July 7th, 2017
Participation Supplement One
In class, we discussed the definition of what technical writing is and how to write effectively for the audience that we wish to target. One thing that I had not heard previously about writing was the fact when you are doing a technical writing assignment you need to limit the interpretation that the reader will understand from it. The reader should only be able to have one clear understanding once they have read your email, instructions, or informative flyer. After reflecting on this, it makes sense, because what you are writing has the potential to affect the reader’s job (assuming you wrote an email about upcoming changes with the company that will affect the reader). If you make your email ambiguous, it could get you and the reader in trouble, maybe even fired. We also talked about ethical communication and what that entails, we also talked about primary and secondary readers. One thing that stood out to me was that the information you write about, including charts / pictures, must be accurate. If it’s not accurate or relevant, you are responsible for that and it could cost the company money. Say the company makes a decision based on a presentation you give, but you just quickly got data from a Google search without looking further into the data and its source or how outdated it is. If the data is bad, then everyone in the meeting will walk away thinking something other than what they should be thinking and make bad decisions based on that bad data. It is important to be accurate with information. The other thing we talked about, and I wouldn’t have even considered if it had not been for this class, is the concept of primary and secondary readers. You should take both categories of reader into account when writing. This could save you from a potentially embarrassing situation. Let’s say you write an email to another colleague and you are saying some not very nice things about someone else. One of the IT guys could be reviewing various traffic on the server and run across your email and report it to your boss and you could get penalized for gossiping and being unethical. On the other hand, when you write an instruction manual, you must assume that the person reading it will not understand the jargon that you wish to include, so you must not include it. Who is reading your work is important.
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