English 421: Technical Writing Online

Here are the peer review assignments for the Technical Marketing Project:

After giving this week's schedule some thought, I've decided to move today's scheduled peer review session to Wednesday.  This will give groups an extra couple of days after last week's break to work on your technical marketing document drafts.  Peer review assignments will be posted to the index page of the course website by noon on Wednesday.  

A polished copy of your technical marketing document will still be due this coming Friday -- and will be graded by Monday, to give you time to complete revisions.

Since you're now working on your technical marketing documents -- I hope! -- it's a good time for us to revisit last week's readings on document design.  Technical marketing documents are produced with specific attention paid to document design.  Writers and designers make a series of key decisions related to presentation of the product and manufacturer, communication to target audiences, availability of resources used to produce the document, and the document's point of distribution.

Document design:  the basics

As I've mentioned in previous blogs, images function in pretty much the same way as does text -- to communicate information to a target audience in ways that reflect the topic, the immediate writing situation, and the company/organization sponsoring the document.

The easiest way to address images in relation to technical marketing documents is to address each type of visual that a technical marketing document might contain:

Not surprisingly, language is one of the most important issues to account for when creating technical marketing literature.  First, it's important to keep in mind the genre itself -- technical marketing.  Although technically-oriented information, such as descriptions, definitions, and product specifications are necessary to convey certain product characteristics, it's just as important -- and, depending on the product, manufacturer, and target audience, even more critical -- to use marketing-style language to entice readers to become customers, as well as to enhance the overall i

Writers and designers of technical marketing documents need to do a great deal more than merely advertise a product/manufacturer, attract an audience, and present technical specifications.

These documents and their creators must strike a balance between communication, information, rhetoric, and research

Here are the team assignments for the Technical Marketing Project.  Please contact the others in your group ASAP, to begin planning for this project.
Team 1

• Dyer
• Kamaruddin
• Schaal

Team 2

• Perrine
• Wehrman
• Yamich

Team 3

• Anderson
• Hawkey
• Kazahaya
• Zakula

Team 4

• Beas
• Flohr
• Nichols

Team 5

Here are the group assignments for today's peer review session for Draft 2 of the White Paper Project:

For Draft 2 of the White Paper Project -- due on Monday, October 27 -- you will need to incorporate graphics, as well as document design elements.  Revisit assigned readings in Chapters 24 and 25 of the Thomson Handbook for details on how to effectively implement a variety of these visually-oriented items.  In addition, take a look at the blogs that I posted last night, 9a and 9b.