Archives for October 2008

PROBLEM-SOLVING STRATEGIES IN TECHNICAL WRITING

It is not always appealing to always write just about technical information, whether it is in parts or in detail, especially when you are writing a technical document. If your thoughts are clearly communicated through your writing, then it is likely to be understood and read by a wider audience. So, as a writer you need to build a bridge to obliterate the gap that often lingers between the writer and the reader of any technical writing material.

For example, to win a bid, a company’s project developers need to write a proposal in order to convince their potential client that they are the best team suited for the job. Their entire presentation is focused around this. Precise development of connection between the presenters and the viewers or the readers will do the trick. It is necessarily to place clearly in your reports the methodology, resources used, final results and the compatibility with legal regulations. Statistics, appropriate data collection, graphs, illustrations and necessary reports also need to be placed along with the main report(s).

To make the report justifiably free to access and easy to connote, appropriate footnotes also need to be placed. At the end of the report a lucid bibliography should be given, indicating all the detailed sources used, otherwise you could be accused of plagiarism! Also, remember that overused sources can tarnish your originality and create unfathomable boredom, so keep your source-details neatly piled.
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Aristotle Returns – Brainstorming with Relationships

Aristotle wrote about brainstorming a couple of thousand years ago. He didn’t call it brainstorming, but “Common Topics” as part of his work on rhetoric. These common topics are relevant today and summarise the use of definitions, relationships, comparisons, testimony and circumstances as tools to use to question our topic and approach it from different perspectives giving off new ideas in the process.

Today we’ll take a look at the use of relationships to help us generate ideas with which to attack our topics.

Asking questions about how the topic interacts with the rest of the world leads to a greater appreciation of X or whatever you want to call your subject. Cause and effect, role in the world,what happens with X, what occurred before X and developments or actions after X are all reflections on the relationship that X has with the rest of the world.
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What’s It All About Alfie? or Why Bother With Good Writing?

No pop metaphysical descriptions here on the life of a rake, my son is too young to really appreciate the humour and pathos in Alfie but he put me on the spot during half-term with some rebellious comments on homework.

“Why do I have to write good stuff anyway Dad?”

At the time I was busy with the hectic shuffling that ocurrs around dinner time so my initial response was along the lines of “Because I’m your Dad and I say so, now just get it done!”

During dinner, we talked about this a little more not least as #1 heir was in something of a strop over why he had to do some homework when his younger sister did not.

As I’m increasingly learning, the questions I get from my offspring are rarely less than thought provoking. I can picture my nan in heaven looking down with a knowing smirk on her face and thinking how poetic justice is particularly after all the grief I gave her when I was a sprog.
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Aristotle, Aristotle was a Bugger for the Bottle….and Brainstorming

“Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle and could drink you under the table.”

Monty Python

Brainstorming new ideas for scribbling is a key part of the composition process. In a practical sense, brainstorming is essential when you have a commission to produce 40 articles on the same topic and by the time you’ve gotten to the 10th you’ll be scraping the barrel for off the top of your head approaches.

Now personally, if I drink I know perfectly well that there is an answer lying at the bottom of the bottle, it’s just I’ve always been too drunk to read it and certainly never rememebered anything the morning after.

Aristotle, if Monty Python are correct, certainly was able to read the answer because he came up with an excellent summary for brainstorming that is as relevant today as it was a couple of thousand years ago when he wrote about Rhetoric.

Braoadly he came up with five main ideas to use:

Definition
Comparison and Contrast
Relationship
Testimony
Circumstance

I’m going to cover definition here in this posting but we’ll come to the others in future postings.

Definition

For a definition you can simply reach for a decent dictionary but there are other ways you can approach determining a definition by asking questions about what something is and how it interacts.

For instance: