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. I also never really liked to start in the middle of a paper. Starting with the body always felt weird and I felt like I wasn’t getting anything done. After seeing that this way of writing is recommended, I will have to start using this tactic more often.

I believe that the most important part of this chapter was the section that talked about organizing your writing for other cultures. Normally when people write they write thinking that their audience will generally be from the same culture and have the same way of processing information. I found this section to be especially important because I will ultimately end up in some sort of technical career. As we have found out from reading the other chapters, when writing in a technical setting your document are likely to be read by a variety of different people all from different backgrounds and cultures. Even though the indirect approach that was presented at the end of the chapter seems drawn out and tedious to me, I realize the importance of learning this style of writing. I also believe that this style of writing is not something that can just be picked up. You can read about as much as you want, but until you have to actually put it into practice it will be hard to understand the important differences.