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July 20, 2005
Tech Writing for Tech Writers
This summer, I've been taking care of some of my general-business requirements for an accounting degree. One thing the NAU College of Business Administration requires all students to do is take a writing class. So, after working as a technical writer, of one sort or another, for more years than I'd care to recall, here I am in English 302W, Technical Writing.
A big waste of time, you say? Actually, not at all. I'm finding that the class covers a lot of things I've never done before, or at least never been trained in before. For example, writing abstracts of magazine articles or book chapters -- sounds soporific, but as I've discovered, a good "informative" abstract is a wonderful thing. And it's not easy to write a good one. Summarizing a scientific or technical book or paper in 200 words requires you to have a nose for what's important and what isn't. A good abstract should function as a substitute for the book or article itself.
Another useful idea -- and one that I haven't often used in my past work, although I'll probably use it in the future -- is that you can often write better technical documentation if you start by "storyboarding" the material, producing the illustrations first and then writing text to bind them together, instead of the other way around. Sounds obvious -- and I've done this in the past when writing software documentation (essentially going from one screen shot to the next) -- but I haven't often heard it explicitly stated as a "best practice."
By the way, you can find more abstracts than you can shake a stick at, by going to Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) and searching for kafalas -- this turns up dozens of abstracts of my dad's scientific papers, as well as some by my late uncle Peter and by my cousin Philip.
Posted by Urbie at July 20, 2005 03:10 PM