The document discusses and compares two technical reports: "The Art of Digital Publishing" by Daniel Lynch and "Content Conditioning and Distribution for Dynamic Virtual Worlds" by Jeff Terrance. While both address technical topics, the author argues that Terrance more effectively communicates for a broader audience by clearly explaining technical terms and concepts, while Lynch assumes knowledge and includes unnecessary details that make his report harder to follow. The author praises Terrance's clear chapter descriptions and hyperlinks, but critiques Lynch for not fully explaining programming languages and including distracting graphs.

1. searles1
Stuart Searles
Daniel Powell
ENC 3241
Discussing Technical Reports
Writing technical reports and emails in the work place is very common and should be
done with regard for the people who will be reading them. The readers grasp of the subject and
willingness to understand what is being told to them are key factors in how each report should be
written. Documents need to be clear and be able to communicate quickly the subject of the
report. Two documents which did a good job with these ideas are "The Art of Digital
Publishing: A foundation of combined standards to support the future of publishing." by Daniel
Lynch and "Content Conditioning and Distribution for Dynamic Virtual Worlds." by Jeff
Terrance. Both of these are technical reports one dealing with how to effectively publish books
online and the other with rendering 3D graphics online.
The report written by Daniel Lynch details how there are problems with online textbooks,
especially math and science books that need to be interactive in some way to help better get the
point across. The first thing I noticed about this report was that Lynch used names of programs,
such as TeX and HTML5, while giving either a vague idea of what it was or nothing at all,
completely relying on the fact that the reader would already know what he was talking about.
The flow of the report is also hard to follow Lynch is very technical in his writing then in one
sentence he writes " I argue we should throw out all this noise and use what we already have."

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which to me seems arrogant and not at all what I was expecting. What Daniel Lynch did do well
was starting off his introduction, he writes " Technology is growing faster than the rate at which
the educational system is evolving, and the distance between these two vital functions of our
society needs to be reduced." This was a great way to show the reader exactly what this paper
was going to be about and it makes him sound passionate about this subject. My advice to
Lynch would be to understand the audience better and to site more examples giving the reader an
idea of what he is saying.
In Jeff Terrance's report he writes about the challenges of rendering 3D graphics in real
time online. Terrance is capable of making a potentially difficult subject and making the reader
have a easy understanding of the material. In this report there is some technical jargon that many
people that were not into computer graphic design or online gaming would not know such as
metaverse but Terrance gives a brief and easy to understand description ” The Metaverse: a place
where users are unconstrained by the rules of the virtual environment. New 3D art can be added
to the world, new behaviors can be programmed into virtual avatars, and new applications
can be built on a whim." Terrance also give a clear description about what each chapter in his
report is going to be about, this in particular is not impressive but the hyperlinks to the exact
chapter he is referring to is very nice. I tried to look for something to complain about in this
report but I couldn't, I even found myself reading much farther into the report than expected
because I found it to be interesting.
While both reports were well written Jeff Terrance is a stronger communicator. Not only
did he make the subject more enjoyable but designed his entire report better. Daniel Lynch not

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only used material that he didn't explain but also calculus graphs that were not needed and
distracting from the main purpose of his material. Technical writing should be about getting the
point across with as little confusion as possible and without making the reader feel inferior, both
which Lynch needed some help with.