Technical Report and Pitch
Purpose
Writing tasks vary across disciplines and professions, but one thing many people in technical professions do is gather information and present it to help solve specific problems. In doing so, they often go beyond simply describing information and must make a pitch for a particular course of action.
In this task, you will be combined into teams of 3-4, choose one of the projects you have been working on all semester, and produce a technical report that persuades a client to adopt your recommendations.
Deliverables
1. Collaborative Technical Report
Thus far, you have already defined a problem or issue, gathered information and data about that issue, and analyzed the data. You will now work with a team to produce a formal, client-facing report that explains what your research can tell the client about the problem and makes recommendations for how they should respond. For this project, you will need to move beyond description and analysis to persuade, demonstrating how your data and secondary literature supports your recommended course of action.
- Genre: Report
- Word count: 2,000-3,000 words
Concepts:
- Audience: the person or group who will read and react to written communication
- Client: a person, group, agency, or business that uses the professional service of another
- Collaborative writing: the process of planning, prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing a document with the active contribution of multiple individuals
- Persuasion: the act of effecting change in action, attitude, belief, or position via argument, discussion, or examination
- Teamwork: Work done by a group of individuals in which each individual takes responsibility for a portion of the whole and work together to ensure the effective and efficient completion of their assigned tasks
2. Persuasive Pitch
For this assignment, you’ll choose a secondary audience with some stake in the defined problem. Reorienting your data, information, and recommendations toward this secondary audience, you’ll construct a persuasive pitch: a presentation meant to persuade that secondary audience to do a particular, useful thing. For example, if you wrote your technical report about clean energy options to a company’s engineering team, you might pivot to address the board of directors, encouraging them to approve construction on a new clean power plant. Or if you wrote a report about improving accessibility downtown to the Urbana city council, perhaps you now want to persuade the Urbana economic development association to offer a grant program incentivizing businesses to make their buildings more accessible.
- Genre: Multimodal format
- Word count: 500-1,000 words
Concepts:
- Audience: the person or group who will read and react to written communication
- Client: a person, group, agency, or business that uses the professional service of another
- Collaborative writing: the process of planning, prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing a document with the active contribution of multiple individuals
- Multimodality: using several modes and/or methods of delivery (i.e., media, genres, sensory appeals, etc.) to complete a task or project
- Persuasion: the act of effecting change in action, attitude, belief, or position via argument, discussion, or examination
- Teamwork: Work done by a group of individuals in which each individual takes responsibility for a portion of the whole and work together to ensure the effective and efficient completion of their assigned tasks
3. User Test
As with the first two portfolios, you’ll conduct a usability test and write a Usability Report evaluating your Collaborative Technical Report. This time, however, you will determine the criteria for your user test, not just the test format.
- Genre: Report
- Word count: 250-500 words
Concepts:
- Usability test: a test that measures the effectiveness of a product based on users’ experience
- User: the person or group who uses a designed product (e.g., document, online application, machine, etc.)
- Document design: the writer’s choice of layout, organization, and format of a document, often selected to facilitate the greatest effectiveness, accessibility, and ease of understanding for their information and purpose