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Hi, this is Ariana from Academic Skills.
This video looks at how to structure and write of professional engineering technical
report, taking into account your reader and purpose.
Technical reports of professional documents that are vital for engineers.
They are designed to record and communicate your aim findings and recommendations,
often for a varied audience.
The concepts you're trying to convey are often complex.
Yet your explanations need to be clear, accurate and easy to understand.
You might be writing for a fellow engineer or a non-expert, someone
from a different discipline to you, or a government department representative with no
engineering background. So clarity is key.
Your reader is busy and probably won't read your technical report from beginning to
end. Instead, they're likely to scan for the information they
need and read only that section.
Or they may go straight to your recommendations and go back to read your analysis
later. This means that you need to write with your reader in mind
and place the key information where your reader expects it to be.
Technical reports are often used for making decisions.
So you need to present what you did, what you found, what this means
and what you're recommending as a result when you're writing a technical report.
You, as the writer, have an aim, something you need
your reader to know, do or understand.
You need to communicate this to your reader clearly, so they can use the information
to better understand the situation.
Make a decision and if necessary, take action.
The content, structure and style of your report will depend on who your audience
is and what they need to know. Before you write,
ask yourself what and how much content should I include and in what
form. This includes, how much background knowledge can I assume?
Would a table graph or chart help to communicate the information more clearly than
plain text? What's the most logical way to organise
the body of the report?
What fool my readers expect to see and in what order?
Will my audience understand highly technical language or do I need to
write for a non-expert?
Let's take a look at the usual structure of a technical report.
First, you usually need to include a title page with a meaningful
title, a summary or abstract and a table
of contents. The executive summary or abstract is a stand alone
section that goes before the body of the report and provides a complete
and concise summary of the key information your reader needs,
without them having to read your full report.
What you include in the body of your report will depend on your audience and aim.
Reports have an introduction.
This is where you include the background information and outline the aim and structure
of your report. Organise the body of your report into clear sections
which present and discuss your findings with descriptive headings to help
your reader jump to the section most relevant to them.
In some reports, recommendations and conclusions are separated
and in others you might find them together or just one or the other.
It's up to you to choose the most logical way to present the information for your reader
and then indicate this clearly to your reader using specific headings.
Your conclusion briefly summarizes your main findings and your recommendations
suggest specific actions arising from the conclusions.
If the focus of your report was to make recommendations, you might find this
becomes a section in the body before the conclusion.
It's always best to check the requirements of your brief so you know where to
place your focus.
If you include other sources in your technical report, be sure to include
your reference list at the end of your document.
You may also choose to save detailed or extensive data for your appendices
for your reader to refer to if needed.
Technical reports will be one of the most common documents you write.
As an engineer, your role as the expert is to clearly communicate
your findings, to design your report so your reader can easily find
and understand the information that's important to them.
If this is your first time writing an engineering technical report, have a look
at example technical reports from your discipline.
A quick online search will yield a range of samples for you to review
in order to bring the ideas we've shared with you in this video to life.
For more tips and resources, search for Academic Skills Unimelb.
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