Your Survey of Writing project asks you to find four different types of writing. Writing Type is the kind of writing, or the genre. Technical Writing includes lots of genres, such as letters, memos, reports, and technical descriptions.

Focus on Career-Related Genres

There‘s no requirement to cover any particular types of writing. Just be sure that you‘re choosing technical writing and ideally kinds of technical writing that relate to your major/intended future career. For instance, if you’re in Finance, instructions on how to go fly fishing aren’t the best choice. Yes, it‘s technical writing, but it doesn’t really relate to Finance. Instructions on how to invest in a local business would be a better choice.

Three Ways to Identify Types of Writing

• Consult lists of technical writing genres
  Identifying the kind of writing you find is easier if you have a general list of kinds of technical writing to draw on. Use these resources to learn more about writing types:
  • Technical Writing: Document Types, on Wikipedia
    This list provides short descriptions of over a dozen broad categories of technical writing. In many cases, the description includes a link to further information on the type of writing.
  • Common Document Types, from Technical Writing Essentials
    This section from one of the open textbooks we are using lists seven different categories of technical writing. Each links to another section of the textbook that provides additional information on the type of writing.
• Check technical writing textbooks
  Another good place to look is the different open source textbooks for the course. They'll list different kinds of writing in a Table of Contents. Here are the textbooks
  • Technical Writing Essentials: Introduction to Professional Communications in the Technical Fields. Suzan Last. University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. 1 January 2019.
  • Technical Writing. Michele DeSilva, et al. University of Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska. 1 October 2017.
  • An Introduction to Technical Communication. Sherena Huntsman. Boise State University, Boise, Idaho. No date.
  • Howdy or Hello? Technical and Professional Communication. 2nd ed. Matt McKinney; Kalani Pattison; Sarah LeMire; Kathy Anders; and Nicole Hagstrom-Schmidt. Texas A&M, College Station, Texas. 2022.
• Use AI to help you evaluate the genre
  Follow the instructions in the optional Identifying Kinds of Writing with AI activity to ask Copilot or the generative AI tool of your choice to analyze a technical writing document and help you determine its genre.