Clear Technical Writing

Our schools and universities do a terrible job teaching engineers how to write, and the results are predictable: The technical staff frequently cannot communicate clearly in writing. The 3-day Clear Technical Writing program focuses on improving technical personnel written communications skills.

Related Courses

Learn How To

• Write effectively.

• Understand word types, sentence structure, paragraphs, and organization.

• Write progress reports, proposals, specifications, failure analyses, trip reports, business letters, and meeting minutes.

• Eliminate semantic noise.

• Create effective graphics and other illustrations.

• Integrate text and graphics.

• Overcome ESL challenges.

• Recognize and prevent common writing shortfalls.

Who Should Attend

Plant managers, manufacturing managers, supervisors, managers, purchasing personnel, manufacturing engineers, quality engineers, program managers, and others responsible for delivering manufactured goods on schedule will benefit greatly from this training.

Course Outline

• The Writing Process. Why we write. Message formulation. Outlining and organiztion. The first draft. Rewriting and semantic noise elimination. Exercise.

• Words, Sentences, and Paragraphs. Word types. Sentence requirements. Paragraph requirements. Exercises.

• Graphics. Bar charts. Pie charts. Flow charts. Digital images. Captions. Exercises.

• Letters, Text Messages, and E-Mail.. Internal letters. Intercompany letters. E-mail. Email advantages and disadvantages. Text messages. Brevity. Tone. Distribution. Exercises.

• Reports. The SIDCRA format. Progress reports. Management reports. Accident and incident reports. File attachment versus embedding. Exercises.

• Proposals. Proposal organization. RFP responsiveness. Proposal themes. The compliance cross index. Exercises.

• Specifications. Specification purposes. Specification formats. Avoiding ambiguity. Stating requirements clearly. Exercise.

• Procedures. Procedures purposes. Process definitions. ISO procedure format. The playscript approach. Flowcharts. Exercise.

• Common Problem Areas. Numbers in narrative. Abbreviations. Capitalization and punctuation. Compound adjectives. Other common errors.

• Course Conclusion. Wrap-up. A suggested improvement roadmap. Course critique.

How You Will Learn

A seasoned author and technical writer with 20 years of experience teaching engineers to write effectively will present this course in an interactive lecture and workshop format.

Along with the lectures, we use exercises, puzzles, case studies, and interesting group activities to enrich the instruction and emphasize the essential points.

You will receive a printed Participant Handbook that includes all materials presented in class, which will help you remember and retain what you learned and apply it on your job.

You will learn key concepts from theoretical and practical perspectives.

Our Expertise

We're experts in this field with real world experience teaching engineers and other technical people how to write. We know the drill because we've personally managed engineering, manufacutring, and quality assurance organizations and we've taught this topic at the University level. We know what works, what does not, and how to implement changes that make a real difference in how your organization communicates.

The above training can be customized to meet your requirements. Please call us at 909 204 9984 or contact us via email.