Tech Biz Writing

With the preliminaries over, the writer can get down to work: the writing of the first draft. This is usually the longest stage of the job, and any self-respecting writer will tell you that they aim to make the first draft the final one, or at least as near to it as possible. Whether this laudable aim is achieved depends, more often than not, on the attitude of the client. Some will accept a first draft with a few minor adjustments. Others will undergo changes of mind on seeing the typescript, rather like a woman buying a hat. Nevertheless, a good writer will produce a professional product, within tight limits of technical accuracy and editorial acceptability, at the first draft stage.

First draft is essentially about structure. It’s now that the actual shape and form of the finished book materializes.

Some writers will not worry too much about the precise wording at this stage, but will endeavour to cover the subject in the right depth and with the correct order and emphasis. They then tweak the manuscript into its final, polished state once they have obtained approval for the first, loose version.

While acknowledging the advantages of this approach, my own view is that it’s not advisable to show a raw, sloppily-written version to a client at an early stage simply because first impressions count, and many customers lay great stress — quite rightly — on a good standard of presentation in their documentation. It’s very easy to lose a customer’s confidence by delivering a hastily-scrawled pencil draft, or disk equivalent, no matter how brilliant it may be in terms of structure or technical excellence. “We could have done that in-house!” will be the conclusion.

The physical act of sitting down to write is largely an acquired one. It takes a considerable amount of self-discipline to tackle the first blank page, with perhaps 300 others reaching out before. The prudent author responds to this challenge by breaking the job down into manageable chunks.

Initially, our writer may think only of the first chapter. Of that chapter he turns the full spotlight of his attention to the first section. In this way he can address the work piece by piece, with the end of each section firmly in sight. It must be stressed though that the entire book will already have been sketched in outline during the previous stages, so the form and continuity will already be there.

Such an approach is more permissible in technical literature than, say, a novel. Technical manuals do tend to break down into small sections, and each part, like the product it describes, can be bolted together to form the whole at some subsequent point. The first chapter, for instance, may be a technical description of an item of equipment. Each part of the equipment can be described in turn, giving the author a series of manageable day-by-day sections.

Which brings us to the question: how quickly should an author write? How many pages per day? Obviously this depends very much on the individual, but a well-known rule of thumb is that, averaged over the research and writing period, two pages a day is a fair rate.

It’s at this point also that the writer needs to deal with the detail of the spec. Heading weights, pagination, and layout of the text and illustrations on the page must all be dealt with in the draft.

Using the military spec JSP 182 as an example, heading weights are as follows:

NUMBER TWO HEADING

1 Ssss ss ssss ss ssssss

Number three heading

1 Sss sss sss ss ssssss ss

Number four heading

1 Ssss sssss ss ssss ss sssss

1 Number five heading. Ssss sss ssssss ss

This type of heading scheme is typical of many technical authorship house styles. When writing to JSP 182, or any other, these weights of heading must be strictly adhered to, for the author will be working for the Ministry of Defence, or an MoD subcontractor. The ministry demands a high standard of compliance from its writers.

Pagination methods too vary from spec to spec. A simple “1” at lower or upper centre of the page is more often used by commercial books. JSP 182, by contrast, places both chapter and page numbers in the lower corner of the sheet — bottom left for verso (left) and bottom right for recto (right).

At this stage, draft illustrations must also be considered, and these are assembled together with the text.

Next: 28. Style of Writing.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Technical Writing, Publishing, 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.