Technical and Business Writing for Working Professionals

About the Book

In terms of writing support, working professionals have been left in the lurch during the past decade, as corporations and other organizations have downsized their writing staffs or eliminated them altogether. More and more, the writing tasks are falling on technical staff members and managers. Unfortunately, many such professionals feel ill-equipped to carry out these writing responsibilities. If you find yourself in that situation, Technical and Business Writing for Working Professionals by Ray E. Hardesty is the book to get you through.

Mr. Hardesty’s broad knowledge of technical and business communication comes from more than thirty years of experience as a newspaper and trade magazine journalist and as a technical writer and editor in several industries. He has experience in the petroleum industry, the semiconductor equipment industry, the electronics industry, and the aerospace industry, including both aircraft component manufacturing and the U.S. space program. He has presented papers at international technical communications conferences, and he has taught technical and business writing at the post-secondary level and in corporate environments. Currently, he is a writer with the distance-learning company Quisic, located in Hollywood, California.

The book stresses two vital aspects of technical and business communication: (1) the mechanics of the English language, and (2) the techniques of writing and communicating well in technical and business environments. The emphasis on these two areas comes from Mr. Hardesty’s concept that language “is nothing less than the organizational structure we use to understand the world and express that understanding to others.”

The first part of the book provides the reader with a rigorous re-acquaintance with the structure of the English language, including parts of speech and sentence structure. In the second part, the author discusses technical writing topics, including short forms, nomenclature, technical writing style, formats, and the writing process. The last part, on business writing, covers background topics such as “identifying the audience,” “business writing tone,” and “the importance of brevity” and then examines the types of business writing facing modern professionals, including e-mail correspondence, interoffice memorandums, formal business letters, internal reports, external proposals, and presentations. On all of these topics, Mr. Hardesty brings to bear his extensive experience in working with professionals of all types in business, industry, and academia.

About the Author

Ray E. Hardesty has been a writer and editor in business, industry, and academia for the past twenty years, including nine years in the U.S. space program. Prior to that, he worked as a newspaper and trade magazine journalist. He holds a degree in English from Augustana College and a master’s degree in political economy from Oregon State University. He has presented papers at international technical communication conferences, and for three years he was the Book Review Editor for the journal Technical Communication. His professional interests include the teaching of writing to technical and business professionals and the expansion of the role of technical communicators into areas such as video and Webcast scriptwriting and multimedia writing.