, design, or other elements that have a great deal to do with a document’s usability. For this exercise, you will explore the plusses and minuses of text-based testing by working with a small group of classmates to test and revise a short but complex document. You will then compare your improved document to that of other groups and discuss the value of text-based testing.

Burnett, Rebecca E. Thomson (2001). Academic>Course Materials>Editing>Evaluation