Technical Writing Class: 06/30/09

Synthesis: June 30, 2009

Ms. Tomines immediately continued her report about weak and strong verbs and passive-active voice. She stressed that doing verbs are stronger than linking verbs; the former is more direct than the latter. After her, I discussed conciseness. Conciseness is saying much in a few words. Short and simple words should be selected; wordy phrases reduced; and unnecessary words and ideas omitted. Mrs. Manzano went in the room before I dropped my parting words. Then, Ms. Roca shared about coherence – the smooth flow of ideas and data. She emphasized that in conciseness, we replace needless words into brief ones and in coherence, we connect ideas in an organized manner. Mrs. Manzano asked her a question – what’s the difference between coherence and cohesion? No one has answered it yet. After the reports, we had 2 consecutive tests about conciseness. Mrs. Manzano added information about my report. She introduced the terms deadwood and pleonasm. Deadwood refers to the non-essential words that should be eliminated in a technical piece of writing while pleonasm is a technical term for redundancy which has to be avoided in technical writing. Moreover, she stressed that being concise is maintaining the appropriate tone. She also gave us the dos and don’ts in the conciseness of technical writing and provided exercises for us to master conciseness. At the end of the session, she discovered that we were not yet done reporting the writing errors, so next meeting, that would be the topic. She also reminded us about the symposium and the line-up of speakers. The entire meeting was calm. We will be expecting the continuation of the assigned reports next meeting.