Modules 4 & 5

Summary

Planning, writing, and revising are the three steps to developing a complete written document. Each step should be designated an almost equal amount of time. Although many may think that the actual writing of the document is the most important step it is equally important that planning and revising get an equal amount of time.

There are many forms of planning: brainstorming, in which you think of all the ideas you can, without judging them; free writing, where you make yourself write, without stopping for an extended amount of time; clustering, where you write a topic in the middle of the page, circle it, then write down the ideas the topic suggests and circle them too; and finally talk to your audience.

The revision process consists of revising, editing, and proofreading; not necessarily in that order; revising means making changes that will better satisfy your purpose; editing includes making  surface-level changes such as grammar corrections; and proofreading means checking for typo-grammatical errors.

Grammar check and spell check are very convenient tools available to us, but these things do not account for editing and proofreading. Although these tools will catch many basic errors it is still important that you take the time to reread and edit your work.

The design of documents is extremely important. A good design saves time and money, reduces legal problems, and builds goodwill. The design of paper pages includes: using white spaces appropriately, using heading appropriately, limiting the use of words set in all capital letters, using no more than two fonts in a single document, and deciding whether to justify margins based on the situation and the audience.

Slides should be kept simple. Big font, pullet-points, clear concise language, limited number of points and slide customization are all important factors in a slide presentation.

Finally, we come to web page design. It is very important that the first screen is easy to navigate. The user should be able to find what they are looking for in a reasonable amount of time with limited difficulty. It has been proven that if the user has to search for something for more than two minutes they will give up.

Main Points

It has been shown that expert writers differ from novice writers in that experts are better at identifying and analyzing the initial problem, understanding the task more broadly and deeply, drawing from a wider range of strategies, and seeing patterns more clearly.

Cycling is the process of drafting, getting feedback, revising, and getting more feedback. It is common for published documents to cycle through this process numerous times before they reach their audience.