UNIT-3-ELP - lecture PDF

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UNIT IIIFIVE TRAITS OF TECHNICAL WRITINGOverviewAs future teachers, technical writing will always be a part of your profession. From the application letter and resume during your application to emails, accomplishment reports, and many more throughout your career, technical writing is an essential sk...

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UNIT III FIVE TRAITS OF TECHNICAL WRITING Overview As future teachers, technical writing will always be a part of your profession. From the application letter and resume during your application to emails, accomplishment reports, and many more throughout your career, technical writing is an essential skill you need to master. But before we ask you to write, you still need to be informed about the specific criteria of effective technical writing. According to Gerson (2013), the five traits of technical writing are: • clarity, • conciseness, • accessibility, • audience recognition, and • accuracy.

Unit Objectives At the end of the unit, I am able to: 1. revise ambiguous words and phrases by specifying exact information; 2. shorten long words, phrases, and sentences; 3. enhance a document design by using highlighting techniques; 4. define a terminology for a low tech reader; and 5. explain a terminology for a lay reader.

Activating Your Prior Knowledge What are your top five personal and your top five professional qualities of a good teacher? Enumerate your answers and provide a short explanation for each quality. My Top Five Personal Qualities of a Good Teacher

My Top Five Professional Qualities of a Good Teacher

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Just like your top five personal and professional qualities of a good teacher, technical documents must also possess the necessary five traits of technical writing that we are going to discuss in this unit, so get ready to expand your knowledge.

Expanding Your Knowledge 1. Clarity Among the five traits of technical writing, clarity is the most important. If the principal’s memo, for example, is not clearly understood by the teachers, they will either call the principal for further clarification or just ignore the memo. In either case, the principal’s time is wasted; the teachers’ time is wasted; the message of the memo is lost. Clarity, nevertheless, is not just a time concern. Think of it from this perspective: If you fail to clearly understand a short story, a poem, a novel, or a play, that is unfortunate; however, equipment is not damaged, no one is physically hurt, and no one is prosecuted. Due to the lack of clarity in technical documents, several impediments can occur. Certainly, clarity has the utmost importance in technical writing, but the question now is: How can we achieve clarity in our technical documents? Gerson (2013) suggested two ways to attain it. The first one is through the Reporter’s Questions: who, what, when, where, why, how. This faulty memo, written by a principal to a newly hired faculty, emphasizes the importance of clarity. Date: July 17, 2020 To: Andrea Coleen V. Jose From: Jazzleen Ronald V. Limueco Subject: Meeting Please plan to prepare a presentation on enrolment. Make sure the information is very detailed. Thanks. What do not you know about this memo? What additional information should the principal have included for clarity? Nothing is clear in the memo, and the explanations are very apparent. The principal has failed to answer Reporter’s Questions: who, what, when, where, why, how. If you are the one who has received the memo, most probably, you would ask the following questions: • When is the meeting? • Where is the meeting? • Who is the meeting for? • How much information is “very detailed”? • How will the presentation be made? • Why is this meeting being held? • What does the principal want to be conveyed about enrollment? You could avoid this problem in clarity by using the Reporter’s Questions Checklist below as a prewriting tool in your technical documents.

Original source: Dr. Steven M. Gerson at Johnson County Community College, Kansas, US

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You can revise the previous memo by utilizing the Reporter’s Questions Checklist to achieve greater clarity. Date: July 17, 2020 To: Andrea Coleen V. Jose From: Jazzleen Ronald V. Limueco Subject: Marketing Staff Meeting Please make a presentation on strategies to increase our enrollment rates for our marketing staff. This meeting is planned for August 10, 2020, in the Conference Room, from 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Our enrollment rates are down 27% due to the pandemic crisis. Hence, we need to help our staff accomplish the following: 1. Make new contacts. 2. Recruit enrolees more effectively. 3. Increase our enrolment rates by at least 20%. Utilize our newly bought multimedia presentation system to make your presentation. With your help, I know our school can get back on track. Thanks.

The second way to attain clarity, according to Gerson (2013), is through specificity. The main target of effective technical writing is to convey the same thing to multiple readers. When you answer the reporter’s questions, you could fill a page with words. But remember, all words are not equal. Words like several, some, few, many, often, frequently, recently, or substantial will take up space on the page and convey an impression. These words are connotative, meaning, they will not mean the same thing to everyone. If a memo sent to seven marketing staff states that the school has lost a substantial number of enrollees due to pandemic, will all staff acquire the same knowledge? One staff might assume that a substantial loss equals 50 enrolees; another staff might assume that a substantial loss equals 100 enrolees. In each case, the staff is guessing, and that is not the goal of successful technical writing.

2. Conciseness Successful technical writing should aid the reader in understanding the text, not present hindrances to understanding. Read the paragraph below, taken from an actual business correspondence:

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Do you understand this letter? Do you recall what you read? Did you even finish reading it? This paragraph fails to communicate its message because it is too wordy. In this example, conciseness actually would aid clarity. Probably, you think that it is the reader’s responsibility to figure it out, but no, it is the responsibility of the writer. Remember, you are writing a technical document, which is a job requirement; you are not writing literature. In your creative writing class during your senior high school days, you were taught to challenge your readers, and it is their responsibility to understand your creative writing. However, technical writing, as clarified in the previous unit, is not literature. Technical documents must be concise. They are tools for the readers to accomplish whatever job they are doing. In contrast to creative writing, excellent technical writing uses short words and short sentences. Conciseness Achieved through Short Words As much as possible, avoid using multisyllabic words. Use one and two-syllable words in your writing. But of course, you cannot change several multisyllabic words like engineer, telecommunications, or Internet. Other words, however, can be avoided. Take a look at the examples below.

Conciseness Achieved through Short Sentences Here is a flawed example of technical writing: “In order to successfully accomplish their job functions, the marketing staff has been needing more workspace for some time now.” An improved sentence would read, “The marketing staff needs more workspace to do its jobs.” The first sentence contains 20 words and 31 syllables; the second sentence contains ten words and 13 syllables. You can shorten a sentence by avoiding: • redundancy, • prepositional phrases, and • passive voice. Avoiding Redundancy Why say, “The tuition will cost the sum of 30000 pesos”? It is more concise to say, “The tuition will cost 30000 pesos.” In this example, “the sum of” is redundant. The examples below replace redundancy with concise revisions:

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Avoiding Prepositional Phrases Prepositional phrases form long-winded sentences. Take a look at the following examples:

Avoiding Passive Voice Sentences with passive voice are weak for at least two reasons. First, they replace strong verbs with weak verbs. Second, they are wordy. Example: “The module was written by Sir Luijim.” versus “Sir Luijim wrote the module.” The first sentence has the weak verb was, and has seven words. In contrast, the second sentence has the strong verb wrote, and has five words. The emphasis is placed on Sir Luijim rather than on the module. Take a look at the other examples below:

3. Accessibility Aside from clarity and conciseness, the third criterion of successful technical writing is accessibility. Accessibility in terms of the page layout or the way the text looks on the page. Take a look at the following paragraph:

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This paragraph consists of ten sentences and 84 words. The total word count per sentence is just 8.4. Because the sentences are not too lengthy, the writing is concise. Subsequently, the paragraph is clear because of the specificity of detail. Yet, despite the clarity and conciseness, this technical writing fails. Why? Basically, this paragraph is incomprehensible. The page layout makes the reader practically unable to understand the text message. You can revise this paragraph by making the content accessible through the following highlighting techniques: • varied font types, • varied font sizes, • numbered lists, • bullets, • boldface text, • italics, • underlining, • white space, • headings and subheadings, and • graphics (table and figures). These highlighting techniques can make your text airy, open, and inviting. A revised copy of the information given in the sample paragraph is shown below.

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4. Audience Recognition Effective technical writers understand that they can only attain clarity by recognizing their audiences. Basically, you will write to either High Tech Peers, Low Tech Peers, or Lay Readers. Writing effectively to these three types of audience levels requires different techniques. High Tech Peers know just as much about a subject as you do. They have the same education, same job title, same level of expertise, and the same years of experience. For example, a university professor writing to another university professor would be writing High Tech to High Tech. When you are writing to a high tech peer, you can use acronyms and abbreviations, usually without any definition. Teachers of professional education subjects are familiar with PBA. But teachers in other fields would assume that PBA meant Philippine Basketball Association, not Partnership Building Activity. Low Tech Peers who work inside your company know something about the subject. They may not have the same education, job title, level of expertise, or years of experience. For example, a university professor writing to a newly hired instructor would be writing High Tech to Low Tech. Professors in the College of Education do not need their high tech peers to define PBL. If these professors write to one of their fellow faculty in other Colleges, however, this high-tech term must be explained. PBL could be parenthetically defined as Project-Based Learning, something professors in the College of Education understand. Lay Readers are your customers. They are completely out of the loop. For example, a university professor communicating with a student. When a professor communicates with a student, he must refrain from using abbreviations and acronyms. He must also define important terminologies. Sometimes, lay readers also need follow-up explanations to avoid confusion completely.

Aside from identifying your audience level, do not forget to use pronouns in your technical writing. After all, schools do not write to schools. People write to people. Your readers want to be spoken to, not spoken at. Pronouns are effective in technical writing. I, me, my, you, your, us, we, and our create a personalized tone.

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5. Accuracy Successful technical writing must be accurate, whether grammatically, electronically, etc. Your errors in technical writing can make you and your school look bad. More importantly, your mistakes can lead not just to embarrassment and misunderstandings but also to damages, injuries, and lawsuits; hence you must deeply understand the importance of proofreading. You can apply the following proofreading techniques to ascertain the accuracy of your technical documents. • Use your computer’s spell check—remember, however, that a spell check will not catch from if you mean form, too if you mean to, or accept if you mean except. • Let it sit—for days or weeks. When your document is icy, you are more objective about your own writing. • Use peer evaluations—others will see the errors you miss. • Read it aloud—sometimes, you can hear errors. • Read it backward—then you read words out of context. You cannot anticipate the next word....