Training description
Technical Writing: A Comprehensive Hands-On Introduction LT0319E 
Target audience
- 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.
Course objective
- Success in business relies on clear and concise communication, making those who possess effective writing
- skills a valuable component to any organisation. 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.
- 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 specialised 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
Requirements
Course 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
- Organising 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 signalling system
- Designing Your Document
- Audience-driven document design
- Relating document structure to the audience
- Recognising the varieties of user manuals
- Developing reference manuals and white papers
- Determining the document types
- Postpositive vs. pragmatic documents
- Implementing the right document format
- 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
Notes
- During this course, you perform extensive hands-on exercises, including:
- Analysing 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
- Organising using the audience's scenarios
- Guiding research through explicit and tacit knowledge
- Improving readability
Duration
4 Days
