Teaching Business Communication

Are you looking to understand what technical writing is and how you can become more proficient?

Technical writing continues to be a highly coveted skill in the professional workplace. Demand is expected to grow at 10% from 2014 to 2024. This is faster than the average for all occupations.

In this article we will show you an average day for a technical writer, how to improve your skills when writing complex documents, and why the field is quickly changing.

In technical business writing, the graphics – such as engineering drawings, tables, and process diagrams – complement and are integrated with the text, to inform or even to entertain the reader, depending on the writer’s objective. In this post you will learn how to correctly and incorrectly use graphics in your technical business writing. 
 

This post has appeared before. It’s a different set of students today. And a different university this time. But much remains the same… Many people believe you have to choose between experience and theory when you want to gain knowledge or skills. But the choice represents a false dichotomy. It’s on my mind today as I…

The Center for Plain Language recently released final grades for US federal agencies. After completing a rigorous evaluation process, they concluded that Participation by agencies in the Center for Plain Language Federal Plain Language Report Card reached an all-time high: 23 agencies submitted materials for review, including all 15 Cabinet-level departments. Compliance scores increased overall: Eight…

To honor our US veterans today, let me share an example of exemplary writing practice from the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA). A team working on a form wanted to use the question, “When were you last (gainfully) employed?” They felt that the term “gainfully employed” would gather more legally sufficient and accurate information than just…

I’m in Seattle at the Association for Business Communication conference. Erin Kane and I will present “Reader Perception of Workplace-Writer Attributes” this afternoon. (Our fellow researchers, Nicole Amare and Alan Manning couldn’t make the trip.) We had more than 600 working adults in the US tell us whether they preferred the more plain or less…