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If you need to create, compile, edit or manage technical documents, an upcoming IMechE training course will give you the tools you need for the task. Technical Report Writing, next running in Manchester on 7 April, is aimed at improving the quality of your technical reports and reducing the time needed to produce them.
Here are five expert tips from Jean Billingsley, one of the course leaders, to help you write successful reports.
Avoid distractions
Close your email, silence your phone, say you’re not available on Teams. This is a good time-management tip generally – but particularly when you're writing because you need to get your thoughts in order.
It's very easy to get distracted if a little envelope pops up and says you have an email – even if you don't spend any time on it, it can break your flow and make you lose track. Cut out distractions to improve your focus.
Put yourself in the reader’s shoes
You're not writing for yourself, so try to understand where your reader is coming from. What would help them? What are they looking for? What's their background?
It’s a useful perspective – sometimes you can get a bit too close to what you're working on and you forget that somebody outside your team probably doesn't know as much about it as you do.
Always use a template
This one little tool can help you in so many ways: it can give you a good structure, save you a lot of time, and help you avoid cutting and pasting. It also takes care of so many fiddly things like font, formatting and proofing language.
It also helps with accessibility because there are things that can be built into templates, such as header style and font type. For people with dyslexia, for example, the guidelines are to have a clear distinction between the header and the body text, with the header font about 20% bigger. A template takes care of those things so you don’t need to worry about it.
Companies often have in-house templates. Sometimes there are two tiers, with a Word document including company information and details such as styles and fonts. Then there are specific templates for technical reports or other types of document.
Don’t just dive in and start writing
This is something we see quite often. If you just dive in straight away, you can end up writing things that are not relevant to the topic or missing things out.
Before you start, take a few minutes to plan your report. Understand what you want to say and what the report needs, including where your readers are coming from.
Remember the objective – don’t show off
Clear communication is key – we want people to read our report, then act on it. Writing is not about showing off and sounding clever or using pompous language. Write what you need to get the point across and don’t bamboozle the reader.
If we don’t write clearly, especially when we have to convey technically complex ideas, our reader may not understand what we’re asking them to do. Even worse, they may give up and not bother reading our report at all!
IMechE’s Technical Report Writing course next runs in Manchester on 7 April. Find out more and book on the IMechE training page.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.