Technical writing - sometimes called business writing, is writing for a specific purpose

and with a specific goal. Usually its goal is to inform/instruct or persuade/argue.

Technical writing can really be considered transactional writing because there are two
people or groups involved in the communication. One party has a clear goal to inform or
persuade the other party. This is real-world writing in every sense. You may not be aware
of how much it already impacts your world through textbooks, instructions, web sites,
and communications from many businesses and service organizations. There are
professional technical communicators but only large organizations have them and even
then they are not there to do your daily work for you and that is why it is so helpful for
many to take at least an introductory technical writing class.

Objectives in Technical Writing

1. Clarity. To make your documents clear:

• Provide specific detail

• Answer the reporter’s questions
• Use easily understandable words
• Use verbs in the active voice

2. Conciseness. To save your writer’s time:

• Limit paragraph length

• Limit word and sentence length
o Avoid a high fog index
o Use meat cleaver method of revision
o Avoid shun words
o Avoid camouflaged words
o Avoid the expletive pattern
o Omit redundancies
o Avoid wordy phrases

3. Accuracy. To avoid grammatical errors follow proofreading tips:

• Let someone else read it

• Let the document sit before proofreading
• Read backwards
• Read one line at a time
• Read long words syllable by syllable
• Use computer spell checks
• Check figures, scientific and technical equations, and abbreviations
• Read it aloud
• Try scattershot proofing
• Use a dictionary

4. Organization. To guide your reader, use organizational strategies:

• Spatial
• Chronological
 • Importance
• Comparison/Contrast
• Problem/Solution

5. Ethics. To be a responsible technical writer:

• Check your actions against legal, practical, and ethical concerns

• Follow strategies for making ethical decisions: define the problem, determine your
audience, maximize values and minimize problems, consider the big picture, and write
your text

Audience in Technical Writing

1. High-tech audience-this audience are the people who are working in the company and
they are in the same department or in the same field or profession as you are.
2. Low-tech audience-this audience are the people who are in the same company and they
are same knowledge but not in the profession as you are or this is on other department.
3. Lay audience-this people are outside the company and they don’t have enough
knowledge to understand the technical writing.
4. Multiple audience-this people knew the three audiences such as high-tech, low-tech and
lay audience. Multiple audience have a knowledge to understand this three audiences.
5. Multicultural audience-have a various learning in culture or even in international.

Kind of Sentence according to structure

1. A simple sentence- is a sentence that does not contain any dependent clauses and
ony contains one independent clause. It is the most basic sentence that there is.
One which has only subject and predicate in it. A simple sentence has only one
finite verb - that is a verb in a tense.

Examples: Americans eat more bananas than they eat any other fruit.

2. A compound sentence is composed of at least two independent clauses. It does not

require a dependent clause. The clauses are joined by a coordinating conjunction (with or
without a comma), a correlative conjunction (with or without a comma), or a semicolon
that functions as a conjunction. A conjunction can be used to make a compound sentence.
The use of a comma to separate two short independent clauses in a sentence is accepted.

Example: My friend invited me to a tea party; my parents didn't let me go.