How Engineers Spend Their Time:

Early Career
______% Engineering: Designing, measuring,
calculating, problem-solving
______% Communicating: Writing reports,
letters, memos, proposals; giving
presentations, talking to colleagues
and bosses and customers and clients

25-50
50-75
Performance evaluation and job advancement usually
depend more on communication skills than on technical
skills.
How Engineers Spend Their Time:
Later Career
______% Engineering: Problem Solving
______% Communicating: Writing reports,
letters, memos, proposals; giving
presentations, talking to colleagues
and bosses and customers and clients

5-10
90-95
As you advance in your career, even more of your time
is spent communicating rather than calculating.
Tips on Technical Report Writing
Dont waste words. Dont say obvious things. (Pollution is
a serious problem.) Dont say things your audience
doesnt need to know (long irrelevant explanations,
detailed math).
Use spell-check and grammar-check!
Its (contraction of it is) versus its (possessive pronoun).
Its a nice day. Put the CD back in its case.
Affect (verb) versus effect (noun). Stress affects everyone
differently. The effect of stress can be negative.
Include proper citations of others work.
Tips on Technical Report Writing
Use the full term, then put the acronym in
parentheses
Eliminate fluff (e.g. Back in the year of 1973,
A man by the name of John Smith,
Basically (this is the written equivalent of
like)
Avoid vague generalizations. (e.g. very
expensive, very difficult, very high
temperature)



Tips on Technical Report Writing
Proofread carefully. Look for missing words,
extra words, and wrong (but correctly spelled)
words like:
due/do
form/from
their/there
an/and
where/were

Avoid sentence fragments. Every sentence must
have a subject and verb. Also to measure
things about the tube. doesnt.
Avoid choppy sentences, especially if they
repeat words and phrases. Example:
This report is about permeation tubes.
Permeation tubes are devices that...
This report is about permeation tubes,
devices that...
Dr. Lims objections
Cut and paste from the lab write-up
Data used as singular
Missing units in graphs, tables, and sample
calculations
Axes or curves lacking labels
Failure to refer to and explain tables and figures in
the text
Dr. Lims objections
Font size too small in Excel spreadsheet
Use of first person and present tense in procedure
description
Using someone elses data
Copying from a previous lab report



A good report:
addresses intended audience
provides introductions and conclusions for
internal sections as well as the whole paper
provides transitions between sections
looks professional in style and appearance
recognizes that the document should be
convincing
How to Write Anything
Free-write a rough draft. Just writedont
proofread, edit, revise, correct, look back at all.
Then
Revise. Organize, check for introduction and
conclusion for all sections, build in transitions,
get rid of non-necessory things, spell-check and
grammar-check.
Revise again.
Read it out loud. This can help you detect
awkward phrases, missing commas, etc.
I believe in miracles
in every area of life
except writing.
Experience has shown me
that there are no miracles in writing. The
only thing
that produces good writing
is hard work.