English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

My biggest problem with writing any paper has always been the introduction. I know the basics of the introduction, they have been drilled into my head since high school, but that never made it any easier to write. I think my problem with the introduction has always been the attention getter. I always found the attention getter to be the hardest part of writing any paper. Thankfully, for me, the attention getter is not a part of technical writing. The six moves that were presented in this chapter should be a good tool to help with the writing of an introduction.

Welcome to the introduction to Reading Response 3. Hopefully the title caught your attention and you decided to read what I had to say. According to Chapter 8 – Organization and Drafting, there should be an introduction to your paper. I’ll be talking about what the chapter had to say about formatting your paper as well as experiences I have encountered in my day to day life. For now, sit back and enjoy the words that I am typing.

So far, based on the previous chapters, this text seems to have a very systematic approach to writing technical documents. This is a good thing because it makes everything quite simple; “Follow these steps and you will not fail...” Something I really liked was the use of power point to create an outline. I think this works because physically separating ones thoughts by having several slides helps to organize thoughts in your head more clearly-just makes sense to me.

The reading and instructions in Chapter 8: Organizing and Drafting was very interesting. How to put the introduction, body, and conclusion together in different genres and patterns was very informative. To begin the chapter, the memo about the Challenger Space shuttle provided an example of a distinct introduction, body, and conclusion that broadcasted all information needed to make a decision. I actually attended a lecture at Purdue that was held by a NASA engineer. The engineer actually brought this memo up but never presented it.

The chapter 8 reading focused on the organization of writing, the steps involved in writing a technical document, and a multitude of ways to bring your point across.

I thought the section on genres was a little far fetched. This seems like it should be placed at a much early level in our writing careers. By now most of have written enough memos, emails, letters, research papers, etc. to know how to use each effectively. On that same note I noticed a lot of this seemed like review material.

This week’s reading from Technical Communications Today, entitled Organization and Drafting, focuses on the various aspects of organization that go into constructing a well-planned technical document. The author goes beyond the simple introduction, body, and conclusion layout and presents several genres available to the reader, each offering a different method of presenting information to an audience. In constructing large technical documents, the text makes the recommendation of creating an informal outline to guide one’s work. I found this section pretty interesting.

I found chapter 8 to be somewhat of a refresher for me as far as the concepts in the chapter go. I feel like by this point in most of our lives we have a pretty solid idea of how to outline and draft documents. However there were some key points I took away from this document. I’ve definitely had to write some documents where I implemented some of these useful key points I observed in the reading

I understand the need for an introduction, body, and conclusion in most documents, especially technical documents. For example, the letter about the O-rings was a perfect situation when points needed to be re-iterated and emphasized several times over. However, in many of my experiences writing memorandums and such documents, the manager reading them has specifically said or implied to ‘cut through the crap and tell me what I need to know so I do not have to read things that are considered fluff’.

Chapter 8 is a good review chapter. While it did bring up some points that were new, most of the items it discussed were things I have been using in writing for awhile. Saying a writing should have a introduction, a body, and a conclusion is mostly common sense by now. As well as stating you should outline a document before writing it. However it did bring up some new things, and also discussed some things in ways I hadn't considered before.

According to Chapter 8 – Organizing and Drafting in TCT, the organizational pattern of a document should be constructed distinctively for the type of genre at hand. One of the first steps toward this is to create an outline, which I think can be an effective tool in technical writing especially. I’d assume that all of us were required to come up with an outline for at least a few of our research papers from elementary school through high school, but I’ll admit that I usually drafted the outline after my paper was written.