Writing Engineering Reports

One of the main ways of communication in the engineering practice is the technical report. The technical report is a practical working document written by engineers for customers, managers, and other engineers. Over the years, I have seen that there is a lot of confusion of how to start writing an engineering report. The goal of this assignment is to help our students to be productive at writing technical reports while, at the time, making it an enjoyable experience. I believe that it does not have to take much time to produce a first draft of the report. And to produce a first draft is the most important part. One of the biggest problem of writing a technical report is suppressing the urge to procrastinate and put off the beginning of work. So, here we will analyze a strategy in the way we approach the writing of technical reports, as well as research papers.

There are two very important preliminary issues to establish before you start writing:

determine who is your audience - customers, managers, or other engineers
what kind of report is it - research, information, tutorial

Do not forget that your audience are the reviewers of your work. So, would the readers of your report be undergraduates, engineers, managers or researchers? And, as always with any paper, your primary reader is the reviewer (do not forget about your prof). And this truth include the reviewers of a journal paper. These are the gate keepers, and you need to address their concerns. The more you can get them addressed in the first draft, the better off you are.

The Big Picture

Producing the first draft is the creative part of the job. And, at this stage it is instrumental to resist the temptation to correct and edit as you write. This means that right now you write down ideas as they come. Do not stop to check the flow and how the sentences connect with each other. If this is your first report, they will not connect very well, but right now the creative part is important. So, do not forget that your job now is to produce a complete first draft, not a perfect first draft . Editing it will be the second stage of your work. It will be the critical thinking, analytical part of your job. And, editing at this point before you completed the first draft is a waste of time. Fixing a sentence and make it perfect if it might never appear in the final draft of your report, because it turns out to be irrelevant, is a waste of time.

The Writing Strategy

The experience shows that using the following procedure will help you to get the job done quickly and with the least amount of stress. Many scientists and engineeers use this procedure:

Just get started, don't procrastinate - Get something down on paper.
Create an outline by making a list of all your figures and tables . Put them in a order of logical presentation as they may appear in the results and discussion section. Always work from an outline . You need to work from an outline. I cannot emphasize more how important is to make this outline from images, figures, and tables that you obtained when working on your project. If you have to stop since you cannot finish the draft in one sitting, you can easily pick up the writing later if you have an outline. You can pick up where you left it, you don't have to read it over to start again. So, you have the data, and this part is easy and it motivates you to sit down and work on it.

Before you have a report to write in your head, you have your data: your sketches, the images of your setup, figures of raw and processed data, your tables of processed data.
Take those and put them in the order. Arrange them in some logical sequence, like you would arrange them for a talk. That list of setup images, figures and tables, in order, is really the outline for your paper/report.
You can look at an example of draft outline in this file that I created from data that I acquired and processed for the previous tutorials.

Do not write the introduction section at this time . The introduction section is the hardest part of the report to write. So, do not start there since the urge to procrastinate is going to kick in again.
Start with the experimental section . The easiest part to write is the experimental part. It is the part of the report that you are the most familiar with since you have done the experiments and measurements. So, start with experimental part and it will give you a feeling of progress.
Now write the "Results" and "Discussion" sections by following the outline that you created. This is a little bit more difficult to write than the experimental part, but you are really getting starting now! Now, when you are done with this step, you have a draft consisting of the experimental, results, and discussion parts.
Editing step . Once this first draft is done, now the really hard part of editing kicks in, but you have a first draft! And, this is the important thing. Now, the critical part is when you convert this first draft into clear, concise, and coherent English. Also, make sure that the science that you have written is correct.
Write the conclusions . From experience I can say that the easy way to write them is to use a numbered format: first, the ... conclusion 1 ..., second, ... conclusion 2..., etc. If you quite clearly separate them from one another then it is easy to see the contribution of your work.
Write the "Abstract" and "Acknowledgements" if necessary.
Now you are ready to Write the "Introduction" . There are two significant points that you need to cover in the introduction:

Why was the study done? What is its purpose?
You need to collect the relevant essential background information and put it together in the introduction. You need to be able to get to the readers sufficient background to understand what you did.

The very last step is to Write the "References" section of your report. This is well connected to the all the previous parts starting with the introduction part. So, it is a good idea to write some notes as you go through the first draft of the manuscript, i.e. the previous steps. In these notes indicate what references might be needed and what they would be about. But, you do not stop and collect the references at that time because this will interrupt the entire flow of your creative work. But, now when the manuscript is just about finished, you need to get the exact references so that the reviewers and the readers can really find the information without trouble. It will be extremely annoying to reviewers and readers when these are not done properly.

As a concluding remark we can use the words of Sir Francis Bacon "Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man". Each of these things that we do as engineers and scientists, we talk to our fellow scientists and engineers, we present our work in meetings and conferences, and do a lot of reading, but when we produce a report or a paper for publication, that is when we focus on our critical skills, when we want to make sure that our scientific arguments are correct and logical. So, writing is the most exacting part of what we do as engineers and scientists. In the end, I recommend you to read this very good short paper (half page only) of professor Royce Murray, editor of the journal "Analytical Chemistry" "Skillful writing of an awful research paper" . This little paper is a gem. In mock style, it tells you the worst things you can do in writing your manuscript.