This past Wednesday, we
looked at prose styles and technical marketing documents. Today, we address images within technical
marketing documents. As I’ve mentioned a
number of times this semester, 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 individual, team,
or company/organization sponsoring the document.

For this week's blog, I've attached some lecture notes on prose and technical marketing documents. These are also listed on the calendar for yesterday (Wed., March 26).  As you've likely gathered by now, prose in technical marketing documents is detailed -- but often presented quite creatively. I would encourage you to take a look at the sample technical marketing documents posted on the calendar for yesterday.

In the meantime....again, take a look at the attached lecture notes!

I’ve
read your reactions to, and questions about, the Technical Marketing Presentation Project,
and after spending these past couple of days thinking about them, here
are some responses. These are designed not only to answer questions that have been raised, but also to guide project planning and research.

Now that you've gotten quite a bit of research done -- enough to complete your annotated bibliographies -- it's time to use those annotated bibliographies to sort through which sources will be most useful for you in writing the first draft of the white paper.  This is a pretty good time to revisit the issue of target audiences, as covered in the assigned reading for last Monday.   Remember...how you shape information for readers is as important as the information itself.

To gain better understanding of white papers and the White Paper Project as a whole, we should further examine the white paper genre, its history, its constituent sections, its audiences, and its goals.

History

Today's and Wednesday's readings explore the open source movement, its origins, and how it relates those proprietary
options more recognizable to us -- namely, Microsoft and Microsoft products. Here are some issues/questions we will consider at some point during the course of the White Paper Project:

This week's activities involve usability
testing for your quick guides. I've placed each of you into a
two-person team.

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.