English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

From the readings, it’s clear that design is not purely for aesthetics, but it has a huge impact on your credibility and usability. But one should not underestimate looks when it comes to designs. I know a lot of people that use Mac and Apple products simply because they’re “cute”, and another that does not use a brand new laptop because it is “ugly”.

For my topic I have chosen to write instructions on how to use the free disk emulator Daemon Tools. Daemon Tools allows the user to create a virtual disk drive on their computer, create, and play disk images. One of the biggest benefits of disk emulators is that a computer without a physical disk drive such as some notebooks and laptops can now run disk images from their hard drive. I have also noticed many installation files have become disk images because it preserves all of the original menus and links of the disk.

After finishing this week’s readings, I had a hard time trying to figure out the real importance of Chapter 19 about technical descriptions in relation to instructions. It came to me that instructions are really descriptions of a process. Even with this I think Chapter 20 did a great job of underlining steps and process for good instructional writing. One thing Chapter 20 mentioned to do is to provide feedback throughout the process to ensure the reader they are doing everything correctly.

I was wondering if I did too much explaining my job experience and not enough trying to sell myself. Any help would be appreciated.

Having never written a cover letter before, I really spent some time pouring over this week’s readings, finding some useful tips and some disappointments. For a change, I actually found some of the questions posed really helpful. The two I found the most helpful from the Thompson handbook were “Why am I interested?”, and “How am I qualified?”. Being a little in the dark about cover letters up to this point, answering these two questions really helped me to see where I needed to go.

So it appears that writing the perfect resume based on the courses reading and past advice will be harder than IU basketball winning another game or the Cubs winning the World Series. CCO stresses to have a clear cut objective and good cover letter, while the article from Tech Life even said not to bother with a cover letter or objective.

http://www.brutoco.net/employment.htm

The position I have chosen for my job analysis and ultimately applying for is as a project engineer for Brutoco Engineering and Construction Inc. I have chosen this particular position because I have worked as a field engineer for Mass. Electric Construction Company and a project engineer would be an “advance” from this.