Chapter 17

There are solicited and unsolicited proposals, formal and informal. You must understand the different functions of planning, researching, and sales proposals. Proposals generally authorize a project, purchase a service or product, or support a specific plan for solving a problem. These are different forms, types, and ideas to write a proposal but every proposal has one thing in common: to persuade the audience to say "Yes, let's move ahead with this plan!"

Solicited proposals are often given out to numerous organizations as a request to perform a duty. Your proposal will have to compete with the other organizations' proposals to be accepted. If you work for a computer software engineering company and a potential client needs a program developed for organizing its T-shirt sales they will likely send the request for the proposal (RFP) out to several different companies. You better write a perfect proposal to fulfill the client's needs if you want them to choose your company for the project.

Unsolicited proposals are not issued by request. Like the example I gave above, your software company might want to send out several unsolicited proposals to real estate agencies suggesting that they use your brand new property tax software. Unsolicited proposals can be viewed as an alternative to "cold calling" or going door-to-door. When writing one you should capture the audience's attention and provide incentive to continue reading in order to consider your organization.

Definition of Technical Writing

Technical Communication, by definition, helps us interact with technology in our daily lives. The most common forms of technical communication come from the installation instructions for your brand new gadget, to the menu on an ATM, or a Google search for a “how-to” on the newest software you’ve just downloaded. During our everyday lives technical communication is common all over, even in the workplace. I would say more so than anywhere else. But that’s also my opinion. I think it is important to give examples on the subject because of its broad base. Some specialized questions and situations, quoted from the book, where technical communication is necessary include:

“A government research scientist must have accurate instructions about how to write a grant or how to perform a particular experiment”

“An engineer must have access to the correct specifications for designing a bridge or configuring a software application.”

“What are the technical limits to wind energy?”

These are just a few examples. It sounds to me like a lot of confusing scenarios boiled down to one thing. Whenever someone may need instruction or guidance for a task beyond their understanding involving technology, technical communication is needed. It could be the newest internet service provider’s security system or a setting on your washing machine at home.

Packet Review

Upon reviewing the other group members' packet I was assigned the persona section. The persona's name is Samantha Sanders and she is your typical 22 year-old, part-time working, full-time student at Illinois State University. The page describing this Samantha persona includes basic information like where Samantha lives, what year she is in school, how old she is, and where she works. There is a section that goes into more details about her roommates living habits as well as her own. This particular section also discusses her plans for post-graduation from ISU, what some of her hobbies are during her spare time, where her priorities stand, and what she likes to do on the weekends. The most important section describing the persona, in my opinion, lists Samantha's "Typical Web Tasks". These include Facebook and other social networks, accessing ISU's iCampus for checking email, blackboard, and keeping up with school news, shopping and bidding for merchandise, reading news, checking weather forecast, check bank statements, and research for school work.

If I were to create this persona of Samantha Sanders myself I wouldn't have done too much differently. A few suggestions I have would be to "chunk" or organize the sections on the page a bit differently, add a few headers to some of the sections, and verify that Samantha doesn't have any disabilities or speaks any other languages besides than English that may affect the way she uses technology (computers; internet). There is a section that talks about Samantha's Typical Web Tasks, but I may have gone into more specifications about her typical "computer skills" as well.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 expresses the how information should be structured for to the readers. Structuring includes outlining, chunking, sequencing, paragraphing, and clarifying headings. If you are like me, reading these sections covered in this chapter, you will have recognized all of them except for chunking. Chunking? To be honest, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard this term in relation to writing. Apparently, chunking is the act of breaking information down into discrete, digestible units, based on the readers’ needs and the document’s purpose. It is a sort of organizing technique that makes it easier on the readers to “connect the dots”. From my perspective, chunking seems to be another word for writing an outline. When writing your traditional five paragraph essay, the paper is first broken up into the five paragraphs, or chunks. There is an introduction, three body paragraphs describing three separate ideas, and then there is a conclusion. Within each of these sections, however, more sections are derived to further organize the chunk. It is noticeable that hard-copies of documents and web-based documents vary in their chunking technique. Web pages are often chunked down into the smallest sections possible because no one likes to read too much on a computer screen. Users would rather get to the point and move on by bouncing from link to link without having to read so much ongoing text. Documents, on the other hand, are expected to have longer sections and less chunking naturally because they are most often read in a sequential order instead of skipping around to various sections. Chunking seems to be an expression of a technical document’s hierarchy.

Chapter 4

Designing and delivering usable information to the user is an important part of technical communication and writing. You have to analyze the document’s audience, determine the document’s purpose, create a task analysis for the document, consider other related usability factors, develop an information plan for the document, and finally, write, test, and revise the document for usability.

Usability testing is important in more ways than one. Not only will usability make it harder for your audience to understand if it is not up to par, but it may drive the audience away from the point you are trying to get across. Usability in the business world is held to an even higher standard. If the product being sold (or the web page selling/advertising the product) isn’t user friendly, the business will ultimately lose their customer base and lose sales.

The content of the document cannot have any inaccuracies. You have to know your audience that the document is aimed at in order to make sure that the level of technicality involved isn’t over their heads. The document must stay organized otherwise it will be difficult to follow. If there are sections of the document that are out of order it won’t be easy for the audience to find or complete the task they need. The style of the document must be written with enough variety to keep the users’ attention but not too much to become too wordy or complex for the user. Layouts and visuals help convey the point you are trying to make but if you aren’t careful they could make the document worse or confusing for the reader. If there are any excessively long paragraphs, lists or steps, a visual aid can often take its place.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 discusses the research process involved in technical writing. Applying critical thinking to your research, understanding the difference between primary and secondary research, locating the Web-based and hard-copy secondary sources you need, and consulting primary sources via inquiries, informational interviews and surveys, observations, and experiments are the main objectives. I have been doing research ever since the third grade. I remember the research projects we were assigned but barely recall the process we were taught to go about conducting the actual research. Of course, I was so young then my parents helped me with most of the research projects/reports. All the same, research has been a part of almost everything I’ve learned in school since (except maybe mathematics). I have had different classes in more recent years that have gone over the proper procedures for researching a topic. This section of our English text helped reestablish these steps in my brain. I want to touch on the more outstanding steps for thinking critically about research that this chapter brought back to my attention.

Always ask the right questions.  Trying to limit your research topics to more detailed queries will likely provide better feedback than researching a broad topic. Explore a balance of views. I think this is especially important when your sources come from a single expert, professor, scientist, etc. The more people’s opinions you get, the more views you get on the subject which will often differ. Evaluate your sources. This step is exceptionally important when your sources are online on different websites. Some websites are considered unreliable while others are perfectly credible sources. The issue is being able to tell the accurate from inaccurate web pages. Often times, if you come across several web sites on your topic you can narrow down credible facts to the ideas that all those sites have in common.

Chapter 7 Part 1

The significance of using audience-centered visuals is the topic of discussion in chapter 7. I have always tried to include visuals in my papers whenever allowed. I feel like it is common sense that a picture within text that is on the lengthier side makes it easier on the reader in most cases. Chapter 7 tells you about this “common knowledge” in greater detail though. This chapter also explains when to use such visuals and gives examples of every different type of visual including strategies for creating them. Not only are these different types of visuals broken down into sections, those sections are broken down further. Tables, graphs and charts are all different types of visuals often used in technical presentations.  There are numeric tables, textual tables, bar graphs, line graphs, dotted graphs, pie graphs, pie charts, flowcharts, organization charts. You always have to keep in mind not to use visuals to simply decorate your document. Visuals are meant to enhance the document they are applied to. Visuals can either be chosen to support text or to be used on their own.

Chapters 10 & 14

Chapter 10 touched on the details that go into technical communication when writing memos and letters. The diagrams for writing letters stood out the most, in my opinion. I have tons of experience with writing professional/business letters to authorities that more important than the average note to one of my friends. However, I've always wondered what the exact specifications are in doing so. I know there are pref-formatted templates for use in Microsoft Word and other composition software products but that has made it too easy in the past. How would I ever know enough to write a letter on my own? Or even, by hand (shocking!)?

From my experience, I was already aware of the separate sections of a formal letter like putting the return address at the top of the page, the insider address below that, and the date somewhere in between, before or after. The first diagram that caught my attention in the "Letter Formatting" section displayed the "Block Format" for writing a letter. It is one of the two standard letter formats used. This diagram expressed, not only the order of the date, return address, and inside address, but the amount of spacing that is to go between each of them and the other sections of the letter. It even emphasizes the importance of the margin spacing along the edges of the page. These are exquisite details that I never thought twice about until now. I certainly gained a lot of knowledge in this chapter and only talked about one of the minor diagrams (Block Format) that caught my attention. Not to mention, the "Modified Block Format". I could write on about this chapter for days.

Chapter 14 is all about writing exceptional summaries to provide an overview of the most outstanding and relevant facts in order to save time and get right to the point. Writing summaries consists of summarizing either your own writing or someone else's writing. The summary should describe, in short form, what the original document is all about, help readers decide whether to read all of the long document, parts of it, or none of it, and give readers a framework for understanding the full document that will follow if they do plan to read it.

From what I am used to, writing a summary means that I should take very much time and just talk about the overall objective of the original document. The first idea of summarizing in this chapter points out the four elements of writing an effective summary. Accuracy, Completeness, Conciseness, and Nontechnical Style. Breaking summaries down into the four ideas alone, made me rethink the way I go about writing a summary. There is much more to think about than simple "summarizing" the document.

Next, the chapter goes through the steps of writing a summary. This was the key section in this chapter for me because it is one thing to say, take your time, map out what you are summarizing, and keep the purpose of writing the actual summary in mind before just jumping into writing one, than to slowly map out the steps. It is almost like they knew they were explaining how to write a summary to someone like me who is initially thinking, "Let's get this done. Let's start writing right now."