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You Will Learn How To
- Write clear, effective technical documents, including user manuals and technical reports
- Assess your target audience and develop documents to meet their needs
- Choose the appropriate writing style to communicate to specialized audiences
- Build effective sentences, paragraphs and sections that explain information clearly
- Employ diagrams, tables, charts and other graphical tools effectively
- Create informative and interesting content that your readers will understand and use
Course Benefits Success in business relies on clear and concise communication, making those who possess effective writing skills a valuable component to any organization. In this practical hands-on course, you gain the skills to assess the needs of your users and create documents that explain technical information. You learn the mechanics of good technical writing, along with techniques for document design and page layout.
Who Should Attend Individuals who need to effectively communicate technical information or instructions to others, or those entering the field of technical writing who need to create clear and concise manuals or papers.
Hands-On Training During this course, you perform extensive hands-on exercises, including:
- Analyzing your audience to meet their needs
- Applying a style guide to achieve consistency
- Editing to remove unnecessary verbiage
- Crafting a powerful tutorial
- Developing a document using specific writing styles
- Choosing the right words and building strong sentences
- Organizing using the audience's scenarios
- Guiding research through explicit and tacit knowledge
- Improving readability
Course 319 Content Introduction to Technical Writing
The purpose of technical writing
- Benefits of effectively communicating technical information
- Dealing with common writing problems
The Writing Process
Getting ready to write
- Eliminating misconceptions that stall technical writing
- Driving your document design with scenarios
- Focusing on a document's purposes
Assessing your audience
- The investigation process
- Identifying your purpose and the reader's purpose
- What the audience brings to the table
Covering the knowledge domain
- Exposing tacit knowledge
- Knowing when you've "covered it all"
Ensuring Clarity and Readability
Writing technically
- Organizing information to meet the reader's needs
- Determining information needs with the OODA loop
Architecting sentences that communicate
- Creating strong subjects
- Building sentence variety
- Punctuating for clarity
- Solving common grammar problems in technical writing
Managing style in technical writing
- Evaluating readability using the Given/New technique
- Ensuring consistency with a style guide
- Eliminating reader recycling
The Mechanics of Writing
Technical writer's tools
- Structuring information with tables and lists
- Selecting the right words
- Two strategies for rewriting
Writing in the right style
- Official
- Primer
- Nominal
- Telegraphic
- Selecting the most effective style
Editing for quality
- Knowing when and what to edit
- The editing triage
- Editing throughout the document process
Maintaining document structure
- Developing cohesive documents with Given/New and transitions
- Applying useful headings to support skimming
- Structuring information around the reader's scenarios
Methods of explanation
- Available writing styles
- General to specific
- Effect and cause
- Problems-methods-results
- Order of importance
- Compare and contrast
- Writing as a signaling system
Designing Your Document
Audience-driven document design
- Relating document structure to the audience
- Recognizing the varieties of user manuals
- Developing reference manuals and white papers
Determining the document types
- Post-positive vs. pragmatic documents
- Employing document formats, such as STOP
Building documents
- Tutorials and standard operating procedures
- Designing Playscript and Minimalist tutorials
- Structuring sentences and sections
- Handling introductions and conclusions
Prototyping the document
- Testing the document for success
- Levels of prototypes
Developing the Look of Your Document
Designing the appearance of your page
- The technical document reading process
- Fonts
- White space
- Alignment
Conveying information with graphics
- Chunking the document
- Employing photos, drawings and graphs
- Focusing graphics
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Course participants developing an effective manual for a complex application.
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The most recent 100 evaluations scored this course:  | | (3.78/4.00) |
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"I found the Learning Tree Course to be very well presented in a way that was easy to follow and understand. The exercises and activities were relevant and helpful."
– L. Ruddock
Ministry of Finance
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