Technical Writing Workshop
DISCLAIMER
Before purchasing, review the rules of your licensing or certifying entity. It is your responsibility to confirm this course meets your CE requirements. See the credit tab on the course page for details.
What’s Included: Full webinar recording, written course materials, expert instruction, a mandatory quiz, and a certificate upon completion.
Deliverability Timeline: All courses are generally available within 1-2 weeks after the live presentation.
CE Credits: AIA and/or LA/CES accreditation is available by request for courses recorded prior to March 11, 2026. All courses after that date include those accreditations by default, if applicable. With these accreditations, our courses qualify for credit in nearly all states for engineers, surveyors, architects, and landscape architects.
Learn more about the on-demand format in our FAQ or contact us at (715) 835-5900 or customerservice@halfmoonseminars.org
Agenda
Registration: 8:00 – 8:30 am
Morning Session: 8:30 am – 12:00 pm
Lunch (On your own): 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Afternoon Session: 1:00 – 5:00 pm
Planning Documents
Effective technical communication characteristics
• Ensuring specificity, accuracy, structure and visual appeal
Defining purpose and audience
• Identifying the document purposes and assessing your audience’s needs and expertise
Writing Documents
Adopting an appropriate style and tone
Using effective sentence construction
Using sentence variety (emphasis, parallel structure, subordination)
Designing documents
• Choosing the right words and technical terminology
• Ensuring clarity (ambiguity, awkwardness, logic errors, positive writing, voice)
• Constructing effective paragraphs
• Page layout and design considerations
Organizing and planning
• Developing work strategies to set priorities and to make the best use of writing time
• Creating project plans outlining specific details for a predictable and logical structure to help your audience understand technical information
Revising and Editing
Editing for grammar and style
• Using punctuation and mechanics correctly
Reviewing content
• Checking accuracy, completeness and effectiveness
• Checking unity and coherence
• Ethical issuesGraphics
• Creating and integrating visuals
Best Practices in Correspondence and Technical Documents
Business letters
• Formats and types of business correspondence
Memos and electronic mail
• Advantages and disadvantages of internal communications
Document elements
• Using formats to establish the order of content in document front matter, body and end matter
Document types
• Specifications, reports, instructions, and proposals
Credits
Professional Engineers
7.0 Contact Hours/PDHs
Geologists
7.0 Contact Hours/PDHs
Continuing Education Credit Information
This seminar is open to the public and offers up to 7.0 PDHs to professional engineers in all states. It also provides 7.0 PDHs to Kansas geologists. Educators and courses are not subject to preapproval in Kansas.
HalfMoon Education is an approved continuing education sponsor for engineers in Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey (Approval No. 24GP00000700), New York (NYSED Sponsor No. 35), North Carolina, and North Dakota.
Attendance will be monitored, and attendance certificates will be available after the seminar for most individuals who complete the entire event. Attendance certificates not available at the seminar will be mailed to participants within fifteen business days.
Speakers
Dr. Mark Decker, PhD
Professor and Department Chair in the Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania’s English DepartmentDr. Decker teaches in support of Commonwealth University’s Professional Writing minor. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Writing at Commonwealth. Dr. Decker has PhD and MA degrees in English from The Pennsylvania State University (2001, 1997) and he graduated summa cum laude in English from Utah State University (1995).
While an undergraduate, Dr. Decker worked for several years as a staff writer for Aerotech News and Review, an aerospace and defense industry trade newspaper published in Lancaster, California. During graduate school, Dr. Decker was a member of the Leonhard Center for Technical Writing Initiative, a collaboration between Penn State’s Department of English and College of Engineering designed to promote an exchange of ideas between technical writing instructors and the scientific and engineering communities. Dr. Decker also taught Business Writing, Technical Writing, and an Advanced Technical Writing course that enrolled graduate students from technical and scientific disciplines.
After graduate school, Dr. Decker spent four years at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where he taught Technical Writing in support of that school’s major in Technical Communication and served as the advisor for the student chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. Dr. Decker has given presentations at several national and international conferences and has published both a book and a co-edited book as well as several scholarly articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia chapters.