Discuss what background information the audience needs to know.

Create a 3 column BROCHURE on letter paper – landscape orientation and double-sided.

This assignment provides experience in preparing a document involving technical definitions, descriptions, and specifications for a specific audience and experience delivering the contents of the report in a reportorial speech.

Background – Technical Descriptions & Specifications

A technical description provides concrete details, precise words, and visuals to show readers what an object, mechanism, or product looks like, how it is put together, and/or how it works. Some technical descriptions detail processes instead of objects.

Many professionals rely on technical descriptions to learn and perform their workplace tasks – making products, using products, fixing products, selling products, and simply understanding products.

Some attributes of technical descriptions include:

• Technical descriptions answer questions such as these: What is it? What does it look like? What does it do? What is it made of? How does it work? How has it been put together?

• Technical descriptions are often parts or sections of other documents.

• Technical descriptions usually rely heavily on visuals – graphs, charts, tables, or illustrations – and use words or short phrases to describe parts of the product or process.

• Technical descriptions help audiences solve problems.

• The introduction to a technical description attempts to do one or more of the following:

– Identify the object, product, mechanism, or process to be described

– Discuss what background information the audience needs to know

– Give a general and brief description of the object, product, mechanism, or process
– Provide an overview of the rest of the technical description

• Writers provide detailed background sections when the subject is not entirely familiar to audiences or they might need contextual information to fully understand the description.

• Parts are the physical, tangible portions of the thing itself; characteristics are the describable qualities that are not parts.

• Writers of technical descriptions provide descriptive detail that appeals to readers’ five senses.

• Technical descriptions use a division organizational pattern, as well as others that suit the subject matter and audience needs, including general to specific, spatial, and chronological.

• Writing technical descriptions entails a set of ethical obligations and responsibilities.

Last Completed Projects