Technical Communication - Chapter 8
When used as evidence, what does an effective example do?
It makes abstract ideas more concrete.
A writer's company has just adopted a policy of employee e-mail surveillance to determine which employee is leaking confidential information. Because the writer knows that this policy will be unpopular with company employees, which is the best strategy for announcing this new policy to employees in a memorandum?
Present the reasoning behind the new policy and then state the policy.
What does it mean to say that a report you are writing contains several logical fallacies?
The reasoning used in your report is illogical and untrustworthy.
A post-hoc argument claims that because A preceded B, A must have caused B.
True
Which of these statements is true?
Writers who appeal to an audience's emotions usually appeal to their sense of reason as well.
Which of the following is an example of an informational constraint that you might confront when completing a project?
You have located advertising brochures and testimonials associated with the subject you're writing about, but you can't find reports on the kinds of controlled tests that would convince a skeptical reader.
According to Chapter 8, in most cases the best place to state your claim is at the end of the argument because you may alienate your audience if you state it at the beginning.
False
Read the following excerpt from a proposal seeking funding to upgrade a police department's crime lab. The proposal writer uses all of the following techniques to make a persuasive case EXCEPT In the past four years, the department's crime lab has experienced an increase in fingerprint evidence for comparisons. The increase in volume is a result of submissions from other rural agencies in the state. However, because our agency cannot access data maintained within the state's Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), submissions are limited to manual searches of the 14,000 files maintained by our department. You can imagine the likelihood of missing a fingerprint match while looking through thousands of fingerprints by hand. In fact, Harlan Andrews, a Senior Investigator at the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Laboratory, reports that manual searches often fail to find matches when in fact fingerprint matches exist. To prevent such errors, our department needs to upgrade its computer system to allow access to AFIS.
examples
Which are the four categories of evidence to which people usually respond favorably?
examples, commonsense arguments, numerical data, and expert testimony
In the excerpt below, the writer has violated which of the following characteristics of an attractive professional persona? As you probably already know, we have a problem with our current documentation. Users cannot easily locate the serial numbers necessary to complete the online registration step. The solution below will help us address this problem and eliminate the customer-support calls we get. It will also solve a few other problems. Last week, others suggested different solutions. However, they will not work. The best course of action is to prominently display the serial numbers at the start of the chapter labeled "Registering Your Product." Our users expect to find the numbers in this chapter.
modesty
