Once again I'm supplying details about a writing class which I'm enrolled in at Arizona State University.  Last week I talked a little bit about what technical writing is and my plans on improving my skills in technical communication.  Moving on, this is a new week and there's more for me to learn and more for me to blog about.

Our first assignment is called the Technical Description Project (which I may refer to as the TDP later in this post).  It's basically a project where I will introduce a new user to a website and explain how the website can be useful.  It's a bit more complicated than that...  It's all written, and it needs to be professional.  Furthermore I'll need to user the Measures of Excellence in Technical Communication (page 13) which is honesty, clarity, accuracy, etc...

I got assigned the website to do my project on which honestly was a big relief for me.  Sometimes projects like this stress me out with making tough decisions like which site would be best.  So it's nice to know that any hardships I encounter will not be causation for me to blame myself for picking a difficult website to do the project on.  Even better, I got assigned a website which I'm excited to report on: Amazon.

Amazon.com is of course one of the biggest online markets.  I'm a regular customer and I know a lot about the site.  However explaining the site to a new user isn't something I've ever really thought about.  I guess in this day and age I kind of expect people to just type in a URL for a webpage and just know how to navigate the site by following whatever cues are present.  To me most sites are pretty self-explanatory.  I didn't need a manual to figure out how Snowbowl's website worked this last weekend when I wanted to figure out details about snowboarding there.

After analyzing a situation which occurred in class and thinking about some experiences I've had with my own mother I've concluded that this technical writing stuff is actually really important for some people who for some reason or another are not as self-intuitive and adventurous on the web as myself.

See in the project we're supposed to put in some images of the website.  Visuals I guess we could call them.  You know, they help people who don't fully understand the descriptive text and need to be physically shown what we're talking about.  Anyways, out professor asked if everyone knew how to capture those visuals and apply them to their document.  She then proceeded to begin a short tutorial on how to "print screen" and use the Windows Paint program to crop the image.

Now I've been using computers a long time and I'm familiar with this practice.  I've done it several times before until I discovered a much easier way to do it.  The Snipping Tool (which is included on all Windows PCs running Windows 7 or above).

You're probably wondering where I'm going with this.  Well in class I couldn't just sit by and watch as an entire classroom was instructed to do something the hard way.  So I spoke up and sure enough not everyone knew about this gem of a program.  So the professor asked me to show the class.  I just said, "uh... You just go to the start menu and type in "snipping tool" and you should get it..."

Then she was like, "No... Come up here and show us."  For a brief moment I thought seriously this isn't that hard.  But whatever I went up there and figured how hard can it be to show the class this little program?  Now walking up to the front of the class you could imagine I didn't have a plan about how I was going to going to give a tutorial on this program which I can't even remember the last time I used.  I was going to wing it.

Long story short: while I fully understand the program and what I did on it, I'm pretty sure my demo went over a few people's heads.  My bad.  I probably should have been more technical and descriptive in the demo process.

But what I learned is that people don't always know how to wing it when they encounter an unfamiliar program.  Many people have been taught how to use programs and don’t often figure stuff out on their own.  So technical communication is very important in these circumstances.  I can now see where better technical communication skills would have helped me explain technology to my mother who many times I've considered to be technologically impaired.

This TDP project reminds me of the subreddit (a branch of a huge social website) called r/explainlikeimfive (ELI5) where people who are not educated in a certain field ask somewhat complicated questions in hope that an expert will give an answer which he or she can understand.  I think I might read up on there to get inspiration for my assignment.

That's all for today.  My limit's up.