I work at a biotech company and my job is to bring fledgling products from Research and Development into Production and the glory of being a fully manufactured product that can be sold. For the writing portion of my job, I write/revise mostly instructional documents to help either build or test our products along with documents to validate that various processes work throughout this transfer process.
I was slightly horrified a few months ago when, in a discussion with a fellow writer on my team, she said that thinking about the user of the documents we write is not something we really need to consider. I don't think she entirely believes this, as she will ask me here and there to review her documents to make sure her instructions are clear. The remark has stuck with me though and I think that a focus on how to make our documents better for our users is essential to creating good documents.
For my class project, I would like to create a training module for the writers at my work. I will focus on audience analysis primarily, and because we have access to the people who use our documents, a secondary focus will be usability testing of our process documents.
The actual documentation I will turn in will be my power point presentation (or outline of the training), what I hope to have my co-workers gain from this training, along with any other handouts or training items I may use during the training.
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I'm slightly envious that you're fortunate enough to work for a company that's willing to take your suggestions into consideration. A while ago I did a rhetorical analysis on the training documents that the company I work for uses to orient new employees to the company culture and the expectations/job duties for different divisions of staff. I completed the analysis with my general manager's prior knowledge and consent, but when my analysis discovered some discrepancies between the language and tone in the documents and the company's supposed philosophies, my GM got really defensive and *really* huffy, as if it were an attack on his character.
Emily, that stinks, and, sadly, I don't think that reaction is uncommon.
Alisha, this sounds great. One thing to consider, though: how long is your training session going to be. You can't do much in an hour, so would it be a series of sessions? Maybe for this class, you could work on the first couple of hours or something.
I'm hoping that this training will be well received, Emily. You never know. I've got a pretty open boss though--but timing is everything of course.
Christy, I may end up doing smaller sessions because I may not even have an hour to do this in! I'm considering this as I plan.
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