I had the honor of working for Mayo Clinic as the lone technical writer in their Division of Engineering. I turned an initial 3-month contract into a 3 year assignment. This was among the most interesting and challenging work I’ve encountered, a highly rewarding part of my career.

The Tragus User Manual was an internal training document. It is, by design, less formal than my structured authoring writing samples because we were working under a set of entirely different guidelines. This was a project developed for research purposes and the intended audience was an audience of one, the senior researcher who was slated to oversee setting up and operating the hardware and software. This was not a marketed product, but was instead produced at the request of the Mayo Clinic Medical Education and Research Lab. The manual was written with the idea that future teams would have a starting point should the project prove viable and be expanded upon.  This was a very intensive writing assignment requiring in-depth hardware and software SME feedback.

The project presented several challenges that I’ll detail below. I think that the challenges I encountered make this an interesting project to discuss as a writing sample. It does provide a good look into my instructional writing style, though I did have to make many stylistic and linguistic concessions on this project.