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Sam Dickerson Professor Daniel Powell ENC 3241 3 February, 2012 Critical Analysis One: Achieving a Readable Style In the two examples of technical writing by Daniel Lynch and Jeffery Terrace, The Art of Digital Publishing: A foundation of combined standards to support the future of publishing, and Content Conditioning and Distribution for Dynamic Virtual Worlds, the two authors unique styles greatly influence the effectiveness of their work. While both authors present large amounts of information, the manner in which the tone, syntax, and presentation of each individual distinctly alters the perception of the authors purpose and ability to maintain the interest of the reader. With the presentation one author becomes superior in his representation of the ideas he is attempting to explain within his article. The author of Content Conditioning and Distribution for Dynamic Virtual Worlds, Jeffery Terrace, is definitely the more effective writer in his report. His ease of expression when it comes to the explanation he offers of virtual worlds and the new ideas in scalability regarding them makes his communication far superior to that of Daniel Lynch in his piece. In his piece, Terrace manages to present a very complex and technical concept in a very easy to understand and comprehensive manner. By maintaining a strongly didactic tone throughout his report, Terrace is able to thoroughly express the difficulty in relaying the information required to structure and represent an entire online world that is rendered in three dimensions on the clients computer. Many of the problems he names, such as the graphical capability of users or the

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restrictions placed on the network when transporting the information for the digital worlds, become increasingly difficult to understand but Terrace is able to explain these concepts in a simple, understandable tone. On the other hand, Daniel Powells article, represents a serious and well thought out description of modern typesetting options. He also begins with an introduction into classical methods of placing type on a written page as well. This approach does add a significant amount of context with regards to the evolution of the styling and representation of written text, this did lend another layer of confusion to his point. Instead of focusing more on the origin of the formatting of text, he should have focused more on the actual tangible benefit to the mutli-layout and responsive book design he mentions. However, the language used in this report is substantially more formal than the other writing, this makes the authors tone seem more cold and lecturing. This makes this piece far less effective and inaccessible to many more casual readers, and substantially less effective than Terraces piece. As stated earlier in this writing, I find the article written by Jeffery Terrace, Content Conditioning and Distribution for Dynamic Virtual Worlds, to be the much stronger report between the two offered. With the very accessible language, and straightforward layout of his writing, Jeffery Terrace is able to present a large amount of information in a readily accessible and didactic report. The other report, pertaining to the software that converts Tex to HTML5, is much less geared towards the casual information consumer.