As a technical writer, your credibility is paramount. You realize you need to do something you want to defend it. Hence the significance of making sure your writing is suitable for your readers, accurate, clear, and as smooth as feasible for your readers to observe your argument and are available to the identical conclusion.
Technical writing covers a huge variety of activities:
This newsletter will specifically assist file writers. Please undergo in thoughts that this newsletter is set writing traps, now no longer the content.
Not surprisingly, the primary lure to keep away from is plagiarism.
Plagiarism, ‘the appropriation or imitation of another’s thoughts and way of expressing them, to have occurred as one’s own’, is in no way acceptable. It’s simply now no longer really well worth doing and has consequences.
Copyright infringement will tarnish your expert credibility and authority. Copyright, ‘the special proper, granted through regulation for a positive time period of years, to make and take away copies of, and in any other case to control, a literary, musical, dramatic or inventive work’, protects creators from unauthorized copying of all or a good-sized a part of their work. Copyright legal guidelines fluctuate among nations, so make certain you recognize what the regulation to your united states permits you to do. If you want to have permission from the author, do it – do not simply wish you will escape with it.
Failure to well known the assets of associated cloth you’ve got used will, at the very least, reduce the honor of your colleagues. And keep in mind to test that your citations are correct, and written correctly – proper right all the way down to using commas and complete stops. Always confer with your fashion manual in case you want to refresh your memory.
Using generalizations can cause readers to think of your authority. Phrases like ‘all people know’, ‘all of us realize’, ‘studies suggest’ are satisfactorily prevented as they can purpose readers to surprise in case you absolutely do realize what you are saying.
Lack of attention to ease of analysis could make the mission of analyzing your technical facts that tons harder. Generally, your readers dislike (amongst different things) massive chunks of textual content or overcrowding of the page; spelling, grammar, or punctuation mistakes; plenty of phrases whilst a graph, desk, or example ought to inform your tale extra easily; loss of headings or different techniques (desk of contents, bolding of key phrases, bullet or numbered lists) to manual them thru your document; use of jargon or technical phrases that are not competently explained; loss of consistency in paragraph spacing, caption fashion, use of shortened forms, font selections, etc.
Having written your file, it is time to test that you’ve got now no longer fall into any of those traps. Reread, and, if necessary, rewrite, upload lacking citations, adjust the layout. Ask a colleague to check it. Ask a person who is now no longer be worried about the assignment if they have any problems analyzing and know-how your file. Check spelling, grammar, and punctuation; evaluate consistency.
And if you could have enough money it, lease an editor to offer it its very last polish.
Then be assured that your professionalism and credibility have now no longer been lessened through your writing.
Definitions of ‘plagiarism’ and ‘copyright’ from The Macquarie Concise Dictionary, 0.33 edition, The Macquarie Library Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998.
Desolate Page, the proprietor of Perfect Pages, is a permitted editor (Institute of Professional Editors, Australia) who specializes in enhancing and proofreading nonfiction writing.