How to Write the Technical Description

Deliverable 3

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© Karen Thompson, ISI English 317, Department of English, University of Idaho

Technical Descriptions Help audiences understand what something is, but unlike definitions, they answer questions that help the audience VISUALIZE what is being described.

• What is this made of?• What does it look like?• What does it do?• How does it work?• What are its features?• Where is it located?

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Technical descriptions use visuals that work cohesively with the description.

Visuals can be: drawings, illustrations, photographs

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Types of Technical Descriptions

The next slides explain the two common, but different, types of technical descriptions and which type you will be composing for this project.

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Product Descriptions• Describe what a product is like, its features, and

qualities.

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What you need to write is a description of a process or mechanism.

You won’t be writing a product description for this project. We just thought you should know about it.

Technical Descriptions of a process or mechanism:• help audiences understand more about what

something is by describing how it works or how it functions.

• these descriptions give information to help audiences make decisions.

And we need more information to make a decision.

We need to decide.

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Technical Descriptions are different from Instructions.

Yeah, we just need to understand how it works.

We don’t need to make it.

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Instructions take a user through the steps or tasks necessary to make something, repair something, or put something together.

Technical Descriptions are different from Specifications.

Technical specifications are used by experts to construct or design something. “Specs” use mostly symbols and layout.

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And why would we need too?

Good grief, we can’t understand that!

Technical Descriptions need Visuals to support the Text.

We need to picture it in our minds.

It helps us follow what you are describing.

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Visual and Text: • Need to work cohesively together.

• Audiences should be able to easily move between a visual and textual description to understand how how a process works or how a mechanism functions.

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We don’t want to work too hard to figure it out.

Make it easy for us.

Example:

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Notice how the names of the stethoscope parts correspond to headings in the description. Also, notice how the writer has used the same color in the second and third-level headings.

Notice also how the figure is labeled (figure 1), captioned and referred to by the figure number in the text.

There are other ways to do this. Your challenge is to be certain the visual you create (or adapt from a source) cohesively works with the description you write.

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We have absolute confidence in your writing abilitiesThrow down!!

Create or find source visual(s).

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If you use a visual from a source, edit it to work cohesively with the description you write.

Create the Visual• A common problem I see is a visual that is too

complex for the audience.

• That’s why it’s a good idea to create your own technical drawing because it allows you to control the level of detail.

• SmartArt or SmartShapes in Word works well for this process.

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Using a Source Visual

• If you decide to use a visual from a source, the descriptive information you write would need to use the same words as the labels in the visual.

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And, it would need to use all of these.

Writing the Description

• Start with a sentence-level definition.

• Use the organizing pattern you decided when composing the document specifications to write, descriptive detail that moves the reader cohesively back and forth between the description and the visual(s).

• Be certain to refer to visuals by their figure # in the description.

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No Ending Needed

• Because you are composing a technical description that is not a stand-alone document but would be part of another, no ending or conclusion is needed.

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