| Teaching of writing has long been mostly about teaching how to write belle lettre. Some of the lessons there can also apply to technical writing, e.g., have in mind and track the reactions of the intended audience. E.g., the script writers for good movies, along with the director and actors, etc. do well having in mind, "tracking", and bringing along the audience, e.g., in what appears to be relatively technical content for movie audiences, the movies Star Wars. So, e.g., anticipate the audience reaction enough to see that they won't get lost and give up. But let's set aside belle lettre, courses in "creative writing", etc. and move on: It turns out there are some technical fields that have long had essentially their own techniques of writing. The writing in those fields is especially good on precision. The better writing examples from those fields can serve as good examples for maybe nearly all technical writing. IMHO, from my experience, some of the best examples include: o The original Kemeny-Kurtz documentation on their programming language Basic. o McCracken's documentation of Fortran. o Any of the freshman college physics books by Sears, et al.. o Any of the best freshman college calculus books. o IMHO, D. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. One way to make some progress on doing such writing is to take a college course in abstract algebra where the homework is to write proofs and where the teacher reads and corrects the writing style, technique of some of the homework. For a student who was taught writing Belle Lettre where often ambiguity is desired and precision is not, an abstract algebra course can be a good step forward for technical writing. |