What is technical writing?

Practice of:
• Documenting process
• Conveying technical and professional information by
text
• Writing about subjects that require directions,
instructions, or explanations
• Using writing (communication skills) to make complex
information easy to decipher
• Sharing of intuitive and well-informed explanations of
machines and processes.
 Examples of technical writing
• Request for detailed figures of faulty end products
• Evaluation of a machine breakdown
• Laboratory report
• Departmental monthly report
• Report on a meeting or visit
• Final project or thesis
• Technical manual
• Brochure
• Journal (research) article
• Email to a business contact
• Letters of rejection, complaint, etc.
 Why we teach technical writing as a subject?

•To train you to be future skilled professionals who need

to perfect their writing skills in English from a professional
point of view.
•In your professional life you may very well need to write
formal business letters and reports of different kinds.
•Engineers today are expected to be multiliterate.
 Qualities
You need to have a good command of: ƒ
• content knowledge
• context knowledge
• English language knowledge
• Genre knowledge
• Writing process knowledge
 Why is it important to study technical
writing?
• constitutes an important part of the everyday
workload
• facilitates communication with co-workers,
clients and supervisors
• necessary for a successful career
• contribute to saving time and money
Introduction to the writing process
 Three important stages
1. Pre-writing.
(a) audience and purpose (who you are writing to and why),
(b) tone and style (how you transmit the information),
(c) gathering of information (brainstorming, analyzing sources of information, etc.) and
(d) outlining (organization of information).
 
2. Writing.
Begin writing a first draft, consider the main parts of the text, paragraph development and
coherence as well as genre conventions.

3. Post-writing.
(a) revising content and organization,
(b) checking for grammatical accuracy
(c) editing for style and
(d) proofreading and peer review.
 Benefits
• ƒ It helps the writer overcome the blank page
syndrome
• ƒ It serves the writer as a guide to writing
• ƒ It makes the writer aware of contextual
considerations such as audience and purpose
• ƒ It accounts for individual variation