Technical documents — and professional documents in a specific field in general — rely on definitions that everyone in that profession agrees on. That might sound obvious, but if you don’t define a term like cybersecurity and still expect everyone to know what you’re talking about, then you risk all kinds of bad things happening.

For this Unit, we’re going to look at definitions that are used in technical writing of all kinds and for all kinds of audiences. We’ll start with sentence definitions and touch on parenthetical ones, but mostly we’ll focus on the extended/expanded definition — one that goes into a bit more depth about the term, its history, and its uses in relation to a variety of audiences.

To do that, we’ll look at the different types of definitions and play around with them a bit. But then you’re going to write a article that would go on the website “How Stuff Works” — because those articles are, in fact, extended definitions.

Here’s the procedure:

Note: I’ll give you much more specific information about all of this in both the Schedule and the Announcements each week. This is just an overview.

  1. Read in Perusall about about Definitions in general, and practice writing a single sentence definition.
  2. Analyze the website How Stuff Works.
  3. Propose an article for the website about something you can explain to a general audience.
  4. Workshop those proposals.
  5. Practice writing the introduction and selecting visuals.
  6. Write your rough draft.
  7. Workshop the drafts with each other.
  8. Submit your revised draft to the Google Drive after I give you my feedback.

How Stuff Works analysis

  • How Stuff Works Rhetorical analysis
    • Who is the audience? How do you know?
    • How is it formatted?
      • Bullets
      • Paragraph lengths
      • Use of bold
      • Use of headings and subheads
    • What kinds of definitions and descriptions are used?
      • Sentence definitions
      • Comparisons to other non-technical things
    • What kinds of visuals are there?
      • Static images
      • Interactive
      • Animated
      • Tables, graphs, charts
    • How effective is the article in explaining how the ‘stuff’ works? Why?
  • Post your findings in the How Stuff Works Analysis folder in the Google Drive
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