As the semester picks up I once again find myself struggle to survive each day.  It grows increasingly difficult to wake up in the morning and easier to find dozing off during lectures.  Not to mention my addiction to procrastination is getting worse.

So... Writing for professions.  I suppose in the profession there's not really a place for procrastination.  Things need to be done right and completed properly.  People aren't pleased or impressed with work that looks like it was completed last minute.  I wonder what the book says about this.

Sure enough...  In chapter 4 the book discusses effective ways of writing collaboratively.  Under the guidelines for managing your project are listed "plan your project" and "create and maintain an accurate schedule" (Markel 60).  I think that if someone like me would actually create and commit to a schedule then I wouldn't have procrastination problems.  That's the thing about procrastination I think...  I mean look at this blog...  I was scheduled to have this written by now and look I did it.  At the last minute? Maybe.

But that brings up another topic of managing a project: breaking down the project into several smaller tasks (Markel 60).  I think that if I create a schedule that has small parts of a project have deadlines then I would probably get things done on time no problem.   I'll hopefully try to employ this strategy in my next project.  Maybe I'll report on that in a future post.

Maybe you're wondering about my current project.  The Technical Description Project (TDP) which Ive been working on the last week turned out to be more complicated than I imagined.  While looking through other example projects it seemed to be that the way the TDP was layed out was very important.  Organization.

From the book I found the three principles for organizing technical information (Markel 153).  The first one says "analyze your audience and purpose."  So I started thinking about that and realized that my first draft for the TDP was kind of poor.  I needed to determine who my audience was.  Initially I think I wrote it for someone like my grandmother who is not very tech savvy.  But I reconsidered thinking that most people are at least somewhat familiar with purchasing things online.   So instead of giving a description of how to buy something on Amazon I wanted to show a user some neat function which will make his or her buying experience better.

I think I used good patterns in my TDP.  They were at least consistent.

As suggested by Markel I tried to avoid "sexist sentences."  I was always taught by my mother that using "he" in a sentence as a pronoun(?) was fine and represented either a male or a female person unless that pronoun was explicitly referenced as a non-female person previously.  But I guess it's good to avoid offending anyone in the professional workplace so I'm willing to pour some sugar or cream in his or her coffee if it makes him or her happy.

I thought the section in the book for using the people-first approach was interesting.  Basically it's a strategy of naming people by stating that they are persons before describing what kind of persons they might be.  That's something I've never thought too much about but it makes a lot of sense.

Anyways I did actually finish the TDP on time and I thought it looked pretty good.  The hardest part was deciding what features to include and what to leave out.  Amazon is a huge website and there's a lot of material that could potentially have been covered.

Writing the document wasn't too difficult for me.  I usually don't struggle too much with getting my thoughts onto the paper.  How to people think?  I'd like to say I think in the English language and use actual sentences and phrases inside my head when I think.  I remember asking my dad about this and he said "yeah sometimes I still think in [his native tongue]..."  It's the raw emotions and feelings which are sometimes difficult to think in a language because I don't know the right words to use.  But technical stuff doesn't seem too bad.

Anyways I think my limit is up here.  Same time next week?