Tips for Writing Technical Papers

Here is the outline of a presentation about “Writing Technical Papers” that Jennifer Widom gave in January 2006 at the Stanford Info Lab: Paper Title The Abstract The Introduction Related Work The Body Performance Experiments The Conclusions Future Work The Acknowledgements Citations Appendices Grammar and Small-Scale Presentation Issues Mechanics Versions and Distribution

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Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing

There are so many good free resources out there to help technical writers at all levels.  Here is one such resource: Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing Authors: Leslie C. Perelman, Edward Barrett, and James Paradis Click here to have free and instant access to this resource

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How Learning SQL can Help your Technical Communication Career

© 2010 Ugur Akinci SQL stands for “Structured Query Language” and is pronounced either as “S-Q-L” or “sequel”. It is the most wide-spread language used around the world today for interacting with relational databases. If you already know or planning to learn SQL you have a great advantage over those technical communicators who don’t since…

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How to Add Sound to an OpenOffice 3.0 Impress Slide

© 2010 Ugur Akinci (1) Open the OpenOffice Impress slide to which you’d like to add a sound clip. This sound file will play each time you load the slide. (2) Click the Gallery button on the Graphics Toolbar (bottom of page). This will display the Gallery screen at the top of the selected slide:…

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Technical Writing — NASA's list of "Weak Phrases"

When writing a technical document or specification, you should get rid of the following phrases whenever you can. They were found to be ineffective by NASA Software Assurance Technology Center: adequate as a minimum as applicable easy as appropriate be able to be capable but not limited to capability of capability to effective if practical…

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22 Questions to Ask Before Writing a Technical Manual

The traditional book format (“codex”) is under serious attack both from online and ebook platforms, and structured documents that have “topic” as their most basic information unit instead of the “page.” However, I believe the book format will be with us for a long time to come while XML-based non-book formats continue to make important…

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10 Characteristics of High-Quality SRS (Software Requirements Specifications)

© Ugur Akinci NASA’s Software Assurance Technology Center has identified the following as the ten important criteria that any SRS (Software Requirements Specifications) should satisfy: 1.    Complete A complete requirements specification must precisely define all the real world situations that will be encountered and the capability’s responses to them. It must not include situations that…

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