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. It was just easier to do it that way because I didn’t have a lot of content to write about, and I was able to keep the structure organized in my head. However, now that many of us will be writing longer technical documents with much more information in our future jobs, practicing the use of outlines could be very beneficial.
Another important feature of a technical document is the introduction, and one function of the introduction is to state your main point. In writing lab reports for courses at Purdue, it was difficult to do this at first. I was much more accustomed to using the body of the report as a buildup to the final conclusion, but as stated in the reading, “technical documents are not mystery stories,” and it doesn’t matter if you give away the final conclusion in the introduction. It’s vital to get the main point across to the reader several times throughout a document.
Furthermore, I’ve also seen several different organizational patterns in technical documents, particularly at work. It seems as though the root of everything in the engineering business is the specification. Specifications are used to detail the requirements for products, procedures, and much more. They’re even used to describe the formats for other documents. For example, Bosch has specifications for writing laboratory test reports and engineering reports. I think that specifications are very important because they can be used to define the formats for all other genres, eliminating the guesswork for somebody to create a format from scratch.
Outline Importance
I agree with Joe on the rising importance of using outlines as one progresses through college and eventually into a steady career. I, as well, never gave too much importance to outlines in the past, mainly because of the shortened length requirements for grade school documents, but I have come to rely on them more and more as my college days progress. I like chapter 8's recommendations on different methods of constructing an outline. Some of them, such as Power Point, I have not considered in the past, but that will likely change in the near future as I see my needs for organizing information growing.
Content in the body, Context in the intro and outro
Another thing I liked in the reading's explanation of the function of an introduction in the reading was the distinction between content and context. I always have a hard time with introductions and conclusions, and thinking of them as context-building tools instead of will really help me in the future (I'm always trying to cram in extra content).
I feel your meaning on outlines. They are extremely helpful, especially in technical writing, but using them is a hard habit to commit to.