...Technical The Basics of Technical Writing for Management Information Systems Professionals David J. Donahoo Associate Professor, Liberty University Lynchburg, Virginia Submitted in Accordance With Guidance in the CSIS 100 Syllabus Abstract This paper provides students in the CSIS 100 course with an introduction to technical writing—one of the critical success factors for their future employment and career advancement. In this paper, students will be exposed to Four basic skills that will improve your technical writing. These include: flow and format, writing in complete thoughts, proper use of white space, and readability. This paper provides various tips to help you be successful in your college research writing and your follow-on professional life. Table of Contents Abstract 3 Introduction 6 General Concepts 6 Flow and Format 7 Flow 7 Flow Tips and Pointers 7 TIP 1: Body 8 TIP 2: Introduction 8 TIP 3: Conclusion 8 Format 9 Complete Thoughts 9 White Space 10 Readability 11 Conclusion 12 Sample References 13 Introduction No matter where you are at in your life-long educational or professional career you will benefit from honing your technical writing skills. Believe me when I say this; technical writing takes your normal writing skills in a different direction. Some of the things you received praise from in high school composition classes will draw scorn in...
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...ween Essays and Research Papers Not all writing assignments are created equal. We’re sure this is something that students around the world have discovered – the hard way. It almost seems purposefully unfair. One type of writing is difficult enough, but teachers want to throw all different writing brands, styles and formats into the mix. You’ve got APA paper, term papers, research papers, standard essays, reports, etc. Amidst all these writing assignments, two stand out as the most commonly assigned. Essays and research papers are, above all, the biggest and most common headache for students. However, understanding the crucial differences between these two assignments may help students to tackle them better in the future. What is an Essay? An essay is a simple composition with three basic parts: the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. The introduction is the first sentence of the essay, and works to introduce the topic of the piece, as well as the writer’s response. An essay could centers around a) the writer’s response to a question, b) an examination of a topic, c) a reaction to a text or d) an opinion supported be evidence. The evidence provided in an essay can center around personal experiences or unbiased factual support. The conclusion of an essay works to sum up the writer’s major points, opinion or position. In essence, an essay is a composition used to examine a topic in a brief but detailed and organized way. Most essays only span a few pages, and some only...
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... | | Overview: “APA, Plagiarism, & Role Transition Articles” In the Week 1 Assignment, you will view an APA Module to obtain information about writing in a professional style and in professional formats that are expected at the BSN level of the School of Nursing. After viewing the APA Module, you will submit an Attestation Statement Form. The reference on Scholarly Writing in your Resources will also provide tips on strengthening your professional writing skills. As part of scholarly writing, you must ensure proper citation for others’ work, including both direct quotations and paraphrased ideas, so you will study a Plagiarism Module for guidelines. Since your professional nursing experience may not have required you to regularly access professional libraries or databases, you will learn and practice the procedures for retrieving research articles. As a part of this assignment, you will select, cite, and summarize two research articles on the role transition from RN to BSN. Resources Use the following resources as you complete this Application assignment. Access these resources in the Resource section or by entering the web addresses provided into your address bar. APA Module http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=apa_exposed Scholarly Writing Tips (available in the Resource section of this week) Plagiarism Module http://library.uta.edu/plagiarism/index.html UTA Library (Go to the RN to BSN Program homepage, and...
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...INTEGRATION PAPER (Alternative Writing Assessment) Total Quality Management for Business Education Majors Second Semester, School Year 2014-2015 The integrative paper represents the culmination of your experience and classroom learning in Total Quality Management. The FINAL PAPER should be at least 5 PAGES (but no more than 10 pages, not counting cover page, index, reference pages, and any appendices). Your paper should focus on SELECTED FIELD TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT LECTURES WE HAD. THE PAPER SHOULD SHOW/ PROVE YOUR MASTERY IN COMMUNICATING THE CONCEPTS, AND THE THEORIES. Typed using 12 point font size, double spacing, one inch margins on all sides, and Times New Roman typeface. A hard copy rd of the final paper should be submitted PERSONALLY at 3 Floor, TIP Administration Building, Office of the VP for Strategic Initiatives. Don’t forget to email your final work to sirjaypy.tenerife@gmail.com on or before Thursday, 26 March 2015, 09:00 a.m. You will be graded using the rubrics for the reflection paper (see attached rubrics). 1. (50 pts) Explain the relevance of THEORY and PRACTICE (actual) of implementing Total Quality Management: a. What I learn vs. what I expect from taking the course b. What aspects of the course were most helpful and why? c. How and When I will use what I’ve learned? d. Feedback on the Instructor’s contact session (i.e., classroom, consultation, internet classroom assistant), and the materials provided. 2. (30 points) What specific...
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...and reflect on why you chose nursing as a profession. Your paper will define how you interact with patients, family members, other nurses, and other health care professionals. Since this is your first formal paper for the program, be sure to use the resources listed below to ensure you are using the proper APA formatting, title page, and scholarly language. Be sure you develop a method of naming your assignment documents as you save them on your computer so you can easily retrieve them when you submit them into the appropriate assignment/document area in Blackboard. Resources ANA Code of Ethics APA Module* http://gseacademic.harvard.edu/~instruct/articulate/APA/player.html (This is also printable. Follow instructions in the tutorial.) Scholarly Writing Tips* (*Available in the Resource section of this module) MS Word Help and How-To Word 2007 - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/FX100649251033.aspx?CTT=96&Origin=CL100636481033 Word 2003 - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/FX100649261033.aspx?CTT=96&Origin=CL100636481033 Review your course readings, lecture, and your Module 2 Resources before completing this module’s Assignment. Performance Objectives * Compose a personal philosophy of nursing. * Correlate historical, ethical, and/or political factors influencing professional nursing practice with what you believe...
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...Management of Soft Skills @ Campus Placement ABSTRACT Every student pursuing a professional career in engineering/management or any other stream has an ambition to obtain a challenging job in a company of repute (a brand name) and make a successful career. The eligibility of any student for campus placement although decides on the basis of his current and past academic performance (i.e. 10th and 12th marks) but his success in the interview is mainly depend on the technical knowledge and mostly on presentation / communication skill/general awareness. This implies the importance of soft skill knowledge at this stage. Basic campus placement activities conduct in three phases. 1. Technical or subject Test 2. Group discussion 3. Personal Interview A group discussion or GD conducted to test following skill of the candidates. • Interpersonal skill-listening, speaking, receptiveness, team spirit etc. • Clarity of thoughts-knowledge and ability to link known fact • Communication skill- coherence And the interview process to evaluate the candidate on various aspects such as goal, attitude, and motivational level ability to react the situation etc. This also helps company to assess the cultural fit between the company and students. This paper will elaborate on exact soft skill required for the students who are ready for placement i.e. final or pre final year students of the college based on four important factors...
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...10 Essential Facts Career Professionals Need to Know About LinkedIn Now! Joshua Waldman, Author “Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies” ! About Joshua Waldman Joshua Waldman, author of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies, has offered LinkedIn profile writing services for the last two years. Waldman is the founder of the CareerEnlightenment.com blog, which won the About.com 2013 Reader’s Choice Award for best career blog. When he hires new writers, Waldman asks them to go through his customized training program, now available to the public as “The LinkedIn Profile Writing Masterclass.” [careerenlightenment.com/lipw] Your Clients Want LinkedIn Services but Don’t Know What to Ask for complaints to you, and your job is to put those symptoms together to form a diagnosis and treatment. There are a few facts in this situation that you may have seen as so obvious that you did not give them much attention. In that case, you might give him aspirin for the pain, protein supplements for the weight loss, and a recommendation for more rest for his fatigue issues. But you wouldn’t be healing the patient until you found the actual disease, the actual cause of his symptoms. Based on your expertise, you know the patient’s symptoms may indicate that he has steatohepatitis, or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. A few facts about this situation. First, the patient doesn’t really know what is causing his ailment. He’s only able to identify his pain and other odd symptoms...
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...September 6, 2010 10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly Brian Taylor Enlarge Image Brian Taylor By Michael C. Munger Most academics, including administrators, spend much of our time writing. But we aren't as good at it as we should be. I have never understood why our trade values, but rarely teaches, nonfiction writing. In my nearly 30 years at universities, I have seen a lot of very talented people fail because they couldn't, or didn't, write. And some much less talented people (I see one in the mirror every morning) have done OK because they learned how to write. It starts in graduate school. There is a real transformation, approaching an inversion, as people switch from taking courses to writing. Many of the graduate students who were stars in the classroom during the first two years—the people everyone admired and looked up to—suddenly aren't so stellar anymore. And a few of the marginal students—the ones who didn't care that much about pleasing the professors by reading every page of every assignment—are suddenly sending their own papers off to journals, getting published, and transforming themselves into professional scholars. The difference is not complicated. It's writing. Rachel Toor and other writers on these pages have talked about how hard it is to write well, and of course that's true. Fortunately, the standards of writing in most disciplines are so low that you don't need to write well. What I have tried to produce below are 10 tips on scholarly nonfiction...
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...common mistakes made by students in research paper writing. Textbooks, internet, and correction given during class seminar presentation constituted the sources of information gathered. It was realized that in the effort to give the best in writing research papers, students unconsciously make mistakes in topic selection, objectives of research, writing format hypothesis or thesis statement, literature review, research methodology, paragraphing, use of tense in sentence construction, referencing and quoting to mention but a few. This writing also incorporated some tips in avoiding these mistakes mentioned and therefore concluded and recommended that The mistakes stated above should be avoided at all cost when writing research papers. They can contribute to low grades or disqualification of your project. Therefore, it is advisable that students seek for guidance from their instructors or professionals in research papers writing. INRODUCTION Research assignments give you an opportunity to demonstrate practically the skills and knowledge learnt in class. In the effort to give the best in writing research papers, students unconsciously make mistakes. This article highlights common mistakes students make in research paper writing especially in their early days of undertaking research...
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...CS113: Academic Strategies for the Business Professional Unit 1 Scavenger Hunt Assignment Full Name: Renee Barley Two-digit Section #: 02 Instructions: Download this document to your computer and save it (use “save as”), adding your name to the new file name before filling it out. All of the gray boxes above and below should be appropriately filled in and the document saved again before submitting to the Unit 1 Assignment Dropbox. The name of this course is CS113: Academic Strategies for the Business Professional. There are several sections for this same course with different students enrolled in each section. Each section is designated with a two-digit number. What is the specific section of the course you are enrolled in? Hint: Your complete course name includes CS113 and the two-digit section number that follows. This can be found in your course syllabus. Example: CS113-99. Two-digit section number: 02 Course Home Hint: Look in the upper, far left-hand corner of your main course page for this important area. Select the Course Home tab to view the complete list of hyperlinks located in this area and then list the first hyperlink located directly below the Course Home tab: Syallbus Academic Tools Hint: Look across the tabs at the top of each Unit Home page for this important page. Name the first three links on the left side of the Academic Tools page: Course...
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...Professional Dynamics Details This course is a bridge course for the RN who is returning to formal education for the baccalaureate degree in nursing. The course focuses on differentiated nursing practice competencies, nursing conceptual models, professional accountability, integrating spirituality into practice, group dynamics, and critical thinking. Emphasis is also placed on writing and oral presentation skills. 3.0 None None Additional Material Textbook Conceptual Foundations: The Bridge to Professional Nursing Practice Cresaia, J., & Friberg, E. (2010). Conceptual foundations: The bridge to professional nursing practice (5th ed). St. Louis, MO: Elsevier. ISBN-13: 9780323068697 (Available as eBook) Important information about this text: All required GCU RN-to-BSN eBooks are accessible anywhere-anytime, with lifetime access via Evolve at (http://evolve.elsevier.com). Refer to “Pageburst/Evolve eBooks” for details on how to access the course’s required text. http://evolve.elsevier.com Topics Topic 1: Essentials of Baccalaureate Education Description: Objectives: 1. Identify uses of the various elements of the virtual classroom. 2. Identify best practices for conducting academic research. 3. Access the GCU online Library Catalog to access the journal databases and locate scholarly/peer-reviewed articles. 4. Define plagiarism and distinguish between plagiarism, paraphrasing, and summarizing. 5. Differentiate between academic and nonacademic writing. Topic Material: Electronic...
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...Tips of resume writing Resume writing is really hard; you want to be professional and conform to accepted conventions, but at the same time, it's important to be distinctive enough that you get the recruiter or hiring manager's attention. That might sound like an impossible contradiction, but this much is true: Wacky or unprofessional resumes get rejected immediately. So it's really important to know what not to do. Here are the 10 most important resume glitches to steer clear of. Yahoo Finance recently wrote about 10 resume red flags. All good stuff, many of which are things I've warned you about before: 1. Don't show peacock feathers. We all want to stand out, but don't use weird fonts or embed images in your resume. It makes your resume look strange (not in a good way) and might not even render the way you expect on someone else's PC. 2. Omit the references. Including references on the resume itself says that you needed it for page filler, or you just don't understand how the system works. References should only be provided upon request. 3. Don't write in complete sentences. And don't, for the love of God, include full paragraphs. Write in bullets and short, impactful sentence fragments that tell your story with a minimum of reading. 4. Don't omit the numbers. Quantify your accomplishments. 5. Don't list your responsibilities. No one cares what your last job's requirements were. In fact, including them sends the message that you don't understand...
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...medium of business communication in these days. The purpose of the communication between sender and receiver is to fix a meeting in a future date for next orders to be supplied by the sender and to satisfy to the receiver that his previous orders are being completed and will be sent to him on time. Moreover, if some items are required or needed on urgent basis then these can also be supplied on specific date to the receiver mentioned by him. Both e-mails have been written for business objectives so these are business emails and not personal emails (Romkema, 2012). In these two emails many barriers can be found at first sight, when read. The first very bad thing in both emails is missing of subject line which is a necessary requirement for writing an email because subject lines are headlines always present in any text communication as well as in email communication. The second barrier in both emails is that these emails have more than two points per email while for better understanding and clarification of the subject matters there must be only one point agenda. But the both e-mails focusing on different issues combined which does not make them precise and comprehensive, so desired and effective communication is not possible through these e-mails. The first e-mail has some other barriers as it is just like a confused paragraph and seems not an e-mail. Further, e-mail must be written literarily without using slang language and...
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...for the next 10 years (at least), text will remain the best way to communicate. During that time, you can make or break your business success, your very life possibly. Without the good business writing skills, you'll be doomed. And in today's fast-paced real world, nobody denies the importance of good business writing skills. Writing is still one of the best methods of communication. The majority of business jobs today require above average writing skills. Business writing has become more than a nice thing to have - it has become a necessity. Most small business people don't have proper writing skills. Most of them never really learned how to write to communicate when they should have - in school. And most small businesses can't afford to hire a writer. There are, of course, hundreds of books that teach you how to write, the classic being... The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. Only two problems with these "general writing" books... 1. They are so dry as to be almost unreadable. 2. They have almost nothing to do with the REAL world. Besides these books, there are thousands more on how to write "sales copy." The favorite is Ken Evoy's Make Your Words Sell. It's now free. There's no charge - you're not even asked for your email address. This book is great, if you have something to sell. And even then, keep in mind that SELLING comes after PREselling (C-T-P-M process). Writing to PREsell is an entirely new concept to the art of business writing. Most importantly...
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...10 Steps to Earn a High GRE Score The following is a guide to scoring high on the GRE test. If you follow these steps, your GRE score will improve. 1. Relax: Preparing for the GRE can be stressful. Try to focus on the task at hand and not so much on everything else you have to do. If you take GRE test prep step-by-step, day-by-day, and give yourself breaks when your body needs them, you'll be able to concentrate on GRE studies a lot better. 2. GRE Diagnostic Test: Begin GRE test prep with a GRE practice test to find out what you're good at, and more importantly, what you're not good at. Correct your completed practice test and evaluate the questions you missed. What kind of questions did you miss? Are they mostly Quantitative or mostly Verbal? What score would you give yourself on Analytical Writing? Did you miss a lot of analogies but do well on reading comprehension? With this information you'll be able to focus your GRE test prep studies on your weaknesses. 3. GRE Study Plan: With your GRE weaknesses in mind, make a very specific study plan for yourself. You should know what, how, and when you are going to study for the GRE test. Put your study plan somewhere in plain view, and make sure you stick to your plan. Try to keep GRE test prep interesting by planning to study different things in different ways. For example, study GRE vocabulary from flash cards one day, from a list the second day, and by reading and learning words in context the third day. 4. GRE Vocabulary: ...
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