Technical Writing for Quality

Sooner or later many technical professionals need to write—or contribute to—documents, such as requirements specifications, user manuals, and standards documents.

A major contribution to the success of any project is the quality of the documentation.

This book will assist anyone who wants to communicate more effectively when writing in the English language, in the US, the UK, the EU, or the British Commonwealth.

It discusses what makes written communication effective, and—more to the point—what makes it ineffective. It contains practical advice for the technical writer, covering choice of words, arrangement into sentences, document organization, and layout. It contains numerous examples of both well-formed and poorly-formed statements.

Graham has over 40 years of experience in assisting businesses and government departments to acquire relevant and effective IT solutions, and manage information effectively. He has developed specialist expertise in a variety of areas, in particular data modeling and business rules. He has presented papers at conferences in Australia, the US, the UK, France, and Germany, as well as meetings of DAMA (the Data Management Association)―in Australia and the US―and ACS (the Australian Computer Society). He has developed and delivered training courses in data modeling, database design and business rules, and delivered them in Australia, the US, and Canada.

He co-authored with Graeme Simsion the widely-used textbook Data Modeling Essentials, Morgan Kaufmann published his book Writing Effective Business Rules in February 2012, and Technics Publications published his book Data Modeling for Quality in January 2021. Graham has also written articles for a number of journals: one on data modeling for object-relational DBMSs for Database Programming and Design, another on metadata and data quality in the Journal of Data Warehousing, and two series on natural language business rule statements for the Business Rules Journal.