Technical Writing for
Industrial Wastewater
Operators
Steve Frank, APR, WEF Fellow
SDF Communications, Inc.
SDFComm@q.com
303-957-7459
Wisdom of my 7th grade teacher
If you can’t write it,
you don’t understand it
“If you can’t explain it simply, you
don’t understand it well enough.”
– Albert Einstein
Four types of writing
 Technical
 News/Other media
 Academic
 Literary
Technical
 Correspondence
 Letters
 Memos – The “old” writing
 E-mail – The “new” writing
 Reports
 Technical
 Narrative
 Proposals
 Job procedures, instructions (SOPs)
News/Other Media
 Newspaper
 Magazine
 Audio/video scripts
 Text messages
 Blogs
 Web sites
Three purposes
 To inform
 To entertain
 To persuade
Your writing strategy
1. What do you need
to say?
2. Who do you need
to say it to?
3. What do you need
them to do after
they read what
you wrote?
Simple communication model
You Encode
Source
(You)
They Decode
Message
Channel
Receiver
(Audience)
Your audience
 Source: You are the source. You know
something that someone else needs to know
 Analysis: You assess the audience and select
the information to include—and the
information to exclude
 Audience: Those who will read what you
write and make decisions based upon it
 Translation decisions: Decisions you make in
encoding your information for you audience
Prose literacy levels, U.S., 2013
10
14%
36%
Proficient
Basic
34%
Intermediate
20
Nonliterate
30
Below Basic
40
12%
4%
52%
Level
1
48%
Level
2
Level
3
Level
4
Level
5
Other audience factors
 Age
 Race
 Language
(11 million
adults are non-literate in
English)
 Country of origin
 Education level
 Economic status
 We’re all busy
(best
readers read at 200 wpm)
Special audience challenges





Older people
Health care consumers
Mobile device users
Top executives
Brain surgeons, rocket scientists
About E-Mail
 E-mail is generally:
 Not as formal as a
letter
 More immediate tone
than a letter
 Shorter than letters
 Can also be made to
sound formal
Subject line
Emails are usually formatted as follows:
From:
To:
Cc:
Subject:
 From, To, and Cc help get the email
where it’s going. Subject is a headline
that says what it’s about
Grab attention with Subject
 Use the Subject line to grab reader’s
attention
 Squeeze key information into 8 words
 Use caps and lower case
 Don’t use ALL CAPS. IT’S LIKE
SHOUTING
 Example: Traffic accident report;
nobody hurt
Composing the report
 Example: You were in a traffic accident. You
need to report it to your boss and the safety
office.
 On a clean sheet of paper, jot down all the
facts about the accident that seem relevant.
 Think about how you would say this if you
just told it to a friend. What are the most
important facts?
 Ask yourself: who, what, when, where, how,
why.
Content
 Begin with the most important
information: “I was in a traffic accident
this morning. I am OK. The truck is
drivable but will need some repairs.”
 With the information above, a busy
person can decide to read the rest or
close it and move on.
The rest of the story…
I was in a traffic accident this morning. I am OK. The truck
is drivable but will need some repairs.
On April 11 at about 6 a.m., I was driving truck number 172
toward Golden. The weather was clear. Just past McIntyre, a
deer jumped out onto the road from my right. I jammed on
the brakes. The right front fender and headlight hit the deer.
The headlight broke.
Nobody was hurt. The deer jumped up and ran off. The truck
is drivable to the repair shop. I reported the accident to the
Jefferson County Sheriff’s Dept. A deputy took a report but
did not give me a ticket.
Did you…?
 Put all the addressees in the TO or CC line
that should be there?
 Attach any required attachments?
 Include pertinent details?
 Eliminate irrelevant details?
 Support your conclusion(s) with facts?
Relax, review, revise
 Take a breath
 Check to see all needed information
included
 Use spell check and pay attention to basic
grammar and punctuation
 Revise and correct errors before you send
your e-mail
 Don’t use all caps or all lower case. ALL
CAPS FEELS LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING and
all lower case makes you look illiterate
These tools can help
Use Spellcheck in Outlook
- You can find both spell check and word count in Review
- If it’s going up the chain, use spellcheck!
- Use www.storytoolz.com to help you revise and rewrite
Texts and Tweets
 A text is a message sent directly from one
cell phone to another
 Maximum text length is 140 characters
 Grammar and spelling rules are relaxed in
favor of brevity and the 140-character limit
 Tweets are brief messages of 140
characters or less that are sent via Twitter.
Followers can re-Tweet them to others
 Remember: Tweets go to everyone who
follows you and people they know, too
Value of brevity
 Think about who will read your
memo. A 600-word memo will take
an average person 3 minutes to read
 Think about BCC and who else the
addressees might forward your e-mail
to
 “I didn't have time to write a
short letter, so I wrote a long one
instead.” —Mark Twain