Archive for the ‘Technical Writing’ Category

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December 4th, 2011  Posted at   Technical Writing
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When you write for your peers, you can use as many technical and esoteric terms as you like. Why? You know they will understand what you’re saying; you don’t need to explain what, to you, are everyday concepts.

But it’s a different story when you need to write for non-technical readers.

Your first task is to really think about your audience, and how you might present your expert knowledge in a way they will understand. Ask yourself:

  1. What are your assumptions about their exposure to your field of expertise, and to the technical terms you use every day?
  2. How many concepts are they likely to understand? How will you explain or illustrate them?
  3. In simple terms, what is your message? What do you want your readers to know or do?

With those answers in mind, you can use these tips to help you achieve clear, engaging and sharp writing. At the heart of your thinking must be:

The more complex your content or the concepts you’re writing about, the simpler your writing needs to be.

  • This is about expressing your thoughts with simplicity, not simplifying your work. Remember your readers: you want to show them the value of your work, not what a good writer you are.
  • Make sure you’ve thought about the logical progression of your report. Plan the structure of your document so that you lead your readers to the conclusion you’ve reached.
  • The simplicity inherent in the use of plain English (active voice, reasonable sentence length, wise use of specialised terms, no verbosity) will serve you well.

Let’s look at some particular areas where this simplicity will help your readers.

Structure:

  • Determine the logical structure of your argument. Brainstorming and mind mapping can be valuable tools.
  • If possible, use headings: they are sign-posts for your readers. Headings give readers an overview and help orientate them, for which your readers will thank you if your content is complex.
  • Aim for a logical flow in the overall document, within its sections, paragraphs and sentences.

Words:

  • Use familiar words: use instead of utilise, on-going instead of chronic.
  • Explain unfamiliar concepts. Perhaps footnotes, diagram, glossary or appendix can be helpful – what will be easiest for your readers?
  • Explain abbreviations, and then use them consistently. You may have to remind readers of their meanings more frequently than you would for your peers.
  • Watch out for tautologies (new innovations, combine together) and clichés (the bottom line, explore every avenue, moot point). (more…)
December 3rd, 2011  Posted at   Technical Writing
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More and more these days freelance writers can find an opportunity to work for a company looking for business writing help to complete all kinds of messages that they need to put out on a daily basis.

In this article I will cover a bit of the groundwork that you need to know in business writing, and then provide a link to a site where you can get a step by step guide on making your business writing shine.

As you will probably already know there are a lot of styles and formats that fit into business writing that you need to know about to impress a potential employer. You should make sure that you have an understanding of the most common stuff below:

* Newsletters and eShots – This is the monthly update that a company will send to their loyal customers that will have a lot of rich content plus a sprinkle of advertising.

* Letter Writing – Often a large company will have to send out a massive volume of letters and will employ a writer to complete this work.

* Reports and Whitepapers – Often used as a content marketing tool and given away free to potential customers in exchange for contact information.

* Power Point Presentations – With many business people needing to give presentations and seminars it will be your job to write their content and make sure that they have everything covered.

* Brochures and Copywriting – You will often see that larger companies have a booklet at reception that explains their vision and core beliefs. This can often be outsourced to a business writer like yourself.

* Blogging – More and more blogging is being seen as a massive marketing tool but it takes time and effort to keep up a good blog and often there are opportunities for freelance business writer to provide the the content.

There are so many different parts to business writing but there are a few cores skill you need to really make it work if you want to have success. You need to work on this stuff all the time:

1. You need to have accurate writing and good attention to details.
2. You need to be expert at proofreading.
3. An ability to get your work in on time is essential.
4. You need to have great communication skills.
5. Market research is a good idea.
6. An understanding of marketing and copywriting methods is also essential.

October 27th, 2011  Posted at   Technical Writing
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The Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) stage of the tendering process is usually a pre-requisite. The purpose of the PQQ stage is to screen potential applicants for the tendering activity. This phase serves to prevent companies from wasting their valuable time and resources going through the lengthy and laborious process of producing and submitting a tender. The PQQ stage is a good way of helping to weed out the applicants who are unsuitable for the brand new contract.

PQQ documents are becoming more and more complex, larger in size and, therefore, more difficult and time consulting to produce. The reason for this is that more and more companies are tendering for opportunities. This, in turn, is because, especially in the United Kingdom (UK), legislation has been changed to make the tendering process more transparent and accessible for a wider number of companies. In particular, companies who are tendering for new opportunities which would previously have been automatically given to the companies who had previously been given the contract or project. The systems for tendering are now much less closed off than they were before. There are more and more opportunities for companies to tender than there ever were before. Therefore, there is a greater demand for PQQ documents to be produced to lessen the load on tender document appraisers and buying departments.

It’s quite obvious that there are going to be less opportunities to tender in a global recession where only projects which are deemed to be absolutely necessary are being started. Budgets are tight and organisational departments are being encouraged to cut expenditure which is not required. On the flip side though, more and more companies can now tender and some companies who had previously never needed to tender before now have to produce and submit tenders. This has created a higher demand for bid, tender and PQQ writing services to be provided by trained professionals in the procurement industry. The reason why companies who never previously needed to tender now must tender is due to the changes in the UK government’s legislation which has called for fairer tendering. This has created greater opportunities for those companies which would have previously been excluded from tendering for lucrative opportunities. This is because other companies had got there years before them on past tenders and the new opportunities were being automatically given to them. (more…)

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