Posted: February 26th, 2023

Technical Writing

My major is computer science. And this assignment needs to be completed within 12 hours. Please read the description carefully as it carries a big part of my assignment.

This assignment allows you to practice translating engineering concepts for different audiences and requires you to think about how we use language to convey ideas. Choose a topic that you are familiar with from your major and practice adapting your writing for three audiences:

1. Nonexperts: these readers should include anyone who is not an expert in your own field: high-school students, college students, the general public, even people with advanced non-technical degrees. (Do not write for audiences younger than high-school students.)
2. Experts / peers: as the phrase indicates, this audience should include people with a very similar technical background as yours, which means you can assume they have some familiarity with your subject, but you should still obviously ensure you’re not omitting important details.
3. Executives / administrators: this audience should include people high up within an organization who are likely more interested in “big picture” ideas: e.g., developing the concepts you discuss into marketable/sellable products or devoting research funding to a new lab or degree program. These readers could also include, e.g., people who actually do have an engineering or scientific background but who have not practiced actual hands-on engineering in many years (because they have moved into administration).

Each of the three descriptions should be about 1 page, double-spaced. So the length of the entire paper will be ~3 pages double-spaced.

The assignment comes from a series in Wired magazine Links to an external site.in which an expert explains a high-level concept to five audiences: a child, a teenager, an undergraduate student majoring in the same subject, a graduate student, and a colleague. We will watch at least one of the Wired videos as part of this module, and you should note well the strategies the expert uses to translate the topic to his audience.