Differences Between Technical and Academic Writing
Based on the following reading, how do you distinguish the research goals of technical writing versus academic writing? Share examples from your own professional and academic lives.
IN THE WORKPLACE, you will conduct research all the time. as a buyer for a clothing retailer, for example, you might need to conduct research to help you determine whether a new line of products would be successful in your store. as a civil engineer, you might need to perform research to determine whether to replace your company's traditional surveying equipment with GPs-based gear. and as a pharmacist, you might need to research whether a prescribed medication might have a harmful interaction with another medication a patient is already taking. in the workplace, you will conduct research using a variety of methods. you will consult websites, blogs, and discussion boards, and you might listen to podcasts or watch videos. sometimes you will interview people, and you will likely distribute surveys electronically to acquire information from customers and suppliers. Regardless of which technique you use, your challenge will be to sort the relevant information from the irrelevant, and the accurate from the bogus. This chapter focuses on conducting primary research and secondary research. Primary research involves discovering or creating technical information yourself. Secondary research involves finding information that other people have already discovered or created. This chapter presents secondary research first. Why? Because you will probably do secondary research first. To design the experiments or the field research that goes into primary research, you need a thorough understanding of the information that already exists about your subject. Understanding the differences between academic and workplace research Although academic research and workplace research can overlap, in most cases they differ in their goals and their methods. In academic research, your goal is to find information that will help answer a scholarly question: "What would be the effect on the trade balance between the United States and China if China lowered the value of its currency by 10 percent?" or "At what age do babies learn to focus on people's eyes?" Academic research questions are often more abstract than applied. That is, they get at the underlying principles of a phenomenon. Academic research usually requires extensive secondary research: reading scholarly literature in academic journals and books. If you do primary research, as scientists do in labs, you do so only after extensive secondary research.
Researching YOUR Subject in workplace research, your goal is to find information to help you answer a practical question: "Should we replace our sales staff's notebook computer with tablets?" or "What would be the advantages and disadvantages to our company of adopting a European-style privacy policy for customer information?" Workplace research questions frequently focus on improving a situation at a particular organization. These questions call for considerable primary research because they require that you learn about your own organization's processes and how the people in your organization would respond to your ideas. Sometimes, workplace research questions address the needs of customers or other stakeholders. You will need a thorough understanding of your organization's external community in order to effectively align your products or services with their needs. Regardless of whether you are conducting academic or workplace research, the basic research methods-primary and secondary research-are fundamentally the same, as is the goal: to help you answer questions. Understanding the research process When you perform research, you want the process to be effective and efficient. That is, you want to find information that answers the questions you need to answer. And you don't want to spend any more time than necessary getting that information. To meet these goals, you have to think about how the research relates to the other aspects of the overall project. The Focus on Process box provides an overview of the research process. Although all these tasks are described as part of the planning stage, remember that you might also need to perform additional research during the drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading stages. Whenever you need additional information to help you make your argument clear and persuasive, do more research. choosing appropriate research Methods Different research questions require different research methods. Once you have determined the questions you need to answer, think about the various research techniques you could use to answer them. For example, your research methods for finding out how a current situation is expected to change would differ from your research methods for finding out how well a product might work for your organization. That is, if you want to know how outsourcing will change the computer-support industry over the next 10 to 20 years, you might search for long-range predictions in journal and magazine articles and on reputable websites and blogs. By contrast, if you want to figure out whether a specific scanner will produce the quality of scan that you need and will function reliably, you might do the same kind of secondary research and then observe the operation of the scanner at a vendor's site; schedule product demos at your site; follow up by.