Markel Chapter's 7 and 8

Chapter 7 in Markel’s book is about organizing your information to reflect your audience, purpose and subject. There are three principles for organizing technical information. First, analyze your audience and purpose, then using conventional patterns of arrangement and finally displaying your arrangement prominently. Whenever writing you should always keep in mind a few questions like will your audience like the message you are presenting or what is the purpose of this technical document?

A piece of text should follow expected organizational patterns and must include introductions as well as conclusion that present the kind of information you would expect. It should be organized linearly and it’s never a bad idea to using headings to make it more clearly from the reader to understand the topic. Conventional patterns like chronological and spatial arraignments are encouraged. We always want to make our documents easier for our readers to understand so things like creating a table of contents, usage of headings and topic sentences can really help us achieve that goal.

Chapter 8 is about communicating persuasively. This involves understanding your audience’s broader goals, their values and what seems to motivate them. Three main goals that most share are security, recognition, and finally personal and professional goals. When talking about security, we need to make sure that nothing hurts their own intentions and maybe cause them to lose their jobs or increase workload. We want to recognize and praise people for their hard work and try not to humiliate anyone in public for their mistakes. And encourage behavior that leads to growth in jobs and in personal lives.

When crafting a persuasive argument there are many points to keep in mind. First of all it is important to keep the 3 elements in mind which are claim, evidence and reasoning. Claim is what you want your readers to accept after they read your document. Evidence is the information that your want them to consider and reasoning is the logic you use to connect the evidence to the claim. Along with these you also have to make sure that you are using the right kinds of evidence and considering opposing viewpoints. Finally you can use graphics and designs to send the final message that you want to audience to get.