Project Management Tree Cartoon
This is actually a great visualization; it made me laugh at its accuracy. When we accept what the client asked for with a certain envision in mind, it is interesting to see how the end product turns out. Sometimes it seems like a grander version of "Telephone" that some of us used to play as children.
Are they lateral to you (at the same position or level), upstream from you (management), or downstream from you (employees, subordinates)?
I know the emails I send to my supervisor versus my co-worker differ from each other immensely haha!
There are three general purposes for communication in the workplace: 1) to create a record, 2) to give or request information, and 3) to persuade.
Ask yourself, "which of these am I trying to achieve" when determining your purpose.
To define a “rhetorical situation,” ask yourself this question: “who is talking to whom about what, how, and why?”
In other words, take an outside perspective to be as straight to the point as possible when engaging in technical writing.
Technical documentation is intended to communicate information to the people who need it in a way that is clear and easy to read, at the right time to help make decisions and to support productivity. Designing technical communication is like designing any other product for an intended user: the ultimate goal is to make it “user friendly.”
This paragraph helped me distinguish between technical writing on scholarly writing. When I read the paragraph above about the characteristics of technical writing, it sounded like academic writing to me; however, technical writing can take the jargon out of academic writing and make it easier to understand to a different audience.
Poor communication at this stage can derail a project from the start.
You must first need clear intention of the problem that needs to be solved, and it has to be communicated clearly to teammates in order to head in the right direction. Without that, your team may take unnecessary detours.
He added that engineers who are more advanced in their careers spend only 5-10% of their time engaged in problem solving of some kind and 90-95% of their time engaging in related communications tasks: researching, writing and reading reports, proposals, emails, letters, memos; giving or attending presentations; discussing and meeting with colleagues, team mates, managers, clients, and so forth.
In my workplace at an accounting office, I can see how this statistic is true. Higher level accountants interact with the client quite often, send formatted accounting reports, communicate with the team of the project, and send engagement letters to the client when they are not actually doing "accounting" work. They [we] are engaging in technical writing whether they [we] know it or not.