Successful Technical Communication and The Necessity of Text's Audience, Purpose, and Context Critical Analysis

Why is a careful and accurate analysis of a text’s audience, purpose, and context critical to successful technical communication? In what ways might different audiences, purposes, or contexts influence technical communication?

The key to any successful technical communication is the ability of one to generate a proper analysis of the audience, purpose and the context of the communication. It is the analysis of these factors that enables one comprehend and generate presentations and documents within the given engineering setting. This implies that without an accurate analysis of the context, audience and purpose of the communication, one cannot gain skills essential in responding to varied communication contexts and situations thus rendering the communication ineffective.

Depending on the context, purpose and audience of any technical communication, several factors are bound to change in order to meet their understanding. For instance, the choice of software, devices and services used in the communication will be directly determined by engineering context of the technical communication. Also, the diction will be highly determined by the audience and the engineering context.

Throughout the Design4Practice program, my work have been primarily addressed to my fellow students and the audience might slightly change in EGR 386w to include key engineering stakeholders that may be interested in the program.

Technical communicators (e.g., engineers) often struggle to be appropriately clear, concise, and comprehensive in their writing/communication. Why might this balance be difficult to achieve? Have you struggled with this balance before?

Most technical communicators often find it difficult to strike the balance between the comprehensiveness, clarity and conciseness in their communication owing to the nature of the work they deal with. Taking an instance of the engineering context, most of the work here is highly detailed and comprehensive such that their expression requires in depth work. In pursuit of achieving this comprehension, most of the technical communicators find themselves straying away from the clarity and concise aspects of communication. On the other hand, when they opt for ore clarity and conciseness, the result is always minimal detail in their piece of work thereby rendering it very tough to strike the balance between the clarity, comprehension and conciseness of their work.

Personally I have not experienced such situations.

Describe the importance of ethical technical communication, particularly in EGR 386w. What are some ways in which technical communication might be considered unethical, and why would this be concerning to engineers (and stakeholders)?

Ethical technical communication ensures that engineers demonstrate their ability to undertake engineering work accurately, without any bias and honestly. It also ensures that engineers only enroll for engineering work they can undertake competently without any strain thus ensuring that the quality of work they deliver is top notch.

Technical communication can be considered unethical when the technical communicator fails to indicate authorship and indicate citations on his/her work and when the work delivered does not by any chance help in the betterment of the society in one way or another. Such cases should be of immense concern to the engineers as they can compromise the quality of engineering work and the success behind the engineering profession.

Which technical writing conventions have you most struggled with in the past (e.g., grammar, punctuation, spelling, organization)? How do you hope to improve on these conventions throughout the EGR 386w semester?

Over the past few years as a technical communicator, I have mainly been in deep struggle with my grammar and the organization of my work. Also, proper punctuation has been some of a problem when working on my writings.

However, throughout the EGR 386w semester, I have developed some strategies to improve on these conventions. They include: allocating more time to learning the English language techniques including spelling, punctuation, grammar mainly through personal compositions and revisions. The second technique will involve learning of acceptable text formats and understanding as well as gaining experience in conventions for tone, paragraphing and structure between varied presentation types. Hopefully, these strategies will help me improve on my understanding and utilization of these conventions in my future .