Technical Report Writing

in Computer Science (CoSc

4161)
Chapter 2: The five steps of technical report writing
Contents
• Steps of technical report writing
• Preparation
• Research
• Organization
• Writing
• Revision
The five steps of technical report writing
• The best way to ensure the report will succeed is to follow
the following steps.
• Preparation
• Research
• Organization
• Writing
• Revision
1. Preparation
Establish your primary purpose.
Assess your audience (or readers) and the context.
• Formal analysis
• Interviews
• Questionnaires.
• Informal analysis
• Talking with persons who have access to research results and
customers.
• Reading notes and reports.
• Talking informally with people who will read the final document
Preparation continues
• Informal analysis
• Identify audiences’ characteristics (Language ability, Knowledge
& experience )
Assessing audience objectives and needs
• What the they should perform after reading the report
• What kind of questions the report should answer for
the audiences.
Determining the Scope.
Selecting the appropriate communication medium(email,
telephone, websites, face to face meeting)
2. Research
• Researches can be grouped in to two groups based on the
methods used to collect data:
• Primary research: Data are collected from the direct sources
using different primary data collection mechanisms
• Interviews
• Questionnaires
• Direct observation
• Experiments
Research Continues
• Secondary research: refers to gathering information that has
been analyzed, assessed, evaluated, compiled, or otherwise
organized into accessible form.
• Books
• Articles
• Reports
• Web documents
• e-mail discussions
Brainstorming questions
• How to search and gather relevant data from the
internet?
• List out the search engines you know.
• How can we evaluate data gathered from the internet,
articles, and books?
• Do you know any kind of special methods for writing
search queries in search engines?
3. Organization
• The data which is collected through the selected research
method should be organized.
• Things to consider
• Development Method: Selecting development or organizing
method
• Outline: Break down the collected data to into manageable
parts based on the selected development.
4. Writing
• The process of writing has three main stages
• Pre-writing
• You should invest some time planning what to write and how to transmit the information
• In order to do this you should consider
• (a) Audience and purpose
• (b) Tone and style of writing
• (d) Organization of information
• Writing
• Post-writing
• (a) Revising content and organization,
• (b) Checking for grammatical accuracy
• (c) Editing for style
• (d) Proofreading and peer review
5. Revision
• Check your draft for accuracy, completeness, and effectiveness in
achieving your purpose and main goal
• Then write a conclusion that ties the main ideas together and
emphatically makes a final significant point.
• The final point may be to write a recommendation and future works.
END!!