2.1 Introduction2.2 Structuring Your Writing2.3 Positioning Your Writing2.3.1 Know Your Audience2.3.2 Are You Talking to Me?2.4 Choosing the Right Words2.4.1 Conciseness2.4.2 Precision and Hedging2.4.3 Universal and Existential Quantification2.4.4 Negatives2.4.5 Vignette: Brake Retarder Prohibitions2.5 Avoiding Traps2.5.1 Clichés2.5.2 Anthropomorphic Writing2.5.3 Malapropisms2.5.4 Erroneous Heterographs2.5.5 Opinion versus Fact2.5.6 Acronyms, Domain-Specific Terms, and Jargon2.5.7 The Laziness of “Very”2.5.8 Other Pitfalls2.6 Making Your Technical Writing More Interesting2.6.1 Humor2.6.2 Vignette: The Joy of Spam2.6.3 Allegory2.7 The 5 Cs of Technical Writing2.7.1 Qualities of Good Writing2.7.2 Correctness2.7.3 Clarity2.7.4 Completeness2.7.5 Consistency2.7.6 Changeability2.7.7 An Example2.8 Referencing2.8.1 Choose the Right References2.8.2 Web References2.8.3 Reference Styles2.9 ExercisesEndnotesReferences