02/06/2018 – Technical Writing

Overall Feedback for the Class

Check your time: Virginia Tech classes require 36.25 hours of class time for the semester (about 2.5 hours a week), plus time to complete your readings and compose your projects. Out-of-class time usually ranges from 2 to 3 hours a week. If you are averaging fewer than 4 hours a week, you need to up your game! You’re not putting in the amount of work that the course requires.

Include details: Remember that you will use your logs at the end of the term, when you are working on your final exam. If you put in a little effort now to require concrete details about your work in the course, you will have exactly what you need when it comes time to write your final.

Focus on document design: I said this in the post on the 1/19 logs, but it bears repeating. Be sure that you pay attention to document design. Using headings and chunking your text will make it easier for you to find information in your logs later in the term, when you are working on your final exam. You can read more about headings and chunking in Ten Ways to Improve Your Writing.

Last updated on Tuesday, February 6, 2018

MRBCRGEO_Parallelogram_diagonal_example by michellebarnhill on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license The columns of information in your Analysis project should use parallel grammatical structures. I’m sure that you all know what the word parallel means. You probably encountered it in a geometry course a long time ago. Remember the parallelogram?

You have probably seen the concept in courses here at Tech. Consider these examples:

A mechanical engineering major is likely to be aware of parallelism control and parallelism tolerance.
A building construction major knows that various parts of a building need to be parallel. (Imagine how annoying a staircase would be if the steps weren’t parallel.)
A computer science or computer engineering major knows all about parallel processing.
A finance major would be familiar with parallel portfolio optimization, parallel loans, and parallel markets.
A business major may know about organizational parallelism, including parallel leadership and parallel learning.

In all these examples, parallel generally means that two or more things match in some way. That is essentially what parallelism means in a writing course as well. When you are composing your Analysis table, choose parallel phrasing for the information in each column. For example, you might start everything in the purpose column with infinitive verbs (verb phrases that start with “to,” such as to explain or to provide).

You can find out more about parallelism in the Lynda.com video on Parallel Structures (6m40s). The video begins with details on parallelism within a single sentence. At 4m50s into the video, the video discusses parallelism in bullet lists, outlines, and headings. That section of the video is closest to the kind of parallelism you will use for the columns of your Analysis table.