Understanding Three Principles for Organizing Technical Information

Printed Page 147-149

Understanding Three Principles for Organizing Technical Information

In organizing your information, analyze your audience and purpose, use conventional patterns of organization, and display your organizational pattern prominently.

As with any important writing task, you might want to discuss your ideas about how to organize the document with others in your network. They might identify other factors that you should consider or suggest other patterns of organization that might work better for your audience, purpose, and subject.

ANALYZING YOUR AUDIENCE AND PURPOSE

Although you thought about your audience and purpose as you planned and researched your subject, your analyses of audience and purpose are likely to change as you continue. Therefore, it is useful to review your initial assessment of audience and purpose before you proceed.

Will your audience like the message you will present? If so, announce your main point early in the document. If not, consider a pattern that presents your important evidence before your main point. Is your audience used to seeing a particular pattern in the application (the kind of document you will be writing)? If they are, you will probably want to use that pattern, unless you have a good reason to use a different one.

Read more about audience and purpose in Ch. 5.

What is your purpose in writing the document? Do you want your audience to understand a body of information or to accept a point of view and perhaps act on it? One purpose might call for a brief report without any appendixes; the other might require a detailed report, complete with appendixes.

If you are addressing people from other cultures, remember that organizational patterns can vary from culture to culture. If you can, study documents written by people from the culture you are addressing to see whether they favor an organizational pattern different from the one you are considering. As you do so, ask yourself the following four questions:

If documents from the culture you plan to address are organized very differently from those you’re used to seeing, take extra steps to ensure that you don’t distract readers by using an unfamiliar organizational pattern.

USING CONVENTIONAL PATTERNS OF ORGANIZATION

This chapter presents a number of conventional, or commonly used, patterns of organization, such as the chronological pattern and the spatial pattern. You should begin by asking yourself whether a conventional pattern for presenting your information already exists. Using a conventional pattern makes things easier for you as a writer and for your audience.

For you, a conventional pattern serves as a template or checklist, helping you remember which information to include and where to put it. In a proposal, for example, you include a budget, which you put near the end or in an appendix. For your audience, a conventional pattern makes your document easier to read and understand. Readers who are familiar with proposals can find the information they want because you have put it where others have put similar information.

Does this mean that technical communication is merely a process of filling in the blanks? No. You need to assess the writing situation continuously as you work. If you think you can communicate your ideas better by modifying a conventional pattern or by devising a new pattern, do so. However, you gain nothing if an existing pattern would work just as well.

DISPLAYING YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL PATTERN PROMINENTLY

Make it easy for your readers to understand your organizational pattern. Displaying your pattern prominently involves three main steps:

Read more about tables of contents, see Ch. 18.

Read more about headings in Ch. 9.

Read more about topic sentences in Ch. 9.