AMA English Prefinal exam topic

Course: TECHNICAL, SCIENTIFIC AND BUSINESS ENGLISH

Course Code: ENGL-301

Period: PRE FINAL

INSTRUCTOR: Keith Feliz D. Banania

PROCESS AND GUIDELINES IN TECHNICAL WRITING

WRITING PROCESS

Writing is a process. It involves a series of steps or stages that guide a writer in finishing his paper. This includes: pre-writing, writing, and re-writing. (Technical Writing, Rosales, et al.)

Choosing a topic

The first step of any research paper is for the student to understand the assignment. If this is not done, the student will often travel down many dead-end roads, wasting a great deal of time along the way. Do not hesitate to approach the instructor with questions if there is any confusion. A clear understanding of the assignment will allow you to focus on other aspects of the process, such as choosing a topic and identifying your audience.

Topic

A student will often encounter one of two situations when it comes to choosing a topic for a research paper. The first situation occurs when the instructor provides a list of topics from which the student may choose. These topics have been deemed worthy by the instructor; therefore, the student should be confident in the topic he chooses from the list. Many first-time researchers appreciate such an arrangement by the instructor because it eliminates the stress of having to decide upon a topic on their own.

However, the student may also find the topics that have been provided to be limiting; moreover, it is not uncommon for the student to have a topic in mind that does not fit with any of those provided. If this is the case, it is always beneficial to approach the instructor with one's ideas. Be respectful, and ask the instructor if the topic you have in mind would be a possible research option for the assignment. Remember, as a first-time researcher, your knowledge of the process is quite limited; the instructor is experienced, and may have very precise reasons for choosing the topics she has offered to the class. Trust that she has the best interests of the class in mind. If she likes the topic, great! If not, do not take it personally and choose the topic from the list that seems most interesting to you.

The second situation occurs when the instructor simply hands out an assignment sheet that covers the logistics of the research paper, but leaves the choice of topic up to the student. Typically, assignments in which students are given the opportunity to choose the topic require the topic to be relevant to some aspect of the course; so, keep this in mind as you begin a course in which you know there will be a research paper near the end. That way, you can be on the lookout for a topic that may interest you. Do not be anxious on account of a perceived lack of authority or knowledge about the topic chosen. Instead, realize that it takes practice to become an experienced researcher in any field. 

Methods for choosing a topic

Thinking early leads to starting early. If the student begins thinking about possible topics when the assignment is given, she has already begun the arduous, yet rewarding, task of planning and organization. Once she has made the assignment a priority in her mind, she may begin to have ideas throughout the day. Brainstorming is often a successful way for students to get some of these ideas down on paper. Seeing one's ideas in writing is often an impetus for the writing process. Though brainstorming is particularly effective when a topic has been chosen, it can also benefit the student who is unable to narrow a topic. It consists of a timed writing session during which the student jots down—often in list or bulleted form—any ideas that come to his mind. At the end of the timed period, the student will peruse his list for patterns of consistency. If it appears that something seems to be standing out in his mind more than others, it may be wise to pursue this as a topic possibility.

It is important for the student to keep in mind that an initial topic that you come up with may not be the exact topic about which you end up writing. Research topics are often fluid, and dictated more by the student's ongoing research than by the original chosen topic. Such fluidity is common in research, and should be embraced as one of its many characteristics.

Source: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/658/03/

Guidelines for Choosing a Topic

Often you're assigned a topic to write about or asked to choose among several topics. When you can choose your own topic, keep the following points in mind:

Choose a topic that's appropriate to the length of your paper.

 Students often pick topics that are too broad to be adequately covered. Narrow topics lead to close observation, while broad topics lead to overgeneralization. If you're writing a five-page paper, don't write on the history of women's rights; instead, write about one incident in the history of women's rights. Even a personal or descriptive essay will be better if you choose a narrow topic—your childhood in a small town, for example, rather than your childhood, or your uncle's barn rather than the Midwest.

Avoid a topic that will tempt you to summarize rather than to discuss or analyze.

 Don't choose the plot of Macbeth but how the final scene of Macbeth illustrates the play's theme. The second topic is narrower and less likely to lead to summary. When considering a topic, ask yourself if it can lead to a reasonable thesis.

Determining the purpose of writing

There are four main purposes for writing:

1.       To entertain

2.       To persuade

3.       To inform

4.       To instruct

Choose a topic that interests you.

If you don't care about limiting cigarette advertising, don't select it as a topic for a persuasive essay. You'll have more to say, and you'll write better, on something you care about. Generally, if you choose a topic that is interesting to you, then your reader will find it interesting too.

If your assignment requires research, choose a topic on which you can find material.

 Even when you aren't writing a research paper, make sure you select a subject that you can develop with sufficient details.

After you've picked a topic, don't be afraid to change it if it isn't working out.

 Instructors would rather you write a good essay than that you grind out pages on something that was a poor choice.

Analyzing the audience

Writing needs to be audience-centered; so audience analysis is a must. Design presentation – content, organization, and delivery – is influenced by the kind of audience expected at the presentation so make sure they understand the meaning and significance of the message. For effectiveness, a writer should know the following:

Are you writing for people in a particular field, such as psychology, literature, engineering, or genetics? Can you assume the reader has knowledge of the terminology and concepts you'll use, or do you need to define them in the paper? Will you need to provide extensive background information on the subject, or will a summary be enough?

What expectations does your audience have? An audience of marine biologists will have different expectations from an article on marine biology than will a general audience, for example.

Are you writing for someone who insists on certain writing practices or who has pet peeves? One instructor may require a five-paragraph essay; another may forbid the use of intentional sentence fragments. Be aware of requirements or restrictions related to grammar, punctuation, and usage.

What is the reading level of your audience? Instructions and explanations written for sixth-graders shouldn't include college-level vocabulary, for example.

Are you writing for an audience that is likely to agree or disagree with your point of view? Consider this question if you're writing an argumentative or persuasive piece. It can make a difference in the language you select, the amount of proof you offer, and the tone you use. For example, an editorial for a small-town paper on the importance of family values is less likely to encounter resistance from readers than an editorial on legalizing drugs.

Who are the readers? Try to take note of the general age, range, male-female ratio, educational background, occupation or profession, race, ethnic background, religion, geographical or cultural environment, civil status, income level and assets, group and organizational memberships, etc. of your audience.

What do they want from you? Are they there to receive instructions? Do they want current issues explained? Do they also want to have fun? Do they need information? Have they come on their own or were they required to attend?

What is the size of the audience? How large is the audience? Is it an audience of 20 or 200? In a classroom, you would be speaking to around thirty students. But in other settings, you may be speaking to a smaller group (like a buzz group) or a bigger group (like a rally).

Audience size may add to anxiety and may affect speech delivery, more so in the use of visual aids, the type of language you use, and so on. Overall, you want to speak more formally with larger groups.

What is the environment of your audience? We should consider the environment of our audience so we can easily adopt their needs.

Organization

Text structures

A text structure is the framework of a text’s beginning, middle, and end. Different narrative and expository genres have different purposes and different audiences, and so they require different text structures. Beginnings and endings help link the text into a coherent whole.

Beginnings: hooking your reader

Where to begin is a crucial decision for a writer. Just as a good beginning can draw a reader into a piece of writing, a mediocre beginning can discourage a reader from reading further. The beginning, also called the lead or the hook, orients the reader to the purpose of the writing by introducing characters or setting (for narrative) or the topic, thesis, or argument (for expository writing). A good beginning also sets up expectations for the purpose, style, and mood of the piece. Good writers know how to hook their readers in the opening sentences and paragraphs by using techniques such as dialogue, flashback, description, inner thoughts, and jumping right into the action.

What’s in the middle?

The organization of the middle of a piece of writing depends on the genre. Researchers have identified five basic organizational structures: sequence, description, cause and effect, compare and contrast, and problem and solution.

Sequence uses time, numerical, or spatial order as the organizing structure. Some narrative genres that use a chronological sequence structure are personal narrative genres (memoir, autobiographical incident, autobiography), imaginative story genres (fairytales, folktales, fantasy, science fiction), and realistic fiction genres. Narrative story structures include an initiating event, complicating actions that build to a high point, and a resolution. Many narratives also include the protagonist’s goals and obstacles that must be overcome to achieve those goals.

As early as kindergarten, children can be introduced to basic informational genres that are organized sequentially, including learning structures for writing instructions, experimental recounts and experimental procedures. Older students can learn to use timelines to organize biographies, oral histories, and recounts of current and historical events.

Description is used to describe the characteristic features and events of a specific subject (”My Cat”) or a general category (”Cats”). Descriptive reports may be arranged according to categories of related attributes, moving from general categories of features to specific attributes.

Children’s initial attempts at descriptive reports often are “All About” reports that have little internal organization. Informational alphabet books and riddle books can be used to introduce kindergarten children to the writing of descriptive reports through shared or interactive writing. Older children can learn to develop categories of related attributes to organize their reports by using webs, concept maps, and software such as Inspiration and Kidspiration. Expectation outlines (Spiegel, 1981) are another strategy that can help students anticipate the categories of information found in a report.

Cause and Effect structure is used to show causal relationships between events. Cause and effect structures organize more sophisticated narratives as childen become more adept at showing the relationship between events. Young children also can begin to extend opinion essays by giving reasons to support their opinions using the word because. Signal words for cause and effect structures also include if…then, as a result, and therefore.

Comparison and Contrast structure is used to explain how two or more objects, events, or positions in an argument are similar or different. Graphic organizers such as venn diagrams, compare/contrast organizers, and data matrices can be used to compare features across different categories. Primary grade children can begin to use words such as same and different to compare things. Other words used to signal comparison and contrast organizational structures include alike, in contrast, similarities, differences, and on the other hand.

Problem and Solution requires writers to state a problem and come up with a solution. Although problem/solution structures are typically found in informational writing, realistic fiction also often uses a problem/solution structure that children can learn to identify.

Endings: beyond “happily ever after”

Anyone who has watched a great movie for ninety minutes only to have it limp to the finish with weak ending knows that strong endings are just as critical to effective writing as strong beginnings. And anyone who has watched the director’s cut of a movie with all the alternate endings knows that even great directors have trouble coming up with satisfying endings for their movies. Just like directors, writers have to decide how to wrap up the action in their stories, resolving the conflict and tying up loose ends in a way that will leave their audience satisfied. Student writers struggle with writing strong endings, often relying on the weak “I had a lot of fun” summation or the classic “It was just a dream” ending to rescue them from their stories.

The type of ending an author chooses depends on his or her purpose. When the purpose is to entertain, endings may be happy or tragic, or a surprise ending may provide a twist. Endings can be circular, looping back to the beginning so readers end where they began, or they can leave the reader hanging, wishing for more. Endings can be deliberately ambiguous or ironic, designed to make the reader think, or they can explicitly state the moral of the story, telling the reader what to think. Strong endings for expository texts can summarize the highlights, restate the main points, or end with a final zinger statement to drive home the main point to the audience.

Cohesion: the glue that holds the structure together

If narrative and expository structures are the framework, cohesive elements such as transition words are the glue that holds these structural elements together. Transition words show the relationship between different sentences and ideas. Poor writers tend to loosely connect their sentences with and and then. Good writers use transition words that show causal and logical relationships between words, sentences and paragraphs, such as because and after.

Transition words

There are six categories of transition words:

Spatial order. Words used in descriptive writing to signal spatial relationships, such as above, below, beside, nearby, beyond, inside, and outside.

Time order. Words used in writing narratives, and instructions to signal chronological sequence, such as before, after, first, next, then, when, finally, while, as, during, earlier, later, and meanwhile.

Numerical order. Words used in expository writing to signal order of importance, such as first, second, also, finally, in addition, equally important, and more or less importantly.

Cause/effect order. Words used in expository writing to signal causal relationships, such as because, since, for, so, as a result, consequently, thus, and hence.

Comparison/contrast order. Words used in expository writing to signal similarities and differences, such as (for similarities) also, additionally, just as, as if, as though, like, and similarly; and (for differences) but, yet, only, although, whereas, in contrast, conversely, however, on the other hand, rather, instead, in spite of, and nevertheless.

General/specific order. Words used in descriptive reports and arguments to signal more specific elaboration on an idea, such as for example, such as, like, namely, for instance, that is, in fact, in other words, and indeed.

Guiding questions for organization

These guiding questions for organization can help students make sure that they have provided coherent transitions between the ideas in their writing.

Does your piece have a clear beginning, middle, and end?

Does your piece have a strong beginning that hooks the reader?

Does your piece have a strong ending that fits the focus?

Are the ideas and actions connected to each other?

Can your reader follow the piece logically from beginning to end?

Is it complete? Does it feel finished?

References:

Spiegel, D. L. (1981). Six alternatives to the directed reading activity. The Reading Teacher, 34, 914-922.

Course: TECHNICAL, SCIENTIFIC AND BUSINESS ENGLISH

Course Code: ENGL-301

Period: PRE FINAL

INSTRUCTOR: Keith Feliz D. Banania

PROCESS AND GUIDELINE IN TECHNICAL WRITING

Writing the First Draft

Have your notes, your plan, and any other resource materials (ie the poem you are quoting from or an article you have to refer to etc.) you may need in front of you. If you have done your planning and preparing on a computer, it is best to print out those materials or to tile your pages so that you can see them while you are working. Now that you are ready, sit down and try to write the drafts all the way through in one go. Don't fuss or worry over any one part of it yet. If you can let yourself get into the flow of writing, your words will come more easily, and you are more likely to find connections between the ideas. Don't rush: Let yourself explore the ideas as you go. Don't worry, either, over any particular paragraph. Try to get the whole essay out of your head and onto the page.

A lot of people get stuck on the introduction. If you are one of them, how about jumping to the first paragraph and going from there? You can go back later and write the intro. Similarly you can skip any of the paragraphs while writing the first draft. If you get stuck, move on then go back to work on it in the second draft/editing stage.

The main idea (trick) is to write the essay as a flowing whole and to really let the ideas and words splash out onto the paper. At this stage of writing, DO NOT spend time fixing anything. DO NOT change anything. DO NOT even consider bothering about your spelling or grammar. You will fix and change in the next stage.

Revising and Editing

Revision and change
Revision means change and not all change is for the better. You may decide that what you wrote was better the first time. Or you could decide that it does need change, but in a different direction. In other words, revision could be a messy process. You need to articulate for yourself why you need to change something, why you think it's not working the way it is, so that you know what you're trying to achieve.

Don't keep only the latest draft, but keep all earlier drafts as well. Date them and, if possible, jot down your reasons for changing them. Perhaps before embarking on a major change, it would also be a good idea to discuss it with your supervisor or someone else.

Editing
Editing and proof reading attend to the detail and are better done after you've decided that you are basically happy with what you are saying. As it is done after you've done everything else, editing is often skimped. Time runs out. And probably you're absolutely sick of the thesis and want to hand it in. However, you have to see editing as an integral part of demonstrating your standards, and, no matter how painful it is, you must take care and get the details right.

Don't read large sections in one go, as you will miss a lot.

Read the text aloud as your ear finds clumsy rhythms, repetitions, awkward and complex sentences, missing links, and the like that your eyes miss.

Remember that, even though the spell check is very useful, you cannot rely on it alone. A word which is spelled right may not be the right word.

Many people find that they do a better editing job on the hard copy rather than on a computer screen.

References need particular care. Keep a printed copy of your reference list and, while you are reading the text, make sure that each reference appearing in the text also is entered into the list of references. It is surprising how many references are missing in theses, or have inconsistent or wrong details recorded.

Final Draft

The final draft is what you will hand in as the completed paper. If you are writing an examination, the final draft may be your handwritten answers once you have had a chance to read over them quickly and make corrections. If you are writing under other circumstances, you will have more time to produce a final draft, so it will probably look more finished and formal.

By the time you write the final draft, your writing should look fairly polished. Choppy sentences, poor or nonexistent transitions between paragraphs, grammar and spelling errors, and other characteristics of a first draft should all disappear. In addition, your final draft should incorporate comments you have received as well as changes you want to make based on your own evaluation.

Before you turn in your final draft, you should read what you have written all the way through at least once more. If you find something wrong with your paper at the last minute, attempt to correct it before you hand it in. Check with your teacher before making minor corrections with a black pen on the final paper. If your paper has too many corrections, you know it needs another revision.

At this point, you can use the following assessment checklist for your final draft. This checklist is briefer than the previous assessment during the drafting phase. You may, however, use either one to your benefit. Here, your evaluation should determine how well your writing assignment achieved its purposes.

Checklist for Your Final Draft

Content: Is the assignment complete? Is the information appropriate?

Organization: Is the order of the information logical? Are the introduction and conclusion clear and related?

Style: Are the style and tone appropriate? Are the sentences smooth and efficient? Is the diction appropriate, concrete, and accurate? Is the paper free from mechanical errors?

Format: Is the assignment in the required format?

When your answers to all of these questions are a confident yes, your final draft is ready to hand in

Course: TECHNICAL, SCIENTIFIC AND BUSINESS ENGLISH

Course Code: ENGL-301

Period: PRE FINAL

INSTRUCTOR: Keith Feliz D. Banania

LIBRARIES, DOCUMENTATION AND CROSS REFERENCING

LIBRARIES

Library Requirement.

One of the requirements for the final report in this course is to find and use information in external sources—either published, unpublished, or both. Of course, you might feel that your project needs no external information—that you already know it all. However, you should be able to identify information that you don't know and that needs to be in the report. For example, imagine you were writing backup procedures for running some sort of high-tech equipment at your workplace. Sure, you may be able to operate the thing in your sleep, but you may not know much about the technical processes or scientific principles behind it. And of course, it could be argued that such discussion is not needed in backup procedures. Background of that sort, however, might indeed be useful. Instructions often benefit by having this kind of background information—it can give readers a fuller sense of why they are doing what they are doing and a way of knowing what to do in case things go wrong.

And of course, it's important to have some experience using the library and other information sources in a more professional, business-like manner. In freshman writing classes, for example, writers are not challenged to push the library's resources for all it's worth—which is normally what typically happens in a technical writing project.

Descriptors and Keywords.

Another big issue when you begin your library search is finding those words and phrases that enable you to find the books, articles, reports, and encyclopedias that have all that information you need. Sometimes it's not so easy! A keyword (also called a "descriptor") is a word or phrase under which related information sources are listed. Imagine you're writing a report on the latest theories about the greenhouse effect: you'd check book catalogs and periodical indexes for "greenhouse effect," hoping to find lists of books or articles under that keyword. But that might not be the right one; things might be listed under the keyword "global warming" instead. So how do you find the right keywords? Here are some suggestions:

Try to find any book or article on your topic—anything! Then explore it for the vocabulary it uses. In particular, check its listings for titles of other books and articles. You're likely to find words and phrases that are the common keywords.

Where to stop.

If you faithfully go through the following suggestions, you're likely to have a long list of books, article, reports, and other sources—more than you could ever read in one semester. What to do? First of all, don't back away from at least knowing what's "out there" on your topic. Once you start looking at your list, you'll see many things that seem to duplicate each other. If, for example, you have five or six books with roughly the same title, just pick the one that is the most recent and that seems the most complete and thorough. Many other sources will branch out into subtopics you have no interest in. And of course many of the items won't even be available in any nearby library or bookstore.

Finding Information Sources

Once you've convinced yourself that you need to go after some external information sources (if you haven't, get in touch with your instructor) and have found some pretty reliable keywords to use, it's time to start the search. Where to start though? The logical starting point is whichever information source you think is likely to have the best stuff. For hot, late-breaking topics, articles and proceedings (talks given at conferences that are published) may be the best bet. For stable topics that have been around awhile, books and encyclopedias may be better.

However, if you're not sure, you may want to systematically check a number of the common types of information sources.

Internet Resources

It's increasingly possible to do much if not all your information gathering on the Internet and particularly through the World Wide Web.

Books

One good starting place for your information search is books.

If you do all these searches, you're likely to end up with a monster list of books. No, you don't have to read every one of them. In fact, you may not be able to lay your hands on most of them. Check the list and try to find a book that seems the most recent and the most definitive. (Check tables of contents and indexes to see which are the most thorough, complete, and authoritative.) And, no, you don't have to read all of it either—just the parts that relate directly to your topic.

As soon as you can, try to get your hands on as many of these books as you can. Check their bibliographies (list of books, articles, and other information sources consulted) at the end of the book, at the ends of chapters, and in footnotes. These will be good leads to other books that your other searches may not have found. Also, while you're in the stacks, check the books nearby the ones you have on your list; you may see other ones that could prove useful.

Magazine and Journal Articles.

While books give you fairly stable information and often at a higher level of generality, magazines, journals, and newspapers often give you much more specific, up-to-date information. There are two ways to approach finding journal articles: through general indexes and through specialized indexes. Here are some strategies for finding articles:

Check several general indexes for your topic. These indexes cover a broad range of magazines and journals—they are more popular and are for general audiences and therefore can't be relied on specialized, technical material. Still, they are a great place to start, and if you are not being very technically ambitious with your report, they may supply you with all you need. At ACC, the general indexes include Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Try finding your topic in the most recent volume of each of these (unless you have a topic that was "hot" several years ago, in which case you'd want to check the index volumes for those years).

Try to find a good specialized index for the field that is related to your topic.

As with books, you won't be able to read all of the articles you find, nor will you even be able to get access to them (or at least right away). Try finding and reading the abstracts of the article on your list; this is a good way to get a brief picture of what the article contains and whether it will be useful to you. Just try to find the articles that relate directly to your topic, and read them selectively when you get them.

Encyclopedias

Another good source of introductory information is encyclopedias. You can use these either to get yourself up to speed to read and understand the more technical information you come across, or you can use the encyclopedia information itself in your report (in which you'll need to document it, as discussed later in this appendix).

Check for your topic in a general encyclopedia, using all the various keywords related to that topic you can think of. As with periodical indexes, encyclopedias are available in general and specialized varieties. You're familiar with the general encyclopedias such as World Book Encyclopedia and the Britannica. And of course a number of encyclopedias are now available online in CD-ROM format (however, the content of most of these seems rather slight compared to the printed versions). These are great for starters, and in some cases they may provide all the information you need in your report. Also, check any bibliography—lists of related books, articles, and reports—that may be listed at the end of individual articles.

Also try to find an appropriate specialized or technical encyclopedia in which to search for your topic. You may need more technical detail, or your topic may be a tough one not covered very well in general information sources-in which case you may want to consult specialized encyclopedias. Even in this group, there are general ones that cover a broad range of scientific and technical fields.

Reference books—handbooks, guides, atlases, dictionaries, yearbooks.

Another source of information reports is all those reference books out there. Every field has its handbooks (repositories of relatively stable, "basic" information in the field), guides (information on literature in the field, associations, legalities, and so on), atlases (more than just maps, great repositories of statistical data), dictionaries and encyclopedias, and finally yearbooks (articles, data, and summaries of the year's activity in a given field). You look for them in the catalogs: when you look up your topic, you'll find entries for these sorts of reference books as well as for the books mentioned earlier in this appendix.

DOCUMENTATION

When you write a technical report, you can and should borrow information like crazy—to make it legal, all you have to do is "document" it. If your report makes you sound like a rocket scientist but there's not a single source citation in it and you haven't even taken college physics yet, people are going to start wondering. However, if you take that same report and load it up properly with source citations (those little indicators that show that you are borrowing information and from whom), everybody is all the more impressed—plus they're not secretly thinking you're a shady character. A documented report (one that has source indicators in it) says to readers that you've done your homework, that you're up on this field, that you approach these things professionally—that you are no slouch.

Number System of Documentation

In the number system, you list your information sources alphabetically, number them, and put the list at the back of your report. Then in the body of your report, whenever you borrow information from one of those sources, you put the source number and, optionally, the page number in brackets at that point in the text where the borrowed information occurs.

What to Document

This question always comes up: how do I decide when to document information—when, for example, I forgot where I learned it from, or when it really seems like common knowledge? There is no neat, clean answer. You may have heard it said that anything in an encyclopedia or in an introductory textbook is common knowledge and need not be documented. However, if you grabbed it from a source like that just recently—it really isn't common knowledge for you, at least not yet. Document it! If you just flat can't remember how you came by the information, then it has safely become common knowledge for you. 

One other question that is often asked: do I document information I find in product brochures or that I get in conversations with knowledgeable people? Yes, most certainly. You document any information, regardless whether it is in print, in electronic bits, magnetic spots, or in thin air.

How to Place the Source Indicators

It's a bit tricky deciding exactly where to place the source indicators—at the beginning of the passage containing the borrowed information, at the end? If it makes sense to "attribute" the source (cite the name of the author or the title of the information), you can put the attribution at the beginning and the bracketed source indicator at the end (as is shown in in the following).

Number documentation system: the code numbers in the text of the report are keyed to the references page. For example, [6:5] in the middle of the page from the body of the report indicates that the information came from source 6 (in References), page 5. Notice the attribution of the quotation marks the beginning of the borrowed information and the bracketed source indicator marks the end.

Setting Up the Sources List

A bit more challenging is setting up the list of information sources—that numbered, alphabetized list you put at the end of the document. The best thing to do is use examples. The following illustrations show you how to handle books, government reports, article from magazines and journals, encyclopedia articles, and personal interviews.

Internet and Web information sources

Books

For books, put the name of the author (first name last) first, followed by a period, followed by the title of the book (in italics if you have; otherwise, underline), followed by a period, followed by the city of the publisher, followed by a colon, followed by the publisher's name (but delete all those tacky "Inc.," "Co.," and "Ltd." things), followed by the year of publication, ending with a period. In this style, you don't indicate pages.

Example: book entry

Magazine and journal articles

 Start with the author's name first (last name first), followed by a period, then the title of the article in quotation marks and ending with a period, followed by the name of the magazine or journal (in italics if you have it; otherwise, underline), followed by a period, followed by the date of issue of the magazine the article occurs in, followed by the beginning and ending page. If the article spread out across the magazine, you can write "33+." or "33(5)." The latter style seems to be taking hold; in it, you estimate how many pages the article would be if it were continuous.

If there is no author, start with the article or book title. If there are two authors, add "and" and the second author's name, first name first. If there are too many authors, use the first one (last name first), followed by "et al.," which means "and others."

Example: magazine entry

Encyclopedia articles

 Encyclopedia articles are easy! Start with the title of the article in quotation marks ending with a period, followed by the name of the encyclopedia (in italics if you have it; otherwise, underline), followed by the period, then the year of the edition of the encyclopedia.

Example: encyclopedia entry

Reports. With reports, you're likely to dealing with government reports or local informally produced reports. With most reports, you may not have an individual author name; in such cases, you use the group name as the author. For government reports, the publisher is often the Government Printing Office; and the city of publication, Washington, D.C. Also, for government documents, you should include the document number, as is shown in the following example.

Example: entry for a report

Personal interviews, correspondence, and other nonprint sources.

With these sources, you treat the interviewee or letter writer as the author, follow that name with the person's title, followed by a period, then the company name, followed by a period, then the city and state, followed by a period, then what the information was ("Personal interview" or "Personal correspondence") followed by a period, ending with the date.

Example: entry for unpublished information

Product brochures. For these kinds of information sources, treat the company name as the author, followed by a period, use something identifying like the product name (including the specific model number), followed by anything that seems like the title of the brochure, followed by a period, ending with a date if you can find one (otherwise, put "N.d.").

Example: entry for a product brochure

CROSS REFERENCING

Technical reports and instructions often require cross-references—those pointers to other place in the same document or to other information sources where related information can be found.

Cross-references can help readers in a number of different ways. It can point them toward more basic information if, for example, they have entered into a report over their heads. It can point them to more advanced information if, for example, they already know the stuff you're trying to tell them. Also, it can point them to related information.

Related information is the hardest area to explain because ultimately everything is related to everything else—there could be no end to the cross-references.

Of course, the preceding discussion assumed cross-references within the same document. If there is just too much background to cover in your report, you can cross-reference some external book or article that does provide that background. That way, you are off the hook for having to explain all that stuff!

Cross-reference consists of several elements:

Name of the source being referenced

This can either be the title or a general subject reference. If it is a chapter title or a heading, put it in quotation marks; if it is the name of a book, magazine, report, or reference work, put it in italics or underline. (Individual article titles also go in quotation marks.)

Page number

Required if it is in the same document; optional if it is to another document.

Subject matter of the cross-reference

Often, you need to state what's in the cross-referenced material and indicate why the reader should go to the trouble of checking it out. This may necessitate indicating the subject matter of the cross-referenced material or stating explicitly how it is related to the current discussion.

These guidelines are shown in the illustration. Notice in that illustration how different the rules are when the cross-reference is "internal" (that is, to some other part of the same document) compared to when it is "external" (when it is to information outside of the current document).

Examples of cross-references

Internal cross-references are cross-references to other areas within your same document; external ones are those to books and documents external to your document.