Legal Discourse & Technical Writing

Have you ever taken the time to sit down and analyze at least one legal work or document? Most individuals will respond no to this because people are not really interested in the intricate details such as writing in respect to the criminal justice system. I would like to pose this question--Without writing where would the legal justice system stand? It would be almost inoperable in my opinion. Every legal action that has ever taking place in history has been documented. These documentations govern the way in which future disputes are resolved nationwide.

The entire legal discourse has created systematic processes to govern the way in which legal writings are posed. Legal documents are designed in such a way that no matter your focus if you are apart of the legal discourse itself you will be familiar with the terminology, framework, and significance of the document in question.  To better understand this statement let’s take a look at this  Sexual Assault Petition:

http://www.courts.wa.gov/forms/documents/SA1_015.doc

This document can be a considered a technical legal document because it poses a solution to a particular problem. A petition by definition is  a written request signed by many people demanding a specific action from an authority or government.

This documents is specific and is designed to allocate for an individual who is being sexually abused. The first half of this document is gathering standard information from the party who is ordering the petition. Pay close attention to the bold sub-heading on the second page Restrain, Prohibit, Exclude.  These words were used for a particular reason they give strong meaning to the document.  Scroll down a little further to the bottom of this page and take notice to the bold heading Request for a Temporary Sexual Assault Protection Order the document's purpose is specifically stated:  An Emergency Exists as described in the statement below. Petitioner needs a temporary protection order issued. Further down on the next page the document contends to further assert its purpose by defining terms and technically describing the actions that this order of protection serves.

This paper was very effective if you were a member of this discourse community. The authors’ presented a problem and proposed a possible solution to the problem.


References

Pattern Forms Committee and the Administrative Office of the Courts, State of Washington, 2004.  http://www.courts.wa.gov/forms/index.cfm?fa=forms.contribute&formID=65

Anatomy of Search Engines

What qualifies a writing to be both technical and academic? Technical writing by definition of Dennis G. Jerz is the presentation of information that help the reader solve a particular problem. An academic writing as we all know is any piece of information designed to inform or educate its readers on a particular subject or issue. Therefore a technical academic writing should inform or propose a solution to a particular problem. Along with this the document should be easily readable, has a distinct purpose, and captures the attention of its audience.

To get a better understanding of technical writing I analyzed a paper written by two potential Ph.D students at Stanford University; Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page titled, “The Anatomy of a Large Scale Hyper Textual Web Search Engine.”  This document falls under the computer and engineering genre of academic writing.  From the title alone the reader can infer that this reading is about to inform its audience on a particular issue. Anatomy by definition describes the make-up of something. So the reader knows that the purpose of this writing is to discuss the make-up of a large scale hyper textual web search engine. Furthermore, the purpose of this paper is directly identified in the abstract of the paper, “This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext (Brin and Page, para. 4).” This reassures that this is a technical writing because the authors state that they are proposing a solution to a problem.

Brim and Page’s argument is direct “the goal of our system is to address many of the problems, both in quality and scalability, introduced by scaling search engine technology to such extraordinary numbers.” What does this mean? As Brim and Page stated with numerical facts and data computer search queries are steadily increasing. If the number of users continue to rise then main stream search engines need to start considering ways to handle the increase in users so that they may continue to provide “pertinent text information” to their users (Brin and Page).

As you move further down into the paper the authors are beginning to formulate ethos for their purpose of writing. They are stating facts and presenting numerical data about the problems that currently exist with search engines. The authors also proceed to explain the purpose and construction of GOOGLE (main stream search engine company) search engines which is the search engine of discussion in this paper. Providing this information is useful because it helps the audience to get a better understanding of why it is necessary or important to consider modifying search engines. The authors’ value improvement and efficiency of search engines as it is discussed repeatedly throughout this paper.

This paper was very effective if you were a member of this discourse community. The authors’ presented a problem, provided evidence for why this problem exists, and proposed a possible solution to the problem. Search engine efficiency is not a very popular topic of discussion. But, Brin and Page presented their argument well and made their audience aware of the importance of having a well sustained and easily modifiable search engine.


References

Brin Sergey and Page Lawrence (2010). The anatomy of a large scale hyper textual web search engine [Electronic Version]. Computer Science. Retrived September 21, 2010 from  http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html.