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This Blog is dedicated to giving an accurate compilation of notes and interpretations of Lannon's Technical Writing text book. Hopefully this will be helpful in furthering your understanding or even just giving you a look at the challenges of technical writing.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Lannon, Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9-EXPLORING PRIMARY SOURCES

Primary sources are interviews, surveys, questionnaires, inquiry letters, official records, and personal observation because they are original or firsthand study of a topic.

Informative interviews contact an expert because much of what they know is not published in their or others work.

Surveys and Questionnairs can be very useful, but the setup has to be specific to you're needs and you have to anticipate trend that may happen and devote questions to them. However after the survey, if a trend is found it is very hard to go back and get detailed answers. Many things can skew a survey like length and attitude. Each question must be worded specifically to get what you what to know across to the taker. Surveys are good for quantifying subjective data.

Many government and cooperate records are available to the general public thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, and most can be found online.

Experiments are controlled observations used to find the reliability of a fact, general observation, hypothesis, or opinion.

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