Ch. 4, 5, 16, and 23 response

Ch.4

Chapter 4 continues on making our writing usable and persuasive. it mainly talks about how to effectively organize our writing and make it usable. Some of its guidelines I used before to write my house repair estimates. But I never realized that there is a science behind my writings. If I picked up this book earlier, I'd be more successful because it goes step by step on the structure of documents, how they should be organized. Also I was always wondering why instructions in the US are so detailed and elaborate. Now I have an answer to my question: we live in low-context country (thanks to this book).



Ch.5

Now we're talking about persuasion. This chapter gives us a few guidelines on persuasion. It also talks about two types of persuasion: cooperative and competitive. Cooperative persuasion comes first because in order to produce competitive document, those who work on it must get together (cooperate) to achieve some positive result. For me this part of a project is the hardest. Because to persuade someone for specific actions is much harder than just to produce a usable document.



Ch.16

A group project is what came to my mind when I read the title. This chapter will be really handy when we'll come up to our group project. Basically it teaches how to manage the group discussion more efficiently. It also helps to avoid common problems that adherent to group projects. It tells how to organize a team. I find this chapter useful.

Ch.23
This chapter is talking about reader-centered instructions. This is very importand topic, because in some cases misunderstood instructions if they are written unclearly may result in injury in production environment. I work in multinational team in production facility. I come across various instructions. Some of them are written properly, others create more confusion than help. If I stumble upon such an instruction, sometime trial and error comes instead if time is an issue. Writers of instructions sometimes are disconnected from working environment. They assume the same level of language for everyone. But sometimes, like in my company, overwhelming number of employees is from other countries. So for them it’s hard to understand complicated instructions. So, it is very important to understand cultural factor.