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Technical writing and terminology

Technical writing and terminology. Some pointers. Summary. A quick introduction to technical writing and terminology An example of how the methods of terminology help to understand a new subject field. What is technical writing?. an activity

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Technical writing and terminology

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  1. Technical writing and terminology Some pointers

  2. Summary • A quick introduction to technical writing and terminology • An example of how the methods of terminology help to understand a new subject field

  3. What is technical writing? • an activity • providing documentation to enable users to get the most out of a product • user manuals • on-line help • tutorials • e-learning courses • more than writing instructions for microwave ovens • documenting a product in all its forms

  4. a profession There are professional technical writers organised, especially in the USA and in the world

  5. a subject • technical communication • a branch of semiotics • different systems of communication • taught especially in American universities • undergraduate • postgraduate/PhD • links with other professions • localisation • technical translation

  6. common problems for technical writers • coming to grips with a new field • How do you write in a field which is completely new to you? • rewriting muddled prose • How do you turn engineers’ writing into something someone who is not an engineer can understand? • Can terminology help ?

  7. The new field… Brand placement … What is it ?

  8. First step • Finding out about brand placement We need to use documentation resources • encyclopedias • e.g. wikipedia • specialised dictionaries • specialised articles on the subject • ie a corpus

  9. Wikipedia • Product placement From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Product placement is a type of advertising, in which promotionaladvertisements placed by marketers using real commercial products and services in media, where the presence of a particular brand is the result of an economic exchange. • Problem: Wikipedia talks about product placement, not brand placement. Is this the same?

  10. Wikipedia implies that brand placement is part of marketing

  11. Therefore marketing terms will be used in brand placement e.g. “We also examine the practice of relying on facilitated scores to control for the effects of brand familiarity on brand-placement recognition …” extract from our corpus of specialised articles

  12. Specialised dictionaries • Monash University Marketing dictionary http://www.buseco.monash.edu.au/mkt/dictionary/bbb.html Brand familiarity the awareness consumers have of a particular brand

  13. Specialised documentsfrom academic journals • Research on cinematic placements indicates that affect for a leading actor appears to transfer to a brand when the brand is jointly featured with the actor in a movie scene […]. Studies have also found significant the effects for cinematic placement on both recall and recognition. • So recall (and recognition) are terms ! • That means they have a specialised meaning as used by experts in marketing They are present in the Dictionary of Marketing Terms under recall test and recognition test.

  14. New concepts • Placement prominence has been conceptualized as a dichotomous variable (Murdock, 1992; Babin and Carder, 1996a) with the term creative placement describing those brands that appear in the background of a shot, and the term on-set placement describing those that are displayed more prominently.

  15. Different folks, different strokes • Gupta and Lord (1998) used the terms subtle and prominent to describe creative and on-set placements, respectively. • Synonymy • Creative placement (Murdoch, et al.) = subtle placement (Gupta, Lord) • On-set placement (Murdoch, et al.) = prominent placement (Gupta, Lord)

  16. Terminology method 1definition drill • Brand placement refers to the paid inclusion of branded products or brand identifiers, through audio and/or visual means, within mass media programming (Karrh, 1998). defined in intension (necessary and sufficient conditions/genus and differentia) : paid inclusion of brands in mass media defined in extension (all the members of a particular set) : mass media programming : films, television shows, video games….

  17. Terminology method 2concept modelling

  18. Terminology method 3creating a term base • electronic knowledge base (Access) • term record (one for each language) • headword, synonym(s) • grammatical information • definition • context • language information • encyclopaedic information • data management information

  19. Coming to grips - summary • Steps • Document the field • Reference works • Situate the new field • Consult manuals, dictionaries • Cutting-edge research in the field itself • Articles, • Structure the terms found (ontology) • Construct a data base for reference

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