Technical Writing: An Introduction
Classroom, Virtual
Who Should Attend
Federal civilian employees, military employees, contractors and anyone else who wants to learn and/or review the fundamentals of technical writing.
Course Overview
Effective technical documents communicate important and sometimes complex information to its readers in a way that is clear, easy to understand, and engaging. Effective technical writers understand this task can be more challenging when some of the readers don’t share the writer’s knowledge, experience, or training. As a result, an effective technical writer must carefully consider his or her readers when drafting the document.
In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of technical writing. The course will summarize and explain the various types of documents technical writers develop, as well as provide the tools and techniques effective technical writers use to create documents that are easily understood by any reader, even non-technical readers.
Course Objectives
After completing this course, you will be able to apply the following concepts:
- Use terminology—including abbreviations and acronyms—consistently.
- Use commas, parentheses, colons, em dashes, and semicolons properly.
- Develop charts and graphics that help translate complex text.
- Understand the difference between bulleted lists and numbered lists.
- Distinguish active voice from passive voice.
- Develop strategies to make sentences clearer and more engaging.
- Create effective lead sentences for paragraphs.
- Focus each paragraph on a single topic.
- State key points at the start of each document.
- Identify your target audience and determine what they already know and what your target audience needs to learn.
- Break long topics into appropriate sections with corresponding headers.