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>I am taking a course entitled "Writing for the Computer Industry," and
>my instructor has a book called "The Power of Maps" by Denis Wood, as
>one of our required reading materials. However, I do not seem to
>understand the importance of 'mapping'in relation to technical
>writing.
Laila,
I'm not sure what "mapping" you were talking about, but if it's "Information
Mapping," that's an analysis and formatting technique for information. As far
as its relation to technical writing, it's just one possible method of gathering
and organizing information. Some of its methods I quite like, but some of the
formatting (a line between every paragraph, basically) isn't appropriate for
the documents I'm currently working on. I recently took a class in Information
Mapping.