Engineering Writing by Design

3Mindset for Technical Writing

We have encouraged you to think about your technical writing project as a problem to be solved, and then use the engineering design process to attack the problem. For the remainder of the book we emphasize the crucial portion of the flowchart in Figure 1.1: implement, evaluate, improve. Let’s start by considering some tools you can use.

3.1 See Rules as Helpful Tools

Rules are not always correct per se; they sometimes require modification when times change. But broadly accepted rules did evolve for reasons. They can help us stay within the general bounds of convention and thereby increase the number of readers we can reach. They can provide us with structure and save us from having to think too much. We ignore ...