tailieunhanh - Improving your technical writing skills Version 4.1

In the most advanced stage of knowledge-crafting, the writer is able to hold in mind the author’s ideas, the words of the text itself, and the imagined reader’s interpretation of the text. The representations of the author, the text, and the reader must be held in the storage components of working memory and kept active by allocating attention to them (Traxler & Gernsbacher, 1993). Thus, for expert writers, not only are the basic processes of planning, sentence generation, and reviewing juggled successfully, but so are three alternative representations of content. The author's ideas, comprehension of what the text currently says,. | Improving your technical writing skills Version 25 September 2003 Norman Fenton Computer Science Department Queen Mary University of London London E1 4NS norman@ norman Tel 020 7882 7860 Abstract This document describes the basic principles of good writing. It is primarily targeted at students and researchers writing technical and business reports but the principles are relevant to any form of writing including letters and memos. Therefore the document contains valuable lessons for anybody wishing to improve their writing skills. The ideas described here are apart from fairly minor exceptions not original. They are drawn from a range of excellent books and have also been influenced by various outstanding authors I have worked with. Thus the approach represents a kind of modern consensus. This approach is very different to the style that was promoted by the traditional English schools system which encouraged students to write in an unnecessarily complex and formal way. The approach described here emphasises simplicity plain English and informality. For example it encourages shorter sentences and use of the simplest words and phrases possible. It explains how you can achieve simplicity by using the active rather than the passive style personal rather than impersonal style and by avoiding noun constructs in favour of verbs. Crucially this approach leads to better reports because they are much easier to read and understand. Fenton Improving your technical writing Version Document change history Version 11 September 2000 Derived from Norman Fenton s Good Writing web pages. Version 21 September 2001. Minor changes including addition of student project guidelines. Version 20 September 2002. Minor corrections made. Version 14 September 2003. Major revision. Version 23 September 2003. Restructuring and editing. Version 25 September 2003. Various typos fixed and polemic removed. 23 September 2003 Page 2 33 .