TC 1 Lecture

Hayakawa's Ladder of Abstraction

Use the appropriate level of abstraction for your audience:

• Saying "I saw a quadruped running through a neighborhood" is too general.
• Saying "I saw a merino sheep running through the neighborhood" is too specific, with unnecessary details.
• Saying "I saw a sheep running through the neighborhood" is much better.

You can be too general, or too specific. Find the sweet spot in the middle.

Don't confuse formality with abstraction.

Technical Writing

Technical writing is designed to convey technical information efficiently. Instructions are much different than a novel. Technical writing is designed to convey writing in a different way.

Focus points

• Clarity: Must be easily understandable.
• Accuracy: Must state things accurately.
• Support: Assertions must be supported by evidence or good authority and proper logic.
• Good Documentation: Sources must be cited usefully.

Grammar and Style

Must be grammatically correct and have clear style. People will use it as a measure of intellectual competence - there is a natural human tendency to take in all the clues and to make a judgment about things. It's what people do.

You have to be really careful about this, because even subtle mistakes can be a source of unintentional humor: "woman sues 7 foot doctors.". What does that mean?

Principles

Helps you decide:

• How to write
• What to write
• How to organize what you write.

Technical communication is not subjective. It involves language, which follows rules.

Audience

The people who read or hear your communication.

Things to consider:

• Field of education
• Age
• Level of education
• Interest: Participation in advantage and responsibility
  • Is this going to help my career? Is this going to slow me down? Am I indifferent?

These affect:

• Tone
• Level

A mixed audience is an audience of more than one person. They may have different ages, fields, interests, and expectations. A project engineer, a lawyer, and accountant are unlikely to read a report for the same purpose.

How to solve this? One idea: Include a summary or overview at beginning, and have a report.

The High School Essay

• Introduction
• Body
  • Paragraph 1
  • Paragraph 2
  • Paragraph 3
  • ...
• Conclusion

The introduction and conclusion have most of the important ideas.

The Technical Memorandum

• Foreword
  • The problem which is the subject of the report
  • How it relates to you and them
  • You can write this before you write the report!
  • Consists of:
    • Problem statement
    • Task statement
      • Criteria: How do I know that something is successful?
      • Constraints: What conditions must this be done in?
    • Purpose statement: Purpose of the document! Not your purpose.
  • Answers the questions:
    • What's the trouble?
    • What am I supposed to do about it?
    • What's this report for?
• Summary
  • Actions
  • Findings
  • Implications
  • Recommendations
  • You cannot write the summary until you have written the report.
• Discussion
  • All the important details
  • Proofs and arguments
  • For specialist readers
  • The first section should be redundant, in order to have a parallel to the foreword and summary.

Memo forms have a heading containing:

• The names of those receiving it.
• The name of the writer
• A subject line
• The date
  • Put dates in form 7 June 2014