As with any other project in the technical professions, a technical communication project begins with a plan. In planning a writing project, you need to understand how to:
- Develop a rhetorical strategy for considering your document's purpose, audience, and the techniques you'll use to write the document.
- Apply a problem-solving approach for building a solid bridge between technical information and your audience.
- Analyze your audience by asking questions about their jobs, needs, expertise, and biases.
- Outline your ideas by listing, categorizing, prioritizing, writing, and checking them.
- Use storyboarding collaboratively to review topics in a document and their relationship to each other.
- Write a document specification to compile preliminary information into a well-focused description of and schedule for your project.
- Continuously examine the ethics of the project and your involvement in it.
When writing for audiences in other cultures, analyze their characteristics by considering political, economic, social, religious, educational, linguistic, and technological variables.
