Response to Amela Colakovic's Chap. 8 & 19 Post

Amela brings up a couple of good thoughts on the chapter readings. She points out the fact that it is difficult to present one's own style in technical writing. Technical writing seems to strip everything down to get to the bare bones of the writing by cutting out all the fluff, avoiding fancy words, and really focusing on the readers. When it comes to establishing style in various forms of writing, writers must first be able to adapt to the conventions of the writing form itself, then focus on the appropriate style techniques.

Amela raises the question of how one can be creative and still please the client in a given project. She goes on to say that creativity seems like something that would have to be sacrificed in order to please the client. This is a good point because many times the client will request that things be done a certain way, and this may not be the direction that the project leader would have gone. Nevertheless, the client's satisfaction with the end product should be the ultimate goal of the project leader. On the other hand, however, I feel that in many cases clients will seek creativity in the people they choose to head their projects. I think that it is just a matter of trying to find a balance between creativity and what the client wants.

Chapter 8 & 19 Response

The first thing that really stuck out to me in chapter 8 was guideline 5 in the "Constructing Sentences" section. This guideline suggests varying sentence length and structure. This is something that I'm interested in because within the past couple years, I've tried to use more variety in my writing. This guideline focuses on using variety, but in a very specific way in order to add emphasis to a particular point. Longer sentences show the relationship between ideas, and shorter sentences emphasize the longer ones. This seems like an effective technique that I can use in my own writing.

Another interesting part of the chapter was guideline 4 in the "Selecting Words" section. This guideline recommends that plain words are used over fancy ones. At first, I was somewhat taken back by this because I figured that fancy words would sound more professional. As I read further, I found out that plain words are easier and quicker to comprehend, and fancy words can lead to irritation in the reader or even the belief that the writer is showing off. This made me think of the group revision exercise we did in class where one of the words in an example had to be looked up in order to understand what it meant. That is too much work for someone to go through just to comprehend what the writer is saying, and I now see how fancy words can be annoying to readers.

One of the most important parts of chapter 19, in my mind, was guideline 5. Ample communication with clients is the focus of this guideline. This section notes that problems, scheduling issues, and expansions of the project are common occurrence when working with clients on a project. When working with clients, meetings with them regularly will greatly increase the chances of the project working to their liking. Also, this will save the person doing the work a lot of time because they can address issues, concerns, or changes right away. This will avoid more work by not having to go back later to fix something that has already been started on prior to consulting the client.