A guide to finding examples of technical and professional writing for projects in this course
How do I find examples of professional writing genres? (and what's a genre again?)
Searching the internet (aka "googling it) is trickier than it looks. The default search interface understandably prioritizes very simple search strategies. But simple search strategies mostly return simple search results, and may not always be helpful, especially for the very specific kinds of researching you're doing in this course. Googling "amicus brief" or "incident report" or "things police chiefs write" will take you to vague or generic information and the same redacted templates and illegible samples that many ad-infested and overly-simplistic websites use.
You need specific information. So you need more advanced search strategies. It helps to understand how search engines and database searches work. I recommend the Power Searching with Google course, an open, self-paced course that introduces some of the specialized strategies and tools you can use with internet search engines. The University of Illinois has a useful comparison of library databases and search engines.
Specific search, specific strategy
When looking for examples of technical and professional writing online, I might start with a general internet search, but I know that because Google doesn't index every page of every site on the internet, and that not every PDF or HTML document on every website will show up on a web search, I'm going to have to use some different strategies:
- filter search results
- select effective keywords
- use operators to refine search results
- use advanced search instead of basic search
Among the most useful of these strategies can be a targeted search of a particular website or repository. Also, instead of sticking with the same few keywords I try to select effective keywords, keep track of the ones that give me good results, and pay attention to the language I'm finding in my results for alternate keywords. I use advanced techniques like adding operators to pre-filter my results, using limited searches with quotation marks, or starting with an advanced search query.
Because I'm a student of professional and technical communication, I know that institutions generate, sponsor, and have authorship of tons of professional and technical writing. This means I can do some detective work and search institutions' web content to find the information I'm looking for.
For example, I might start my Google search looking for a list of major law firms in Texas, or a specific one if I know of it. I might search for a list of legal bloggers, or search for professional organizations (is there an association for police chiefs? what about unions?).
I don't stay on Google too long. I know I should also look at federal, state, or municipal websites (most often ending with a .gov). State court systems have websites, counties have websites, cities have websites, and so do professional organizations and individuals.
When I'm scanning organizations' web pages, I look in navigation menus and page footers for key terms like publications, transparency, or reports and follow those links. I use website-specific searches rather than full internet searches. I vary between specific names for genres (i.e. amicus briefs) and general ones (i.e. briefs, proposals, reports). If the site has a publically-searchable database (lots of court systems do), I might try to search by date rather than case number, if the system will let me. Then I just put in a large span of dates (cases in the last year, for instance) and see what the systems deliver. Or I could look for links to recent information and see if I can get lucky. Or, if I know about a particular case I want to study, I can search for information about it in particular.