Technical reports require attention to sentence, paragraph, and document structure. They also demand careful word choice, avoidance of ambiguity, proper treatment of jargon, and awareness of style issues. This course shows how to be a better writer.
Technical professionals must occasionally write technical reports. Although there is no one right method for doing so, certain techniques and methods usually improve the results. In this course, Writing Better Technical Reports, you'll be encapsulated with a wide-ranging discussion of structure and style into successfully writing technical reports. First, you'll learn many of the more common writing mistakes and discover techniques for avoiding them. Next, you'll delve into a reader-oriented approach that will improve your reports' reception and effectiveness. Matters of sentence, paragraph, and document structure receive consideration here, along with tone, ambiguity, and technical jargon. Additionally, you'll explore tips specific for electronic document formats. Finally, you'll cover techniques for joining paragraphs using transitions, facilitating navigation within the report, avoiding confusing or opaque references, and exorcising bad habits, such as redundant, superfluous, and imprecise verbiage. By the end of this course, you'll have a solid understanding of how to efficiently make your technical reports leaner and more readable.
Glenn is President of Independent Software Inc., a Denver IT consultancy. He has been teaching advanced computer seminars around the world since 1988. He developed official Server 2008 courseware for Microsoft. Glenn has written 18 commercial books for McGraw-Hill, Wiley, IDG and Sybex. He is also a sought-after expert witness.
Course Overview Hi everyone. My name is Glenn Weadock, and welcome to my course Writing Better Technical Reports. I'm a consultant and seminar leader at Independent Software Inc. in Colorado and an author of over a dozen books on Windows, networking, and certification. You're a technical professional not an English major, but every now and then you have to write a report like a project status update, an analysis of competitive products, a proposal for a new system. In this course we'll explore nine ways you can write a tighter, clearer, and more compelling technical report. Some of the major topics that we will cover include how to tailor your report's style and structure to your audience, evaluate the best way to provide supporting details for you main points, trim your pros to be more active, compact, and precise, and consider the pros and cons of different digital report formats. By the end of this course, you'll know how to choose individual words, build strong sentences, and craft organized paragraphs. You'll understand the importance of unambiguous pronoun use, you'll discover ways to make your reports leaner and more readable, we'll discuss how to recognize tone in your writing and whether you should use it or suppress it, and you'll discover some best practices for whether, when, and how to use technical jargon, all in just a little over an hour of your life. You don't need any prior knowledge of English grammar or punctuation to benefit from this course. English doesn't even have to be your first language. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn how to become a more polished communicator with the Writing Better Technical Reports course at Pluralsight.