The main parts of this course guide focus on applications--ways technical writing skills are applied in the real world. However, these applications use varying combinations of information structures. An information structure is a type of information content (such as descriptive writing), a way of organizing information (such as a comparison or classification), or both.The information structures reviewed in this appendix are the ones commonly used in technical writing. Of course, there are other structures--maybe some that scholars of technical writing have not yet pinned a label on, but these are the most common and the most readily visible. And of course some of these structures blend together. The main thing is that by knowing these, you have the intellectual tools for quickly organizing and structuring just about any writing project.
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