Good document design is both science and art. The particular design of a document—what it contains, what color scheme it follows, what alignment strategy it reflects, and so on—is the result of a series of choices made by the designer.

Learning to write memos can be challenging because they are one of many genres of correspondence often composed by professional writers.

Memos are brief printed documents traditionally used for routine, day-to-day communication within organizations

Have empathy, be polite, and offer to assist with other questions or requests.

You don't want to submit perfect progress reports and then suddenly your supervisor finds out the project is behind schedule!

But memos evolved into emails, although paper memos are still created, and often then scanned and distributed electronically.

You should take time to consider the purpose of your document in order to determine how you should express the message you wish to convey. Obviously, you want the message to reach your audience, and you will probably want the reader to take some action in response to your message.

ou “adapt” your writing to meet the needs, interests, and background of the readers who will be reading your writing. In reality, the lack of audience analysis and adaptation is one of the root causes of most of the problems you find in professional, technical documents—particularly instructions where it surfaces most glaringl

Make sure your tables, charts, and graphs are appropriate to your audience, subject matter, and purpose—don't zap beginners with massive, highly technical constructions they can't understand.

Such a practice was common and legal, but it was not at all ethical to deny sick persons the ability to afford the health care they needed.

Ethics is one of the most important topics in technical communication. When you can communicate clearly and effectively, and when it is your task to help others to understand an object, process, or procedure, it is your responsibility to do so in an ethical fashion.

Good communication skills, particularly in writing, are essential if you are going to succeed in the workplace. The working world depends on written communication because within modern organizations, almost every action is documented in writing. Furthermore, many kinds of writing, including correspondence, presentations using visuals like PowerPoint, technical reports, and formal reports are prevalent in most workplaces. And the writing has to be good, accurate, clear, and grammatically correct. Kyle Wiens (2012) writes in an article in the Harvard Business Review: "If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building. I have a zero tolerance to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid."