ENGL 214

Academic & Professional

Communication

Technical Writing & Purpose Statement

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL 1

Aims
• To work on and finalize report
titles
• To introduce technical writing
• To learn how to write a good
purpose statement
• To learn the basics of outlining

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Report titling exercise

• As homework, you were supposed to go home and work on your titles,

which are due on Sunday.
• To follow up, we will take a few minutes in class to work on
composing your titles together.
• Use the attached worksheet to narrow your topic and hone your title.

ENGL 214 Report

title worksheet

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL 3

Ways of narrowing the T222 theme
Google

legitimate actors

Meta
Platforms: the ICT
Privacy - ecosystem where these
Surveillance entities coexist with
people
Phishing scams
Illegitimate,
dangerous actors
Hacking / data
theft

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL 4

 The report writing process
Week 1,2 Weeks 3,4 Weeks 5,6,7 Week 8

Is the yes
Select topic Source evaluations Submit to
proposal no
approved? Turnitin
Modify proposal
Is topic too
general? Submit Revise and
Submit Progress report edit:
yes
Proposal
Narrow content,
topic no organization, style
check spelling,
Purpose Take notes Write first draft (in class) punctuation,
statement grammar, referencing

yes
Write 2 level Get more Finish the report (at home): add
outline sources visuals (figures & tables), title
no page, table of contents,
introduction, conclusion,
Are the sources recommendations, references
Find sources good enough?

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Technical writing
• Important form of communication
for both students and employees.
• Requires at least a working
knowledge of a particular field and
of the terminology that is used there.
• Many leading companies (ex.
ARAMCO) are looking for
employees who can write
technically.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Examples of technical writing

• Instructions
• Letters / emails
• Project writing
• Progress reports
• Advertisements and
brochures
• Questionnaires & surveys
• Research reports

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

 Characteristics of technical writing
• Whatever your purpose, your aim must always be to
communicate to the reader in clear technical English.
• It shares a basic vocabulary with standard English but uses
specialized technical vocabularies as well.
• It also shares a basic grammar although certain grammatical
structures, such as the passive voice, may be used more
frequently.
• What most distinguishes the two, however, is the special need
in technical English for the clear communication of
information.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Ten essential features of clear technical English

1. Purpose-driven
2. Audience-specific
3. Logical
4. Precise
5. Concise, simple, direct
6. Objective & impersonal
7. International
8. Standardized
9. Visual
10. Ethical

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

 Purpose-driven

• Technical writers need to know what they

intend to achieve with their document,
what they intend to find out.
• The purpose may be to inform, to provide
instructions, persuade, to entertain, or to
describe.
• Always begin with the question: why am
I writing?

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Audience-specific
• Always consider who you are writing for.
• Different audiences have varying levels of
education, technical expertise, attitudes, and
reasons for reading.
• Technical writers must take their audience’s
characteristics and attitudes into
consideration in order to produce a document
that achieves its purpose.
• In your English course this semester, your
audience is your instructor.
• Carefully consider how best to convey your
technical, major-specific information to him.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

 Logical

• Present text in sections and sub-sections, and in

logically structured paragraphs that have a single
main idea and support.
• Transitions [connectors – ‘link words’] between
ideas must also be strictly logical; they should
indicate comparison, contrast, enumeration,
chronology, and so on.
• A clear logical plan should precede every document
you produce, and the document itself needs a table
of contents and headings.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Precise
• Ideas and factual information taken from
sources must be reported faithfully in your
writing and documented accurately.
• Measurements, statistical data, dates and
names should be precise.
• Vocabulary should be used precisely and
defined if necessary (compare ‘firewall’ for a
computer engineer and a mechanical
engineer).
• Work should be proofread carefully to
eliminate errors of content, organization,
grammar, and mechanics.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Concise, simple, direct
• Communicate in a concise, simple and direct way
with the fewest possible words.
• Irrelevant information and repetition
(“redundancy”) should be eliminated.
• Choose the simplest, most direct vocabulary: Dear Brian,
“finish” rather than “finalize”; “use” rather than
“utilize”. You are fired.
• Avoid slang and colloquialisms.
• In general, keep sentences short, avoiding That is all,
excessively complex ones composed of several
clauses. Dave
• Mainly use the sentence order Subject-Verb-Object
(SVO).

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Objective & impersonal
• The subjective feelings of the observer are
rigorously excluded and there should be no
attempt to influence readers by appealing to their
emotions.
Another point
• If opinions against nuclear
are given, they mustpower
beis adequately
that it is a
serious hazard to health. An excellent example is the
supported by facts, as, for example, in an
Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster. When you
argument.
think about all the little children who got ill because
of the radiation
• Technical writingleak—many
does not very seriously
permit ill with
irrelevant
cancer—how can you not be against nuclear power?!
information about the writer (personal
Instead of enjoying their young lives, these poor kids
preferences, opinions
spent months etc.)
in hospital undergoing painful therapy.
Instead
• While of laughter,pronoun
the personal they knew "I"
onlyis
tears and screams
permitted, its
of terror and agony. Clearly, nuclear power is evil and
use should be limited; similarly, ‘we’ and ‘you’
I think it should be banned at once.
may be inappropriate pronouns to use in
presenting objective research.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

International

• English is the world's main language for technical

communication.
• Any terms used need to be understood anywhere
in the world. Avoid slang and local language.
• Generally, formal academic English is the most
recognisable globally.
• Special care should be taken if abbreviations or
initials are used.
• Some terms are only used in highly specialized
fields of study; do they need to be defined?

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Standardised

• Certain formats are used in technical

English worldwide.
• For example, the formats used for abstracts,
progress reports, research reports,
bibliographies, and business letters all have
only limited variations.
• These standard formats aid in clear,
efficient communication: readers know
where a certain kind of information is to be
found and can go right to it.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

 Visual
• When appropriate, make full use of visuals. You will
need at least two in the final draft of your report.
• They are classified into figures (charts, diagrams,
graphs, drawings, maps, and photos) and tables (the
tabular display of data).
• For each visual there should be a concise descriptive
label that clarifies its purpose for the reader as well
as a specialized type of reference which must be
used when copying a figure directly from another’s
work.
• Visuals are never simply decorative; each fulfils an
essential purpose in clarifying meaning for the
audience.
• Be aware they have to be cited correctly.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Ethical
• All writers must conform to a code of conduct
that determines how they behave towards
others, their academic institution, employer,
colleagues, and the public.
• One of the most common unethical practices in
writing is the theft of someone else’s intellectual
property, especially in the form of plagiarism.
• Other examples include the use of deliberately
imprecise or ambiguous language, the
manipulation of statistics, and the use of visuals
such as graphs and photos that are displayed in a
way designed to mislead the reader.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

 Abstracts
• Summary of whole writing
• Very important aspect of
academic writing
• Usually at the beginning

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

 Abstracts

• There are two kinds of abstracts:

• informative abstracts
• descriptive abstracts

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

 informative abstracts
• similar to summaries, only shorter
• summaries can be pages long
• informative abstracts are usually one
or two paragraphs on the front page
• informative abstracts offer readers a
concise, accurate and complete re-
statement
• Example: describes research carried
out, conclusions made, and
recommendations

Successful Writing at Work, Kolin, p.339

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL
 Text from: Successful Writing at Work (Kolin, pp. 338 – 354)
ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL
 descriptive abstracts
• are usually only two or three
sentences, on the front page
• they help the reader decide if they
should read the document
• they state what the article contains,
without specific details
• an informative abstract will mention
each recommendation
• a descriptive abstract will simply
mention the recommendations without
specifying what they are

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

When you first start, you may only have a simple outline.

Topic

Background /
Problems Solutions Evaluation
History

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

As your initial plan grows, the parts become more complex.

Topic

Background /
Problems Solutions Evaluation
History

A.???? A. ???? A. ???? A. ????

B. ???? B. ???? B. ???? B. ????
C. ???? C. ???? C. ???? C. ????
D. ???? D. ???? D. ???? D. ????

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Why write a purpose statement?
• It helps you to focus your energy into
choosing the correct sources
• It serves as a guide for your research
• It tells readers exactly what you propose to
do for them

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Introducing the purpose

• These are some of the ways you can introduce your

aims and objectives:

• The objective of the report is to…

• The research was carried out in order to
investigate…
• The goal of this study is to…
• This study investigated whether…

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Key words

• As with the Title, you should find a key word that

focuses on the primary activity of the study. Think
about exactly what you wanted to achieve:
• Do you want to identify a value?
• Use to determine, to calculate, to measure.
• Do you want to test or investigate a system or a
machine?
• Use to analyse, to identify, to test, to design.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

 Samples:
The purpose of this report is to measure the damage
caused by industrial chemical waste, and to
identify ways that the risk of personal injury can
be reduced.

The goal of this study is to determine primary

causes of obesity for females aged 30-40 and to
investigate the effectiveness of various exercise
equipment to combat this problem.

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Sample “wave power” report titles:

Problem/solution Argument
Overcoming the Common Wave Power Systems are
Difficulties of Wave Power Needed in the Eastern
Systems Province
INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION
PROBLEMS ARGUMENTS
SOLUTIONS COUNTERARGUMENTS
CONCLUSION CONCLUSION
RECOMMENDATIONS RECOMMENDATIONS

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Sample abstract:
Problem/solution
Overcoming the Common
Difficulties of Wave Power
Systems This report will focus on the current
INTRODUCTION generation of wave power systems,
examine a number of difficulties
PROBLEMS
that designers of wave power
SOLUTIONS systems face, and suggest solutions
CONCLUSION for those common problems.
RECOMMENDATIONS

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

Sample abstract:
Argument
Wave Power Systems are
Needed in the Eastern
This report argues in favor of using Province
wave power as a source of INTRODUCTION
alternative energy for use in the
ONE SIDE
Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia,
OTHER SIDE
and makes recommendations on the
prospect of such a project. RECONCILLIATION
CONCLUSION

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

HOMEWORK:
Submit your proposed
report title to the shared
spreadsheet

• Hone your topic

• Edit and finalize your proposed title
• Submit it to the shared spreadsheet
• This assignment is worth 1 point

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL

 Questions Discussion Thank you

ENGLISH 214 ACADEMIC & PROFESSIONAL 35