Formal Research and Proposal Review

Technical Writing and Communication involves not only documentation but some sort of oral communication. It can be in the form of a proposal, research findings, etc.

For our Formal Research Proposal Report project, we, as a group, were asked to find a problem that we want to see fixed around the city of Lafayette or on the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. We chose to propose an increase in fees associated with tuition in order to get new supplies for the biology and chemistry labs. Those supplies include chairs, window blinds, new lab equipment, etc. Not to mention that those labs have not been updated since 1958 and 1978 respectively.

From doing this project we learned how to go about communicating with people to get them to take our survey we created, how to communicate with the lab instructors, and how hard it actually is to prepare documents for a formal proposal. We also learned about team work and how it is very important to communicate with the members in your group. 

picture from: mouthsofmums.com.au/finding-balance/

Technical Communication requires a balance between:

Politeness

• It was very difficult to be polite to the rude people we encountered while trying to get price estimates for our lab equipment, chairs, and other things. 

Assertiveness

• One of our team members had to be assertive towards another member to stay on task.
•  It is very hard to be creative and come up with different ways to say the same thing more than once. 
• We also had to be assertive in the fact that we needed volunteers to take our survey.

Specificity

• We also did not know how to write the same idea in different ways for the formal documents we had to create, such as the letter of transmittal, abstract, and introduction, body and conclusion of the actual proposal.
• We also knew what we wanted to propose, but did not know how to ask for what we wanted.