Forget the Past

Professional writing has very little to do with the composition and literature learnt at school: the objectives are different, the audience has different needs, and the rewards in engineering can be far greater. As engineers, we write for very distinct and restricted purposes, which are best achieved through simplicity.

English at school has two distinct foci: the analysis and appreciation of the great works of literature, and the display of knowledge. It is all a question of aim. A novel entertains. It forces the reader to want to know: what happens next. On the other hand, an engineering report is primarily designed to convey information. The engineer's job is helped if the report is interesting; but time is short and the sooner the meat of the document is reached, the better. The novel would start: "The dog grew ill from howling so ..."; the engineer's eport would start (and probably end): "The butler killed Sir John with a twelve inch carving knife".

In school we are taught to display knowledge. The more information and argument, the more marks. In industry, it is totally different. Here the wise engineer must extract only the significant information and support it with only the minimum-necessary argument. The expertise is used to filter the information and so to remove inessential noise. The engineer as expert provides the answers to problems, not an exposition of past and present knowledge: we use our knowledge to focus upon the important points.

For the Future

When you approach any document, follow this simple procedure:

1. Establish the AIM
2. Consider the READER
3. Devise the STRUCTURE
4. DRAFT the text
5. EDIT and REVISE

That is it. For the rest of this article, we will expand upon these points and explain some techniques to make the document effective and efficient - but these five stages (all of them) are what you need to remember.

Aim

You start with your aim. Every document must have a single aim - a specific, specified reason for being written. If you can not think of one, do something useful instead; if you can not decide what the document should achieve, it will not achieve it.

Once you have established your aim, you must then decide what information is necessary in achieving that aim. The reader wants to find the outcome of your thoughts: apply your expertise to the available information, pick out the very-few facts which are relevant, and state them precisely and concisely.

The Reader

A document tells somebody something. As the writer, you have to decide what to tell and how best to tell it to the particular audience; you must consider the reader.

There are three considerations:

• What they already know affects what you can leave out.
• What they need to know determines what you include.
• What they want to know suggests the order and emphasis of your writing.

For instance, in a products proposal, marketing will want to see the products differentiation and niche in the market place; finance will be interested in projected development costs, profit margins and risk analysis; and R&D will want the technical details of the design. To be most effective, you may need to produce three different reports for the three different audiences.

The key point, however, is that writing is about conveying information - conveying; that means it has to get there. Your writing must be right for the reader, or it will lost on its journey; you must focus upon enabling the reader's access to the information.

Structure

Writing is very powerful - and for this reason, it can be exploited in engineering. The power comes from its potential as an efficient and effective means of communication; the power is derived from order and clarity. Structure is used to present the information so that it is more accessible to the reader.

In all comes down to the problem of the short attention span. You have to provide the information in small manageable chunks, and to use the structure of the document to maintain the context. As engineers, this is easy since we are used to performing hierarchical decomposition of designs - and the same procedure can be applied to writing a document.

While still considering the aim and the reader, the document is broken down into distinct sections which can be written (and read) separately. These sections are then each further decomposed into subsections (and sub-subsections) until you arrive at simple, small units of information - which are expressed as a paragraph, or a diagram.

Every paragraph in your document should justify itself; it should serve a purpose, or be removed. A paragraph should convey a single idea. There should be a statement of that key idea and (possibly) some of the following:

• a development of the idea
• an explanation or analogy
• an illustration
• support with evidence
• contextual links to reinforce the structure

As engineers, though, you are allowed to avoid words entirely in places; diagrams are often much better than written text. Whole reports can be written with them almost exclusively and you should always consider using one in preference to a paragraph. Not only do diagrams convey some information more effectively, but often they assist in the analysis and interpretation of the data. For instance, a pie chart gives a quicker comparison than a list of numbers; a simple bar chart is far more intelligible than the numbers it represents. The only problem with diagrams is the writer often places less effort in their design than their information-content merits - and so some is lost or obscure. They must be given due care: add informative labels and titles, highlight any key entries, remove unnecessary information.