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Technical Writing for Teams: The STREAM Tools Handbook

ISBN: 978-0-470-60269-0

February 2011

Wiley-IEEE Press

264 pages

Description
A unique, integrative, team-centered approach to writing and formatting technical documents

Technical Professionals:

  • Do you have difficulty producing high-quality documents with multiple contributors when faced with a tight deadline?

  • Do you need a process that enables global team members to collaborate online as they produce sophisticated documents?

  • Do you prefer the ease of a WYSIWG desktop publishing tool like Microsoft Word rather than more complex software like LaTeX?

  • Professors and Graduate Students:

  • Do you want to streamline the process of writing multi-investigator papers, reports, proposals, and books?

  • Do you spend a lot of time formatting documents instead of thinking and writing?

  • Do you write research papers in Microsoft Word and then need to convert them to LaTeX for your thesis?

  • Do you write research papers in LaTeX and then need to convert them to Microsoft Word when embarking on collaborations with your colleagues from industry?

Undergraduate Students:

  • Do you need to write a research paper and don't know where to start?

  • Do you need to collaborate with classmates on a long paper and find yourself lost in organizational details rather than immersed in the content?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, Technical Writing for Teams: The STREAM Tools Handbook is for you. It provides an easy-to-learn system that streamlines individual and collaborative writing, allowing you and your teams to instantly become more productive and create the highest quality documents in a minimum amount of time. Introduced here are the STREAM Tools—Scientific and Technical wRiting, Editing, And file Management Tools—which unlock your collaborators' potential and addresses team dynamics, separation of duties, and workflow. You'll see how to ensure compatibility among multiple writers, achieve consistent formatting, organize content, integrate bibliographic databases, automate the process of document preparation, and move content between Microsoft Word and LaTeX. Checklists, guidelines, and success stories are also included to help you operate as efficiently as possible.

From planning and editing documents to solving common team writing problems to managing workflow, Technical Writing for Teams: The STREAM Tools Handbook is the one-stop reference that allows teams to collaborate successfully and create unified, effective documents.

About the Author
ALEXANDER V. MAMISHEV is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, as well as the Director of the Sensors, Energy, and Automation Laboratory and the Director of Industrial Assessment Center.

SEAN D. WILLIAMS is Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Associate Professor of Professional Communication at Clemson University. He is the cofounder of the Carolinas Virtual Worlds Consortium, and conducts research on collaborative writing, virtual teams, and technical communication.

Features
  • Teaches how to lead a writing team as well as how to participate as a member.
  • Provides both a practical subset of the standard editing symbols and a set of "correction codes" to provide team leaders with extra flexibility when reviewing drafts.
  • Provides an exclusive set of "T-Magic" templates that help automate the process of document preparation and largely solve the problem of inconsistent formatting.
  • Key concepts are illustrated through instructional videos.
  • Draws upon MS Word’s reviewing features and outline view to help writing teams create documents that are unified in their overall approach.
  • Demonstrates a set of procedures through which members of a team can all contribute literature references to the same bibliographic database without duplicate entries, overwritten files, and similar problems.
  • Shows how collaborative environments such as wikis, bulletin boards, and SharePoint can strengthen group processes and solve many team writing problems, including the very dangerous problem of version control.
  • Removes the need to use LaTeX for complicated technical documents.
  • Incorporates all the features in the forthcoming Word 2007.