Course

Technical Writers' Workshop

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In this workshop, you’ll learn how to improve the style and structure of technical information. You’ll work on your own style, and you’ll evaluate the style of others. In addition, you’ll learn how to spot and organize potential topics when creating tasks, concepts, and reference topics, while improving the overall quality of your own work and the work of your team.

Quality initiatives are common in business and government, and these campaigns have even begun to affect technical communication groups. Managers must now prepare plans for improving and measuring quality and proving that their teams have met or exceeded performance measures.

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use and create several tools for improving the quality of technical information, including:

• Style guides
• Checklists
• Heuristic evaluations
• Reviews, tests, and edits

By the end of this course, you will be able to do the following:

• Speak articulately about style
• Distinguish between different concepts of “style”
• Define the purpose of a style guide
• Describe the process for developing a style guide
• List the major components of a style guide
• Identify at least half a dozen style guidelines
• Develop a personal approach to improving your own style

Recall and apply guidelines for quality

• Spot the cues that indicate what a passage lacks 
• List and explain at least half a dozen guidelines for clarity, task orientation, completeness, organization, and retrievability

Write and revise
• Concept topic
• Task topic
• Reviews of other writers’ work
• Menus, lists, headings
• Your own quality checklist