Comparison of 4 readings

The Writers and Editors reading leans more to the writing part of technical writing. It speaks on the different ways that writers are classified. It had very little to do civil engineering, even though they could give tips on writing up certain documents. The STC reading was just an overview of how communication is classified. It also talked about the different types of interference and those are very relevant in engineering, semantic noise being the most relevant. Sometimes engineers don’t realize that not everyone knows the “simple” terms that they do. The TC reading considered what technical communicators do and there were a couple of points that hit home. The points they made about helping engineers write reports and articles, writing for specialized technical journals, and translating technical information into other languages. Engineers have to write reports quite often and if they do a lot of research then they publish their findings in articles to educate the engineering community. Translating technical information goes into the semantic noise subject, when writing up something or a client they don’t want to hear about how you came up with the design because in the manual it told you to follow a procedure, they want to know what you’re doing and how it is going to affect them. Is it cost effective and efficient, is it safe, these are things that need to be translated from the initial engineering work. The PowerPoint was the most relevant writing to my field. It talks about the efficiency of technical documents and what helps and hurts the efficiency of the document. Efficiency is a very important aspect in any field of engineering because it will help to get across the message with the least amount of effort but the best results. It talks about the professionalism of the communication and how data is turned into relevant and useful information that the reader will understand. Over all the readings all touched on some aspect of engineering but the last two were more involved with the engineering sides of technical writing.