WWD Activity 1

Selzer's article on writing in the workplace uses past studies and his own research to determine how someone composes a scientific text. He mentions studies done on the writing habits of high school students and professional writers to make clear that the basic writing habits of these people are understood while the lack of study into scientific writing makes a scientist or engineers writing habits less understood. Selzer goes into great detail about how he studied Nelson making all of his findings legitimate. Through his explanations of his research he is able to list the different ways in which Nelson maps out his works and how he organizes them. For example Selzer explains Nelson's writing process from start to finish so that it is clear, then he mentions different writing techniques such as recycling certain material, and doing very little revision due to the planning process. This is all a pre-cursor to the point of his article that not enough is known about the technical writing process and more research is necessary. Selzer makes this clear by explaining that in his research he discovered many differences between Nelson's writing and a professional writer's work, but because there are not more studies to compare technical writing techniques are not as understood, or well taught, as is necessary.