Technical Writing

This memorandum was written to critically analyze the redesign I did for English 202c. The end goal of the project was to effectively apply the ideas and concepts we have learned throughout the semester by taking a piece of technical writing and redesigning it to make it better. My main focus on the redesign was to improve the stylistic and visual coherence design decisions of the document. I always analyzed the purpose of the document and revised it to allow the reader to understand when it is correct to use the waterfall method.

Improvements to Style:

The improvements to the documents style started at the title of the document and carried all the way throughout. The title was rewritten to provide more information to the reader. The original title “SDLC waterfall model” was not concise enough. I changed to title to fully spell out the abbreviation “SDLC” to clarify to readers who were unfamiliar with the abbreviation. Also I thought it was appropriate to give the document a subtitle of “The Waterfall Method”. Notice I changed the word “model” to “method” as the model refers to the logical design of the method, and the document was about the method.

The next stylistic improvement came in the way of font choice and headings. Since I feel the original author intended that the document be for print I changed the headings to a san-serif font and the body of the document to a serif font. I also improved the subheadings of the “Pros & Cons” section of the original document. I wanted to make the section heading clearer so I changed the name to “Advantages and Disadvantages of the Waterfall Method” and added to subheadings, “Advantages” and “Disadvantages”. These improvements to design choices cleaned up the document, making it more aes...

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I do not believe that someone would be reading this document just to gain more information on the waterfall method, but instead they would be reading it see if the waterfall method is the best choice of design methodology for them. Providing examples when to use the waterfall method and examples when not to gives the reader the knowledge to make this decision.

Summary:

The original document was clearly deficient and no professional organization should have released a document this poor to the public. The redesign serves as a better replacement to the original in all aspects of design. I applied the techniques taught in this course and was able to redesign a document that is much better than the original. This course has taught me to have a critical eye when reading technical documents and it has taught me how to better approach my own technical writings.