Technical Writing Introduction
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Successfully conveying complicated content to end users — both internal and external — is vital and can greatly enhance the value of products and services. This training course provides a complete process for planning, writing, and editing technical documents, including assessing the needs of users, selecting document formats, and making effective use of graphics.
You Will Learn How To
- Write effective technical documents, manuals, and white papers
- Assess your audience and develop documents to meet their needs
- Build effective sentences and sections that explain information clearly
- Employ diagrams, tables, charts, and other graphical tools effectively
- Create informative content that your readers will understand and use
Course Outline
- Introduction to Technical Writing
- Benefits of effectively communicating technical information
- Dealing with common writing problems
- The Writing Process
Getting ready to write
- Eliminating misconceptions that stall technical writing
- Driving your document design with scenarios
- Focusing on a document's purposes
Assessing your audience
- Identifying your purpose and the reader's purpose
- What the audience brings to the table
Covering the knowledge domain
- Exposing tacit knowledge
- Knowing when you've "covered it all"
- Organizing using the audience's scenarios
- Ensuring Clarity and Readability
Writing technically
- Discriminating between the three levels of information
- Determining information needs with the OODA loop
Architecting sentences that communicate
- Creating sentences with clarity
- Building clarity through sentence focus
- Solving common grammar problems in technical writing
Managing style in technical writing
- Evaluating readability using the Given/New technique
- Ensuring consistency with a style guide
- Eliminating reader recycling
- The Mechanics of Writing
Working with words
- Selecting the right words
- Editing for concision
Editing for quality
- Knowing when and what to edit
- The editing triage
- Editing throughout the document process
- Two strategies for rewriting
- Structuring Information for Understanding
Leveraging and formatting tables and lists
- Organizing data to support readers' scenarios
- Determining when to use a list
- Exploiting tables for highly structured data
Maintaining document structure
- Building cohesive documents with Given/New
- Applying useful headings to support skimming
Methods of development
- Problems-methods-results
- Effect and cause
- Order of importance
- Designing Your Document
Audience-driven document design
- Relating document structure to the audience
- Recognizing the varieties of user manuals
- Developing reference manuals and white papers
Determining the document types
- Post-positive vs. pragmatic documents
- Implementing the right document format
Building documents
- Tutorials and standard operating procedures
- Designing two styles of tutorials
- Structuring sentences and sections
- Handling introductions and conclusions
Prototyping the document
- Testing for success
- Levels of prototypes
- Developing the Look of Your Document
Designing the appearance of your page
- The technical document reading process
- Fonts
- White space
- Alignment
Conveying information with graphics
- Chunking the document
- Employing photos, drawings and graphs
- Focusing graphics
Convenient Ways to Attend This Instructor-Led Course
Hassle-Free Enrolment: No advance payment required to reserve your seat.
Tuition due 30 days after you attend your course.
In the Classroom
Live, Online
Private Team Training
In the Classroom — OR — Live, Online
Tuition — Standard: $3285 Government: $2890
Aug 28 - 31
(4 Days)
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EDT
Herndon, VA / Online (AnyWare)
Reserve Your Seat
Oct 9 - 12
(4 Days)
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EDT
New York / Online (AnyWare)
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Nov 27 - 30
(4 Days)
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EST
Rockville, MD / Online (AnyWare)
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Jan 15 - 18
(4 Days)
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EST
Alexandria, VA / Online (AnyWare)
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Feb 19 - 22
(4 Days)
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EST
Ottawa / Online (AnyWare)
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Feb 26 - Mar 1
(4 Days)
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EST
Herndon, VA / Online (AnyWare)
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Apr 9 - 12
(4 Days)
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EDT
New York / Online (AnyWare)
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Jun 18 - 21
(4 Days)
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EDT
Alexandria, VA / Online (AnyWare)
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Jul 23 - 26
(4 Days)
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EDT
Herndon, VA / Online (AnyWare)
Reserve Your Seat
Aug 20 - 23
(4 Days)
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EDT
Ottawa / Online (AnyWare)
Reserve Your Seat
Guaranteed to Run
When you see the "Guaranteed to Run" icon next to a course event, you can rest assured that your course event — date, time, location — will run. Guaranteed.Private Team Training
Enroling at least 3 people in this course? Consider bringing this (or any course that can be custom designed) to your preferred location as a private team training.
For details, call 1-888-843-8733 or Click here »
Tuition
Standard
Government
In Classroom or
Online
Standard
$3285
Government
$2890
Private Team Training
Course Tuition Includes:
Training Hours
Standard Course Hours: 9:00 am – 4:30 pm
*Informal discussion with instructor about your projects or areas of special interest: 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Enhance Your Credentials with Professional Certification
Learning Tree's comprehensive training and exam preparation guarantees that you will gain the knowledge and confidence to achieve professional certification and advance your career.
Earn 23 PDUs
PMI, the Registered Education Provider logo, PMP, CAPM, PMI-ACP,
and PMBOK are marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
This course is approved by PMI® for 23 professional development units (PDUs). For more on the Project Management Institute and a full list of courses approved for PDUs.
Technical : 22 PDUs
Business & Strategic : 1 PDUs