A Strategic Guide to Technical Communication - Softcover

Graves, Heather; Graves, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551118149 ISBN 13: 9781551118147

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2007

Synopsis

A Strategic Guide to Technical Communication provides specific strategies for writing in the principal technical writing genres: instructional sets and procedures, proposals, operational manuals, usability testing and reporting, and technical reports. This text also examines relevant principles of graphic design, visual presentation of complex information, document design, and online documentation. Each chapter includes exercises and assignments that make highly theoretical information accessible and useful to the reader.

About this title

About the Author

Heather Graves is the author of Rhetoric in(to) Science: Style as Invention in Inquiry, the co-author (with Roger Graves and Lester Faigley) of The Brief Penguin Handbook, Canadian Edition (2006), and the co-editor (with Roger Graves) of Inkshed: Newsletter of the Canadian Association for the Study of Language and Learning. Roger Graves is Associate Professor and Director of Writing and Technical and Professional Communication at the University of Western Ontario. He has researched and written about the teaching of writing in Canadian universities since 1990, and is the co-editor (with Heather Graves) of Writing Centres, Writing Seminars, Writing Culture: Teaching Writing in Canadian Universities (2006).

Review

"What a fantastic textbook! Concise and practical, A Strategic Guide to Technical Communication is an outstanding text that provides theoretically well-grounded, pedagogically sound, and hands-on guidance to creating effective professional documents. It's one of those rare textbooks students will want to keep on their book shelves well beyond their graduation." (Doreen Starke-Meyerring)

"Clear, accessible, and immaculately written, A Strategic Guide to Technical Communication is a superb choice for the introductory technical communication course. The organization of the text is excellent, guiding students through style and document design to the major genres of technical discourse, ethics, and usability testing, concluding with impressive chapters on online documentation and oral presentations. Without question, A Strategic Guide to Technical Communication is my text of choice for our undergraduate technical communication course." (Joseph Little)

"A Strategic Guide to Technical Communication covers clearly and well the main genres of technical writing―further, it includes in-depth, thought-provoking, up-to-date sections on topics such as navigating ethical issues; setting up, conducting, and reporting usability studies; and writing online documents. This book would work equally well for a technical communication course and for courses in business or professional writing: its rhetorical perspective and wide-ranging coverage go well beyond the features common to bestselling technical writing texts." (Kelly Belanger)

"Intelligently organized and informed by the latest in theory and research, A Strategic Guide to Technical Communication is a comprehensive and user-friendly textbook. Instructors will appreciate its solid grounding in theory and research, its many examples of student writing, and its helpfully integrated in-class exercises, lab assignments, and suggestions for major projects. Students will like the book's hands-on approach and practical strategies for writing, designing, and testing documents for real users in both traditional and online environments." (Jo-Anne Andre)

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1551118149
• ISBN 13: 9781551118147
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 312