Improving the Communication Effectiveness of Civil Engineering Management Procedures.

摘要

In this thesis the authors report on investigations of the clarity and readability of written instructions as factors which influence job knowledge. Using carefully selected effective-writing techniques, a portion of the Civil Engineering procedure manual was re-written for real property maintenance management. It was then compared for communicability with that of the current procedure manual by administering a job knowledge test to a sample of civil engineering employees. A Gunning Fog Index measurement and an opinion survey were also used to determine the differences between the two versions of the manual. Although additional research involving larger samples will be needed to verify the findings, the authors found that all three measures used converged in the same favorable direction. The findings indicated that, for the population studied, the clarity and readability of written instructions did influence job knowledge, and that the writing techniques used in the re-written manual produced a higher level of job knowledge than did the currently used narrative writing style.