Chapter 3
Reading Technical Information
Objectives and outcomes
- Understand that workplace professionals read documents, listen to conversations and presentations, and view visuals for a variety of purposes: Assessing and making decisions, learning background, learning to do a task, and actually doing a task.
- Recognize that reading and writing are synergistically linked activities – each affects the other.
- Use strategies of experienced communicators
Identify Purposes
Regardless of the purposes that workplace professionals have for reading, they expect information in documents to be accessible, accurate, comprehensible, and usable. The reader might be reading to assess whether to read the entire report, to learn how well something is working, or to learn how to do a certain assignment.
Reading-Writing Relationships
When writing something you want to think like the reader and maybe answer questions you think they would have. As a reader you hope the questions you ask yourself will be answered in the text.
Strategies for Effective Reading
Some strategies for effective reading are skim, scan and predict which skimming helps you locate where info is contained in the material, then scan. Scanning is the process of finding key terms or specific information that sticks out. Predicting what is in the article comes form the information you just skim and scan to formulate questions that you hope to get answered.
Identify Structure and Hierarchy
Document features are those that give the writing and overview or purpose. These are things such as the objective or purpose, the methodology, the results, and the conclusions. Other features are headings, visual cues, and previews of what’s coming. Visual cues give the reader a chance o understand the material by breaking it into chunks, or the important elements are signaled such as with bold print or italics. Previewing and reviewing give you a chance to identify and then reinforce the structure or organization of a document. The wording anticipates the wording of the first subheading giving the reader a chance to match words and make use of what they are reading.
Determine the Main Points
Seeing words that are italicized or asking questions to make sense of the reading and figure out what the main points are help determine the main points.
Draw Inferences
This is when the read makes connections and draws conclusions beyond the words and visuals that are presented. These help form opinions. Strategies are: Identify the tacit assumptions on which you believe the document is based, extend the ideas to pose reasonable but unstated implication, or speculate on the impact of the implications.
Generate Questions and Examples
Widely used levels of questions include:
- Knowledge question that emphasize the recall of specifics
- Comprehensive questions that require and understanding as well
- Application questions requiring applications of principles
- Analysis questions that emphasize separation of objects or relationships between parts
- Synthesis questions require the reader to organize the parts to create a whole
- And Evaluation questions requiring the reader to judge qualitative and quantitative value.
Monitor and Adapt Reading Strategies
Effective readers are aware of what they’re doing when they move through a document adjusting their strategies to meet the needs of the situation. The goal of the reader is to strategize what works for you. Different readings can mean different things to each reader it is how they relate it to their experiences and knowledge versus the other person especially if they come from different backgrounds or fields of study.
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Chapter 3 was very helpful with how they layed out the information for me to understand. I thought the objectives were helpful to have because it made me have an overview of what I was going to read about. When reading this information I thought about how teachers lecture and give notes and most of them have power points which is a very effective way for students to get the exact notes teachers want them to. I think power points are a good way to give notes because they are easy to read, accurate, and accessible. The way the person uses bold text, highlighted words, italics, and underlininig phrases helps any student know what things are more important than others. Also using visual aids help students connect what they are writing and reading in the text to help better understand the information.
Communicating any given information can be quite difficult if you don’t know where to start or how to convey your information effectively. Personally, I have a pretty short attention span. When listening to a lecture or presentation, I want something that is going to grab my attention. Sometimes that is almost more important than the information itself. When I give a presentation, I want it to be something that my listeners will remember and possibly refer to at a later time in their life. This chapter outlined some very insightful ways of doing just that. Vivid visual aids, colorful power points, and accurate information seem to be only the beginning. We have endless possibilities available to us, we just have to utilize them.
I really liked this chapter because it shows how you can write purposefully. As a college student, reading is a thing done on a daily basis. With older textbooks, the authors weren’t concerned with how the reader would react to the presented material. Their only concern was that the information you need to get through the class is between the front and back covers. I absolutely hate these books because I can’t ever finish my reading assignments. The layouts aren’t agreeable for the reader. They bulk everything onto the pages with no paragraph breaks, the headings aren’t bold, and they don’t emphasize things that need to be. The newer books present the information that is more easily read and even though I still don’t like the reading, it isn’t as horrible.
This chapter definitely points out some great ideas to help us become better at writing. I think it is extremely important to some how grab the reader’s attention and be able to hold their attention. This separates poor authors from great authors. This is important in workplaces because many of our jobs will require us to give presentations, write and read important documents, and learning how to do new things. I am majoring in Construction Management and I know that these things are going to be and everyday thing for me. I will have to hold meetings, do proposals, write up bids on jobs, etc. I need to keep these things in mind for the future when doing these daily activities.
This chapter can be use to describe the book itself. The book is very structure and organize which makes it easier to understand and read. The objectives and outcomes at the beginning give readers the overview of the main concepts and the use of header helps readers to identify information easier. I remember reading books or articles where there was no structure and it was very to read. Trying to understand the main concepts were also really hard. The strategies for reading described in the chapter (skim, scan, and predict) are very helpful for any readers. I know I greatly benefited from these strategies because in college reading is require daily. And using these strategies I read more more efficiently.
This chapter is great at explaining the correct strategy to write a technical paper. It pointed out tips to keep each paragraph relatively informative. For example, if you read something and enjoy each paragraph, you end up having a better understanding of the subject being talked about. On the other hand, if you get a paper where the paragraphs go off-topic or contain information that is not necessary, it is very tough to continue to read it. The format of the presentation needs to be something that can maintain the readers attention for the whole duration not just the first couple of minutes.
Chapter 3 really made me think about how to achieve effective communication. For example, a presentation is much easier to listen and pay attention to with a power point or handouts or some kind of visual aid. Without some kind of visual aid, it is my experience that I get bored easily and stop listening to the speaker even though I know it is important information. There have been a few presentations I have listened to that were boring, but if they showed me an example with some kind relation to me could have made the difference of thinking if it was interesting or not. I could have related myself to the subject.
Chapter three outlined their information perfectly so it was easy to understand. I like how right away they talk about how reading and writing go hand in hand and affect one another. If you read and also write well you will go far in the workplace. I like that it tells you to write as if you're the person that was going to read what you wrote, leave the reader with no questions. I see a similarity in the effective reading strategies to how I have been taught to write. Identifying who you are writing for, come up with strong main points. This just shows that reading and writing are very similar.
This chapter deals with basically how or what is the write way to read and write uselful technical writing. It went into different parts about how the writer uses bold, highlighted, or underlined words grab your attention and are a great way to state main points. Also as a reader you want to read the answers that you may have questions too, if you see it in the writing, you are fulfilled as a reader. Also for note-giving, powerpoints in my opinion are a great way to get your ideas out there, because its states the mainpoints without babbling on about usless information that only confuses us. This group did a great job laying this chater out.
The authors make a great point when saying reading and writing go hand and hand. If the reading is hard to read, either by bad layouts, wording, or even how its actually written. Then many readers are not going to read much farther than the first page, if that far, and the message you were trying to get across is lost as nobody would want to read it. I'd have to agree with a comment made earlier, newer textbooks are laid out in a nicer, more attractive way, inviting the reader to keep reading. The flow is usually very smooth without jumping around from topic to topic, they just seem to merge together.
Chapter three helped me to see the benefits of great written textbooks. Reading books with bold topics, and questions to refresh your memory of what you just read helps to better understand the topic. In the workplace using points to get attention helps to get your point across. Synthesis questions help me greatly to take a concept to the next step. Reading about whole parts can sometimes be misleading or difficult. Recapping, or asking questions that summarize the whole assist in understanding each part. If I was to explain a new design for a motor it would be much more useful to break the motor into parts to explain the whole.
This chapter had a lot of helpful tips on helping us to become better technical writers. It is something all of us will have to deal with in our careers. Learning to be able to write something that holds someone’s attention is very important. Reading technical information is not always the most exciting thing to read but it is probably one of the more important things to read. I have a hard time reading something that has really long paragraphs, and I am more likely to stop reading it, or think of other things while I read. I also find it very helpful when the writer points out important information by bolding certain words. I hope that I am able to take a few of these tips and use them in any technical writing I have to do.
Chapter 3 explains what eveyone does to captivate the reader, or audience. You use interesting visuals and persuasive words to tell the people the facts about what ever your trying to get across. If you don't appeal to the reader, or audience then what ever your trying to say will be pretty much disregarded. One really good way to point out what you are trying to say is use repetician in things. That way it will stick in your mind. The reader is looking for something to pop out at them not like a jake in the box, but something bold, something new and refreshing.
As I make it further in my college career I find one of the best things to do when you encounter documents to read is to begin the skim, scan, and predict methods to reading. These techniques can cut down on the massive amounts of reading that you would have to do in college by letting you figure out for yourself what things are of importance and what things you already know and don't need to go over again. This method lets you save time and when you have hundreds of pages to read that can seriously help out.
Writing and reading might sound an easy thing to do since our young age, but I wonder how many of us know how to write and read right? Honestly I don’t, but I’m working hard on it. Chapter three will be a huge help guiding me. English is not my native language for that reason it takes me 2 or 3 times more on reading and understanding the material, and the same thing happens when I write; I have to make sure that my thoughts are well plot so that my audience comprehend what I’m trying to project. One of the things that caught my eye as I read the chapter was that skimming, scanning, and predicting before I start to read will make my reading much easier to understand. I would always go straight to my reading without making any type of connection like subtitles, images, tables, emphasized words…nor looking at document structure. If I apply these new techniques to my daily work I would eventually become a better writer and reader.
I believe that reading a technical document is nothing like reading a book. In a book, or a novel, you read every last word because the story’s every last detail hangs on each word. It’s not like that when reading technical documents. You aren’t reading a story and you’re not biting your nails to see what the next sentence brings. You have to look for the main points of the article and they’re easy to find. Just look for, highlighted, bolded or italicized words that flag an important section of the document that you should take a closer look at.
This chapter was very helpful, because with all the reading I do for homework; it can get a little frustrating. Skimming and scanning the information seems very effective. I realized after doing that with this chapter, I took in a lot of important information. I looked for bold words, bulleted phrases, and italics. This can be helpful when you don't have enough time to read something in its entirety. It can also be helpful to read it like that, and then read it in its entirety. The information soaks in a lot better this way.
Chapter 3 talks about technical reading and writing. Technical reading is just like reading a textbook. You read the main headings and captions, you read the bold words and skim though the text. No one wants to read a textbook cover to cover and no one wants to read a technical document or book cover to cover either. As with must technical documents when you need to know something you skim through the bold or underlined words to figure out what the problem is.
This chapter discusses ways of becoming and effective reader by indentifying the purpose, understanding the read and write relationship and increasing the speed of reading through skimming, scanning and predicting the main ideas
In the workforce there is lots of reading in a day one has to finish. Before reading the entire article to you need to indentify your purpose of the reading the material and ways you can understand it a short period of time. Ways of doing that is through scanning, skimming and identifying the main points.
It is very important for technical communicators to be able to give and receive information. If you can't translate the information so your audience can understand it, the information could be very ineffective. Also, it is very important to be able to interpet the information that is being conveyed. This is something that can be bad if the wrong interpretation is taken. In some cases it could be life threatening, if it were pertaining to health issues. For example, if a nurse does not understand the doctors orders for the right medicine and doseage, it could cause a possible fatality.
Reading technical information is very boring to me. I usually skim chapters for main themes and look for definitions. When I'm in a class and a powerpoint is being presented, I'll quit paying attention when the information is too long and not in an outline format. When I have to read chapters out of a text book it takes me forever because I usually realize I'm not even really reading, or atleast I can't remember what I just read. I'm not big on the whole reading thing, but I do appreciate it when themes are very well expressed in separate sections. I'm a big picture guy because I don't have to read that way, unless its a small caption. The best way for me to take in information is writing it back out in an outline.
After reading this chapter I felt that I had a much better grasp on how I can better organize my findings into a paper that can be easier to read for anybody. It has a few pointers to make things flow smoother through the paragraphs. Not only will it help me become a better writer for college but it will also help me prepare for any informative technical reports that I will have to write up for my major.
This chapter really helped me because it applies to more then just technical reading material it also applies to reading in general. As students we read a lot and some of it is really dry and hard to read in its entirety so knowing how to skim and scan and still get the material is important. Being a Public Relations Major I'll have to write press releases and notifications so knowing how to consolidate and get the most important information out there is huge and knowing how to formate my writing so that it's easy to read and understand is huge.
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