Introduction To Technical Writing

Great technical writing will help any reader understand quickly and clearly: poor technical writing delays, confuses and often irritates. This course aims to ensure that participants can make their technical documentation accurate, brief, clear, complete and, above all, useful.

Training Style

The workshop will be highly participative and constantly seek to anchor the skills and knowledge in the participants work situation.

People learn best by “doing” and the content will combine generic learning inputs with “smart practice” using predefined exercises and referencing documents and situations specific to the client company where possible.

Course Content

Getting the reader into focus:

• Understanding all the forces at play in the communications arena
• The first principle of effective communicating
• Profiling the reader
• Persuading the reader

Effective writing skills:

• The TAB3C channel to effective writing
• Timing is important!
• How to ensure that your reports are accurate and complete
• Common enemies of brevity and how to beat them
• The four steps to writing concisely
• How to structure sentences
• How to avoid ambiguity and vagueness
• The danger of double negatives
• Common enemies of clarity and how to beat them
• Using correct punctuation
• The wisdom of courtesy
• How and when to use jargon, abbreviations and shortenings
• When to use the active or passive voice in writing

Planning, preparing and editing reports

• Identifying the right structure
• Preparing your document – a five step process
• Drafting and polishing
• Editing and checking

Specific Technical Reports:

• Knowing your end user
• Interviewing Subject Matter Experts
• Explaining jargon
• Maintaining styles and consistency
• Making sure it works – smart testing
• Deviation and incident reports
• SOPs and user guides

Data Visualisation & Presentations

How to interest and persuade your audience with:

• Clear simple charts
• Well-designed tables
• Simple dashboards
• Effective delivery

Getting the best out of MS Word:

• Embedding videos and objects
• Editing a PDF
• Building and navigating documents
• Working with tables
• Tips and techniques
• Short-cuts in MS Word and the Quick Access Toolbar

The Writers’ Miscellany:

• Lists – vertical and in-sentence
• Numbers
• Values and dates
• Fonts
• Abbreviations
• When to use capital letters
• Future developments
• Writing emails

Applied Technical Writing Course

Progress to ESS Applied Technical Writing – bespoke in-company training available on request.

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