Tech Biz Writing

Verbal information will usually form a sizeable part of the data input to any job concerned with state of the art equipment. Little, if anything, may have been written down at the early stages of development — indeed that’s what you are there for. And what has been committed to print may be outdated or misleading. A writer should be prepared for this common situation by adopting a suitable system of notetaking.

Notetaking is something of a learned, journalistic skill. It demands a systematic approach combined with the ability to extract the salient points from a flow of verbal information. Journalists develop this into a fine art, often by the use of shorthand. Few, if any, technical writers use shorthand, but some may have devised for themselves a system of speed-writing for clipped, yet accurate, notetaking. But beware, the sort of ad hoc shorthand which becomes indecipherable a day or two later, is worse than useless, it’s positively dangerous, as it can lead to errors and disasters.

An alternative, now widely used, is a small, personal cassette recorder. It’s always polite, though, to ask if someone minds being recorded. Engineers occasionally go dumb in the presence of a microphone, and executives have been known to wax philosophical while the tape supply dwindles away. Some people even resent a tape recorder as an intrusion of privacy. As always, play it by ear.

Next: 23. Visual Information.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Technical Writing, TechBiz Writing, Documentation, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.