Structured Writing (Course)
The course teaches the practice of precision modularity as advocated by Robert Horn, complemented by exposure to proposal storyboarding as practiced by the defense/aerospace industry.
These classic methods offer practical ways for technical writers to deal with complexity by thinking systematically and to quickly deliver immediately useful results.
Instructor-led, live online course, 20 hours in class, offered at Polytechnic University of Porto since 2020.
Learning objectives
At the end of the module, students will be able to:
- Gather detail with information types.
- Identify concepts with information blocks.
- Teach behavior with steps, decisions, and consequences.
- Justify behavior with processes.
- Make facts findable and comparable.
- Leverage structure to cover detail and detect change.
- Explain harder decisions with principles.
- Have a place for everything learned.
Why am I teaching this?
For me you are a technical writer if you have to communicate complex information with an industrial mindset. Instead of writing once, we write again and again, systematically, and failure costs time, money and, in extreme cases, the loss of lives.
Robert Horn's theory makes technical writers extremely effective, by enabling us to ask focused questions, and then to quickly create pages of information that are demonstrably useful and finished. This is also a practical way to write and maintain large document sets over time.
What happens in class?
The class is organized in lessons as follows:
- We learn just how unhelpful is the traditional practice of “writing paragraphs”, creating the motivation to learn a more practical approach.
- We learn the principles of Robert Horn's theory, especially the information types.
- In individual lessons, we study each of the information types in more detail. Thus, students practice writing facts, concepts, structures, procedures, processes, and principles.
- We learn how to organize large documentation sets based on topics written with a bottom-up approach.
- Finally, we learn the contemporary technique STOP for developing complex proposals, which reached similar results using a top-down approach based on large scale collaboration over a storyboard.
The course only works if students engage in class and outside class, by pre-reading texts and completing assignments, which are debriefed in class. In the University course, students that engage in class get a passing grade. A final exercise where students apply structured writing to a topic they choose provides further feedback and the possibility of a higher grade.
Module history
The course was developed as my contribution to the Portgraduate Diploma on Technical Communication. In 2024, the emphasis on STOP was diminished to make way for other modules.
| Date | Place | Class | Place |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-03 | Virtual | 12 students | “Structured Writing” at Polytechnic University of Porto. |
| 2023-03 | Virtual | 6 students | “Redação Técnica II” at Polytechnic University of Porto. |
| 2022-04 | Virtual | 4 students | “Redação Técnica II” at Polytechnic University of Porto. |
| 2021-04 | Virtual | 7 students | “Redação Técnica II” at Polytechnic University of Porto. |
| 2020-05 | Virtual | 9 students | “Structured Writing” at Farfetch. |
| 2020-03 | Porto | 7 students | “Redação Técnica II” at Polytechnic University of Porto. |
Available yearly or on demand
This training is an instructor-led module available live online or on premises. The training room requires a projector and students must be able to read and write in class, possibly in laptops. The duration of the course may be adjusted to cover proposal writing in more detail.
In 2023/2024, this training was offered between 8-Mar and 28-Apr (6x3h+2h) for €208 as an instructor-led, live online course, integrated in the Postgraduate Diploma on Technical Communication. A similar offer is expected for 2024/2025.
Contact me for details: px@acm.org — LinkedIn — +351 91 784 2996