Course Description

Learn best practices for authoring effective documents and composing your communications with clarity, relevance, and precision. In this course, you will learn how to prepare documents that clearly and concisely convey technical information to both technical and nontechnical audiences. Discover your writing style and develop a plan to help you overcome writers block. Analyze your audience and tailor your writing accordingly. Learn the five Cs of writingcorrectness, clarity, conciseness, coherence, and control

Course Outline

1. Technical Writing Foundations

a. What are Technical Communications?

b. Technical Writing vs. Business Writing

c. The History of Technical Communications

d. Types of Technical Communications

e. Role of the Technical Communicator

2. Your Writing Style

a. Your Writing Style

b. Your Writing Approach

3. The Communication Loop

a. Sending the Message

b. Receiving the Message

c. Barriers and Filters

4. Getting Started

• Set Up for Success
• Define Your Objective
• Identifying Your Team
• Making Your Team Effective
• Understand Your Audience
• Types of Audiences
• Identifying the Audience
• Identify the Right Communication Method
• Message Formats
• TimeValue of Formats

5. The Writing Process

• Create a Plan
• Understand Every Task That Needs to Get Done
• Assign Tasks
• Develop the Timeline
• Write the Purpose Statement
• Brainstorming and the StickyNote
• Course Highlights
• Define what is technical writing
• Analyze audiences
• Discover the five Cs of writing
• Learn best practices for communicating up and down the organizational structure
• Prepare various forms of written documentation
• Structure and compose communications for clarity, relevance, and precision