FAQ on Technical Writing
A technical report is a document that describes the progress, results, or process of scientific or technical research. A technical report may also include some conclusions and/or recommendations of the research. Technical reports are considered to be ?non-archival? publications so that they can be published elsewhere in peer-reviewed venues with or without modification. ~ClickHelp Glossary
Here I?ll describe what you should do before writing, and what elements a usual tech report includes.
So, before starting to write a report, you should do some preparations:
- Establish the message of your report. You should clearly understand for what reason you?re writing and what information you want to provide your documentation.
- Define your audience. The process of writing a tech report is the same as writing documentation. Before starting to write a tech report, define your target audience to make your content more relevant to them ? if people of your field read your report, it can be more ?technical? in language and detail. In another case, cut back on the jargon for non-expert readers.
- Create an outline. Technical reports are usually very structured, so create a draft to follow it to make your report clear and well-structured.
Here are the elements of a technical report:
- Title page
- Introduction
- Summary
- Results
- Body
- Conclusion
- Details
Let?s examine them in detail.
Title Page
The title page comes first in a technical report. It contains the title, the date, institution details, and the like. Keep in mind, that the content of the title page is not added up to the word count of a report.
Introduction
In this part, highlight the main goals of your paper clearly to help your readers understand the purpose you?re writing for. You can also describe the flow of your report to let your readers know what they should expect.
Summary
Write an overview of the whole report here. It usually includes the results and conclusions.
Body
This is the main part of your report because it carries your content. Introduce the information using small subheadings to make the body section more presentable and clear, so readers will be guided with these subheadings.
You can also use bulleted or numbered lists to point main ideas in order to help your readers understand what are you talking about.
Conclusion
A conclusion implies a summary of the main points that you report in the body, what decision you came. Use words to show that you are concluding your work to prepare readers that you?re about to finish. The conclusion should be short and concise. But the main idea is to cover every question that a reader may ask.
Details
This part states the details of the technical report subject.
Bibliography
In a bibliography, list the sources you use for writing the report and research. When you finished with your report, it?s a good idea to use a plagiarism tool from this list: ?Top 10 Free Plagiarism Detection Tools? to prove whether there is plagiarism in your work or not.
Acknowledgments
Here you should list all the people who took part in writing this tech report, who helped you, who proofread your work and so on. So, appreciate other people?s efforts.
Appendices
In this section, you should include graphs or diagrams but if you don?t have any materials, just skip the section.
What techniques help you write technical reports?
