This
coming week’s scheduled activities are designed to move you through the
planning stages of the Quick Guide Project to the project’s preliminary
writing and review stages. We will continue to work with project research – both of the product and of user characteristics and communities.

On Tuesday, we'll cover details related to writing situations and writing for general and specific audiences. Remember, technical writing is a user-centered form of communication -- meaning that while information covering software and task are important, even more vital toward the success of your quick guide is attention paid to the existing knowledge and needs of your target audience. Why are users accessing your documentation? How will they access it? What will they do with the information you've provided? And how can you best shape this information so that your audience can access and use this information quickly and effectively? We'll look at ways to incorporate audience analysis into this project so that you can learn more about your target audience.

Thursday's activities focus on preliminary writing tasks: a
working title, a brief yet descriptive introduction, clearly-written
steps for all tasks associated with the process you’re documenting,
notes/hints when necessary, and a conclusion. You’ll also work with
basic document design, including creating screenshots. If you haven’t created screenshots before, use the tutorial that’s linked to the course calendar for Wednesday. This
tutorial covers creating screenshots, pasting them into an Adobe
Photoshop file, cropping and resizing them, saving your work, and
creating labels. You’ll need to have a draft of your documentation ready to go in time for our documentation review session on Monday of Week 4.

Be sure to read the applicable chapters from our text, as well as online readings -- these are listed for each class day. Also,
be sure to look over each of the sample deliverables; these are meant
to give you an idea of what you’ll need to include within your
deliverables. Again, links to deliverables are placed within the
calendar in conjunction with days on which "connected" topics are
scheduled.

Finally, be sure to access the index page of this course website daily. You'll find not only these weekly Instructor's blogs, but also important announcements.