Mention five specific techniques you can use to improve your written documents.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

As the Toolkit suggests, students who have not taken a writing course should consider doing so. The textbook offers 10 specific suggestions for better-written documents, as follows:
1) Know your audience. If you are writing for nontechnical readers, use terms that readers will understand.
2) Use the active voice whenever possible. For example, the active voice sentence “Tom designed the system,” is better than, “The system was designed by Tom,” which is an example of the passive voice.
3) Keep your writing concise and well organized. Use one paragraph to convey a single idea.
4) Use an appropriate style. For example, use a conversational tone in informal documents and a business tone in formal documents.
5) Use lists. When you must enumerate a number of subtopics related to the same topic, lists are an organized way to present them.
6) Use short, easy-to-understand words. Your objective is not to impress your audience with the size of your vocabulary.
7) Avoid repeating the same word too often. Use a thesaurus to locate synonyms for frequently repeated words. Many word processing programs include a thesaurus and other tools to help you write better.
8) Check your spelling. You can use the spell checker in your word processing program to check your spelling, but remember that a spell checker is a tool that identifies only words that do not appear in the program’s dictionary. For example, a spell checker will not identify instances when you use the word “their,” instead of the word “there.”
9) Check your grammar. Most word processing programs include a grammar checker, which is a tool that can detect usage problems and offer suggestions. When you use a grammar checker, you can set various options to match the level and style of the writing and to highlight or ignore certain types of usage. For example, you can set the grammar checker in Microsoft Word to check grammar rules only, or you can configure it to check writing style, including gender-specific words, sentence fragments, and passive sentences
10) Review your work carefully. Then double-check it for spelling, grammatical, and typographical mistakes. If possible, ask a colleague to proofread your work and suggest.