English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

This chapter, "Organizing and Drafting," makes some good points about patterns of arrangements and the patterns that different genres follow. I've written many documents in several genres, although I've never necessarily considered them as their own genre while writing them. I suppose I always saw them as a set format, but saw that format as a set of requirements more than a tool for the audience to use while reading the document.

As defined by the TCT, a genre is a predictable pattern for organizing information to achieve specific purposes (pg 183). Different genres dictate which document types are utilized, eg. the report genre could use a research proposal document and the hypertext genre could use a web format. Most of my experience with genre's falls into these two categories. I've written plenty of research papers for other English classes, and I've written my share of content for the web. What interests me are some of the other genres described in the article.

I felt like Chapter 8 was mainly a review section. I already knew most of this information from earlier college and high school classes, especially the section that drilled in outlining. Although I already knew most of it, I did find the part about using presentation software to develop an outline pretty helpful. I had never thought of using those programs in that way, but it seems like a pretty easy way to start when there is a lot of information to keep track of.

What really stood out from this reading to me was the common saying that tied together the chapter: “Tell them what your are going to tell them. Tell them. Then, tell them what you told them.” It may seem redundant and pointless to basically say the same thing over and over but it is the basis of most technical writing and presentations.