Guidelines for the first technical report assignment
Approximately 5-10 pages (not counting title page, acknowledgments, and table of contents)
For this assignment, I am asking you to investigate and write a report about a technical question, problem, innovation, or opportunity. To a great degree, the subject of your report will be up to you. It could be something connected with your academic or career plans or experience, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. The main thing is that it should be something that you will be motivated to work on and learn more about.
(Please note that I am going to ask you to submit a proposal for approval, and I reserve the right to discourage you from pursuing projects that I can’t responsibly advise you to undertake. This is something that doesn’t come up often. With most subjects, we can find a way of making it work.)
As we have discussed, a good technical report should be as clear and efficient as possible, but it should also be substantive. While the length of your report should be dictated by functional considerations, somewhere between five and ten pages (not counting title page, etc.) seems like a reasonable scale.
What counts as a technical question?
For our purposes, something counts as a technical question if it connects with your career interests or work experience in some reasonably substantial way, OR if it is concerned with the way something works in practical terms.
Scope and level of detail
Good technical writing provides clear, actionable information while respecting the complexity of technical challenges as they exist in the real world. To do that, it is generally advisable to focus on something very specific: a very small slice of a larger issue or interest.
Audience
As we have discussed, understanding your audience is critical to the effectiveness of a technical report. For our purposes, the actual audience of your reports is going to be your professor and classmates. With that in mind, I encourage you to write your report so that other people in our class (including me) will be able to read and understand it. This means that you should write your report with an awareness that readers may not be experts in the field that you are addressing.
If you wish, however, you may frame your report as if you were writing to a specific audience other than our class (for example, as if you were advising the owner of a certain kind of business, or the director of a certain kind of technical project).
Structure
For reference, the IET guide to technical report writing suggests that a technical report should comprise:
Title page
Acknowledgments: A brief statement of appreciation for anyone who helped you produce the report. For example, if you were to consult with the STCC Writing Center, it would be appropriate to acknowledge the Writing Center and your tutor. (Hint, hint…)
Summary: A brief statement of the essential points of your report, including its main results and conclusions
Table of Contents: Should enable readers to quickly identify and locate the different sections and subsections of the report.
Introduction: Should state the objectives of the report and may discuss any background information necessary to understand it, such as essential terms, concepts, and context.
Procedure: An account of the methods and materials you used to produce the report.
Findings: A review of the information you obtained.
Conclusions: A summary statement of your findings.
Recommendations: A statement of the action you would recommend on the basis of your findings.
Appendices: Any supporting information or documentation that you think it would be helpful to include but which does not fit into the above sections of the report.
The guide to technical report writing produced by Helen Prance for the University of Sussex School of Engineering and Informatics recommends a generally similar structure, though you will note a few differences:
Title page
Summary: Prance notes that this should summarize the entire report, including important results and conclusions
Table of contents
Introduction: Prance states that this should state the objectives of the report and discuss how the report will approach its subject.
Body: Prance notes that this should be divided into numbered and headed sections that arrange the main subjects of the report in a logical order.
Conclusions: Prance’s guide does not explicitly call for a recommendations section, but any actions that are being recommended should be clearly stated here.
References: Note that the IET guide does not explicitly call for a references section, though it does discuss the citation of sources.
Acknowledgments: Note the difference in order between the IET and Prance’s guide.
Appendices: Prance states that the appendices should contain any information that is necessary for a full understanding of your report (such as full data and research findings) but not required for a practical understanding of its main points. Here are some of the things that I would encourage you to do in your project:
As you will observe, there are some differences between the two guides, and if we were to consult more guides across more fields we would likely find more differences.
Citations
Since this is an academic paper, your report should include citations and references appropriate to the field that you are working in. If you are unsure of what citation style to use, you may use APA or MLA as a default. (Since we are going to be working across a variety of fields, I am less concerned with the style of your citations than I am with the substance of them.)
Formatting
Both of the guides we have looked at provide some recommendations about formatting.
The main thing that I will be looking for when I read your technical report is how clearly and effectively you communicate.
The purpose of a technical report is to accurately and efficiently deliver information that will enable the reader of the report to understand and respond effectively to a technical problem, challenge, or opportunity. In other words, technical reports serve as tools for practical problem-solving.
With that in mind, here are some of the things that go into an effective technical report:
Provides a clear and practical assessment of the problem, challenge, or opportunity at hand.
Provides solid evidence in support of that assessment, and presents that evidence effectively and responsibly. (Things to avoid here might include using evidence that is irrelevant, inaccurate, fraudulent, or misrepresented.)
Provides an effective and responsible analysis of the evidence presented in the report, demonstrating how that evidence supports the report’s principal conclusions and recommendations. (For the most part, evidence doesn’t simply speak for itself. You need to explain what you think it shows and explain why and how you think it shows it.)
Up to this point, I’ve mainly been talking about the substance of your argument. However, I’m also looking at the way you present your argument. Here are some of the things that I focus on:
How effective is the overall structure and organization of your work?
How effectively do you construct and connect individual paragraphs?
How effectively do you construct and connect individual sentences?
Do you present your evidence clearly and cite it appropriately?
In general, do you write in a clear and engaging way, and do you take care of the “little things” that could distract your reader or take away from the effectiveness of your argument? (For example, spelling and grammatical errors.)
It’s important to note that I apply these standards somewhat differently in different contexts.
