Providing Technical Writing Short Course at Eastern Analytical Symposium
On November 18, I will facilitate a technical writing short course at the annual Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS). Here’s a link to their web site with a list of all the Short Courses on offer during the symposium.
The short course I teach is broadly focused on technical writing as applied across the analytical sciences domain. In past short course sessions, there were people from a broad range of business enterprises in attendance, which made for very interesting discussions comparing and contrasting ways of working and documentary demands.
The course is set up to examine the practice of technical writing at several different levels:
- First we will talk about documents as a whole.
- Then we will talk about managing content at the section and sub-section level.
- Then we will address writing at the paragraph and sentence level.
- We will talk about technical writing methodology to help make executing the practice of writing (planning, drafting, revising) a more effective and economical experience.
Courtesy of EAS, my short course attendees receive a workshop manual I prepared that is filled with exhibits and examples to exemplify the concepts I cover in the session. During the course of the day we work extensively with these example documents (technical memo, evaluation report, project summary). The intention is to make pre/post comparisons in these examples so as to literally see some of the typical problems we see in our McCulley/Cuppan consulting work and how to fix these problems.
Some of the key elements of this short course are as follows:
- During the course of the session we will talk about the differences in writing basic technical reports, such as analytical or evaluation reports, and technical memos.
- We will also look at writing summary reports, especially reports that must summarize work that occurred over a period of time.
- One segment covers the development and management of the technical report logic trail and how the logic trail is the intellectual backbone of a good report.
- We will talk about managing the development of technical documents from the perspective of reader logic in contrast to writer logic. In particular, we will look at managing the point of view being represented in any document, especially from the perspective of time and how to effectively control point of view in reports that must summarize past and current work.
- This year, I have expanded the discussion on visual presentation, where we will look in particular at the best ways to manage the presentation of simple and complex tables and figures.
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I have been asked to attend a technical writing short course. Are you going to have one soon in 2010?