Technical Writing Portfolio

About

As a Technical Writer, I know that the communication process is often a difficult one. To overcome this, you need both an eye for detail, the ability and desire to interview stakeholders and experts for their insights, and take responsibility for and decide what you want the final technical document to look like. When I was a collegiate teacher, I did this often by being the one place and the one person who was in charge of updating, writing, and creating my online course content for my students.

Stakeholders

One of the largest issues of technical writing is responsibility. A technical writer, or any writer, needs to remember that it is his or her name on the project and so he or she has to be responsible for the content and quality of the project. He or she needs to meet and discuss the issues with the stakeholders and gain their knowledge, yes, but making that knowledge understandable and clear is the responsibility and job of the writer. In these projects, I am the name on them.

Samples

Explanation

As a seasoned writer, I have written for companies, teaching positions, and independently. This sample of the portfolio will focus mainly on my academic writing, since I have been in academia for over seven years.

Brochure

This was a brochure I created on assignment during my work for my last technical writing company. It is publicly available, so I have included it here. This was a brochure I worked on in InDesign and Photoshop. To make this brochure work, I had to research the concept, our company, the client's company, and even potential applications of our technology with the client's technology. In addition to interviewing and working with experts in our organization, I worked with the in-house graphic and UI/UX designer to make it look even better. Finally, I got approval from management, both directly above me and directly above him.

Here is the Google Doc PDF link

Assessment Report

For four years running, I was apart of my university program's assessment team. During my last two years, I was the assessment report author and a leader on the assessment team. Being the report writer means not only compiling the 1000+ different datapoints on a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet, organizing them, and then graphing them, but taking the first attempt at interpreting and understanding the trends and the data in general. That understanding then needs to shift to writing about it and turning the assessment report into a reflection of practices and activities that might have led to the outcomes and results.

However, while publicly available, there is still sensitive information within this report. For the purposes of this website and portfolio, I have worked to censor out and hide any of that potentially sensitive information. I have included that censored out version of the assessment report here

Syllabus

The largest document I want to link to today is the syllabus I constantly used while teaching. There will be parts of this missing from the actual document due to them being requirements from past stakeholders. A syllabus is a very technical document, especially for a writing class. It needs to inform the students of what to expect, it needs to be firm and clear enough to anticipate and answer the different questions a hundred-plus people will have throughout sixteen weeks, and it also needs to be casual enough to be open and ready for them to read and engage with it. This is not a simple process, and it often takes more than a few semesters to get into that right "groove" where all this fits and works.

The link for this sample can be foundhere.

Essay Prompt

I have included my own essay prompt from a collegiate class I taught. Like most essay prompts, this prompt has to accomplish a lot. It needs to be toned in the right mixture of professional and casual to get students to pay attention to it. It needs to layout what the task is, while also setting expectations. Finally, it needs to be short, otherwise students will gloss over it and not look at it.

This sample can be found here

News Articles

Finally, I have included articles I wrote while working at the Paisano in college. These involved interviewing experts, framing the story, editing it, and then publishing this. This included following AP guidelines, recording and transcribing interviews from SMEs, and then bringing it to print in Adobe Indesign.

The samples of each can be found here and here.