Ewald T Writing in the Technical Fields A Practical Guide 2017

Textbook in PDF format

The education marketplace is pretty crowded with technical writing textbooks, so you are right to question why you should choose this one. This text has been created because, despite the numerous textbooks extant for first-year survey courses on technical writing, none really suited my course. I started to develop my own modules to send out to students and have now bundled them into a text in case they suit your course as well. There are several reasons why most other technical writing books haven’t worked well in my courses.
First, I have found that technical writing textbooks are generally too big and too expensive. They might make good desktop references to accompany students through their professional lives, but they contain too many chapters and too much information for a two-term introductory technical writing course. This text is pared down. Second, students find the writing of many texts overly formal. This formal tone discourages them from reading and makes it hard for them to absorb the information they require. It also seems out of step with the much less formal style of writing generally used (and deemed perfectly appropriate) in the North American workplace. This text also employs a lot of labelled graphics in place of long explanations—for instance, to demonstrate the layout of letters. This is hardly a unique approach, but it is helpful. Third, many technical writing textbooks don’t show students how to actually achieve results on the page: for instance, how to use Word properly to format text, insert citations, and the like. It’s always surprising how little facility some students have with word-processing software, despite their expertise with smartphones and their inventive use of the Internet to shortcut their homework