Kursbeskrivning
TWW Stage 2 of The Technical Writing Workshop is a new follow-up course to The Technical Writing Workshop - how to write technical documentation in English (see separate course descriptiojn).
Declan Madden and Neill Dronsfield, Språkbruket Education, continue to run The Technical Writing Workshop as we also develop follow-up courses that focus on advancing the writing skills of technical communicators.
The Technical Writing Workshop, authored by Declan Madden, is still the only course of its kind with more than 900 technical communicators attending since the course began.
New follow-up course, TWW Stage 2, is now open for bookings
The course is designed to give participants new knowledge, practice new writing skills, consolidate existing knowledge, and find solutions to their individual problem areas.
Be a better technical writer by learning to master a large number of critical details of the English language that apply to technical documentation and product information.
The need for precision, clarity, conciseness, and correctness is an absolute requirement.
The quality of the technical information that you and your colleagues produce reflects on your customers’ perception of the product itself. Customers, whether corporate or consumer, will react strongly to incorrect, faulty technical instructions, descriptions, and safety information. They will reject your product and choose a different product or supplier.
“If the manuals are so bad, how can we possibly trust the product itself?”
Be a better technical writer by also improving your descriptive technical writing skills,
an important part of TWW Stage 2.
If you attended The Technical Writing Workshop (or, YH Teknikinformatör) earlier, you learned how to write technical instructions, but also process descriptions and technical function descriptions. Many of you realised for the first time the important difference between these two descriptive writing applications.
TWW Stage 2 examines descriptive technical writing in greater detail by focusing on technical system descriptions, transition, and content reduction.
Be a better technical writer by getting personal, individual feedback on the written assignments that are a vital part of this training course. The written assignments focus on descriptive technical writing: technical system descriptions, process descriptions and function descriptions.
We will, of course, revise/refresh the principals of instructions, typical faults and problem areas, grammar structures, etc., while new input will analyse in minute detail areas such as prepositions, hyphens, dimensions, modifiers, numbers, punctuation, gender vocabulary, better sentence structure, and much more.
Be a better technical writer by sending us a sample of the work you are doing at your company for our analysis and our feedback. (optional, limited amount, and authorised for our review.)
TWW Stage 2 is provided Live Online and Face 2 Face, Stockholm, Malmö.
It is open to previous participants on The Technical Writing Workshop, experienced technical writers, and on-site technical documentation groups.
Kommande kursstarter
Kursdatum:
Course dates
The course consists of 2 course days and 3 distance assignments
(equivalent to 1 additional course day).
Option 1 Live Online lectures
Week 10, 11: 5 & 12 March 09.00 – 15.00
Option 2 Face 2 Face Malmö
Week: 18, 19: 29 April & 6 May 09.00 – 15.00
Option 3 Face 2 Face Stockholm
Week: 20, 21: 13 & 20 May 09.00 – 15.00
Målgrupp
Technical Communicators, information architects, technical editors, proofreaders who work with technical manuals for industrial and/or consumer products and equipment
Kursinnehåll
TWW Stage 2 contents
1: Syntactic cues
Using syntactic cues to reduce ambiguity and increase clarity and understanding.
2: Modal auxiliary verbs
can, may, might, could, should, have to, must, will, shall
3: Numbers
Special difficulties in combining words and numbers, with examples.
4: Technical descriptions of systems using transition
Using transition to link ideas and information together and thus improve readability.
5: Punctuation
Hyphens, em dashes, en dashes, exclamation marks, quotation marks, parentheses, slashes, colons, semicolons, apostrophes, commas.
6: Capitalization
Capital letters in trade names, subheadings and chapters, bullets lists, technical terms and acronyms
7: Grammar
Past, present and future time in technical documentation, active and passive structures, difficulties with the -ing form of the verb, explaining the use of adverbs, articles, countable and uncountable nouns, pronouns,
8: Dimensions
Writing and managing the vocabulary of dimensions of an object, structures to avoid, common errors
9: Basic lists
Invoicing sentence, parallelism, punctuation in lists, capitalisation.
10: Content reduction
How to shorten descriptive text without removing any relevant information.
11: Safety warnings and cautions
Levels for warnings, STE recommendations.
12: Better sentence structure
The elements of sentence structure, dangling, jammed and misplaced modifiers, wordiness, parallel structure, separation of subject and verb, preposition and object, concise versus wordy, highlighting information in a sentence, splitting sentences, combining information in instructions
13: Prepositions
40 example sentences of prepositions of movement, direction, position, proximity, time, method, special purpose, typical problem areas for Swedish speakers/writers, 60 examples of errors, preposition self-test
14: Good structure in instructions
38 absolute requirements for writing good instructions
15: Better vocabulary choices
Simple alternatives to 45 complex words and 25 phrases, 54 confusing word pairs, 30 unnecessary modifiers, random list of well-known words to be avoided in technical documentation (but suitable in software documentation)
16: Special trouble areas
Special vocabulary usage problems, ambiguous reference, personal style
Investering
Course fee
SEK 18,000 per person excluding VAT