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Features of Technical Documents

Penned by cs_harris on September 13, 2020

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In this video, I recap elements of technical documents with some students who were tasked to write instructions for making sandwiches.

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My technical writing students were tasked with writing instructions for me. I asked them to tell me how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and I purposefully gave them no guidance. They deployed several features of technical documents, including Headings Subheadings Paragraphs Tools lists Ingredients lists Numbered lists Bulleted lists Instructions, obviously Lists of steps Highlights (Does anyone remember Sun In?) I'm impressed with their ability to use these elements without prompting. Now, since the course is an online course, I would have liked to see images, to hear audio, and to experience video.

MLA > APA Primer

We often refer to MLA Style, APA Style, or Chicago Style as citation systems, but they entail much more than citations. They entail ways that scholars navigate their research, reading, and writing. As James Paul Gee might say, they are ways writers navigate their worlds, citation systems operate within their discourse communities to arbitrate how the genres in those communities are presented. Of genres, Amy Devitt, Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff say “As sites of social action, genres identify the linguistic ecology of discourse communities, making the notion of community more tangible for teachers and students” (542). Perhaps one way to illustrate that linguistic ecology (probably borrowed from Einar Haugen’s language ecology) is to note the differences in how manuscripts are structured. APA Style is bounded by a framework. Abstract Introduction Literature Review Methodology Results Discussion Conclusion References Interestingly enough, the Introduction typically is not labeled

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