Other Professional Writing - Writing for Computer Science - page 172

intended to be read just once (at a decision-making meeting, say), with opportunities
for clarification; or it may be that the task must be completed within some limited
time, and under pressure from other competing demands. Before you begin such a
task, you need to know how much time can reasonably be committed to it, and then
you can use that knowledge to decide where the effort will go—in other words, you
need to decide whether compromises are needed, and if so what they will be.
If time is limited, don't begin by doing the writing that is easy; do the writing
that the reader needs. And it will help the reader if you acknowledge that material is
missing. That is, the effort needs to be spent wisely, with a focus on the document
being useful and informative.
It is also critical that you decide what you trying to accomplish. One aspect of this
is recognition of the nature of the task itself, which is the topic of the next section.
Another aspect is the kind of outcome you are hoping for. You might be aiming to:

Record something (an event? a decision?), perhaps just for yourself or members
of your team.
Inform someone, such as a manager or client, of an outcome, decision, failure,
obstacle, or result.
Persuade or convince

someone of the need to take action, or of the need for a

decision to made.

Sometimes the author's intention is not apparent. Perhaps the initial impression a
reader has of a document is that it appears to be intended to do no more than provide
information, but the authors wrote it because they wanted a decision to be made. Or
perhaps the author has argued that action is needed, but does not explain what the
actionmight consist of or howurgent it is. 1 Or perhaps the document is fundamentally
incoherent; for example, the author's aim was to present an argument for renewed
funding of a system development, but the resulting document consists largely of a
list of the system's features and shortcomings, and in the last few pages drifted into a
discussion of why the user feedback was misguided. In all of these cases, the authors
appear to have not thought through what it is that they are trying to accomplish.

Understanding the Task

Any list of typical professional expert writing tasks is likely to be incomplete: each
workplace and context has its own demands, which shape the activities that are
undertaken. It can help, though, to clearly identify the particular kind of task that you
are doing. Examples of professional writing tasks that might be considered include:

1 Which is not at all the same thing as how excited the author is. Some topics make certain authors
highly agitated, so that they press for immediate action, even if there is no discernable urgency at
all. The outcome in such cases is often that the author gets told to calm down and the report gets
ignored—which is far from what the author wanted.