Page Summary

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• This course teaches the fundamentals of technical writing, focusing on clarity, conciseness, and audience awareness.

• It covers essential skills like using active voice, structuring paragraphs effectively, and choosing the right terminology.

• While it's optimized for laptop/desktop use, the course can be accessed on various devices with an internet connection.

• The course has pre-class and in-class components, with the pre-class lessons providing a valuable standalone learning experience.

• Optional units offer supplementary material for those seeking to further enhance their technical writing skills.

Technical Writing Oneteaches you how to write clearer technical documentation.

Target audience

You need at least a little writing proficiency in English, butyou don't need to be a strong writer to take this course.

If you've never taken any technical writing training, this course isperfect for you. If you've taken technical writing training, thisclass provides an efficient refresher.

Learning objectives

This course teaches you the fundamentals of technical writing.After completing this class, you will know how to do the following:

• Use terminology—including abbreviations and acronyms—consistently.
• Recognize ambiguous pronouns.
• Distinguish active voice from passive voice.
• Convert passive voice sentences to active voice.
• Identify three ways in which active voice is superior to passive voice.
• Develop at least three strategies to make sentences clearer and moreengaging.
• Develop at least four strategies to shorten sentences.
• Understand the difference between bulleted lists and numbered lists.
• Create helpful lists.
• Create effective lead sentences for paragraphs.
• Focus each paragraph on a single topic.
• State key points at the start of each document.
• Identify your target audience.
• Determine what your target audience already knows and what your targetaudience needs to learn.
• Understand the curse of knowledge.
• Identify and revise idioms.
• State your document's scope (goals) and audience.
• Break long topics into appropriate sections.
• Use commas, parentheses, colons, em dashes, and semicolons properly.
• Develop beginner competency in Markdown.

It takes years of focused practice to become a great engineer or a greattechnical writer. This course will improve your technical writing butwill not instantly transform you into a great technical writer.

Pre-class and in-class components

The course consists of the following two components:

• Pre-class
• In-class

You are currently viewing the start of the pre-class component.

The in-class component enhances the lessons taught in the pre-classcomponents. That said, the pre-class lessons on their own stillprovide a valuable educational experience.

Hardware and network requirements

Although this course is optimized for a laptop or desktop, you maytake the course on a tablet or phone. If you are taking thein-class component, please note that you'll type a lot.

You need an internet connection to take the course. You cannot downloadthe course. The course is not available on tangible media.

The course contains a few short videos, all of which are optional viewing.If you want to skip the videos, then you can take the course on alow-bandwidth internet connection.

Optional units

We've marked a few units asoptional. This material isn't essential,though you'll probably find the material useful.

Next unit:Just enough grammar, an optional unit