TECHNICAL REPORT WRITING TODAY provides thorough coverage of technical writing basics, techniques, and applications. Through a practical focus with varied examples and exercises, students internalize the skills necessary to produce clear and effective documents and reports. Project worksheets help students organize their thoughts and prepare for assignments, and Focus boxes highlight key information and recent developments in technical communication. Extensive individual and collaborative exercises expose students to different kinds of technical writing problems and solutions. Annotated student examples--more than 100 in all--illustrate different writing styles and approaches to problems. Numerous short and long examples throughout the text demonstrate solutions for handling writing assignments in current career situations. The four-color artwork in the chapter on creating visuals keeps pace with contemporary workplace capabilities. The Tenth Edition offers the latest information on using electronic resumes and documenting electronic sources and Ethics and Globalization sidebars that highlight these two important topics in the technical communication field. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

This book is based on, and expanded from, a course on technical report writing that the author has presented for over 20 years. Are you an engineer who writes technical reports as part of your job, yet you wish you could make them shorter and better - and write them faster? Maybe you write external reports for your consultancy's clients, or internal reports for senior managers. Maybe sometimes you think you signed up to be an engineer not a writer. But now you are a writer as well as an engineer and you wish that writing a good report was easier. This book will show you how to write shorter and better reports, and write them faster. The author is a retired chartered engineer and who has written about 100 articles and four books - published by Kogan Page, Macmillan and San Francisco Press. Here is just one comment from one client who arranged for the course on which this book is based to be presented to his staff: 'Thank you for the course. All the feedback I've had so far has been very positive... which is quite unusual as they can be a cynical bunch.' Well, not so much as cynical as don't like 'airy-fairy' ideas. The book is down-to-earth with practical ideas.You will learn: - How to break the task into three phases: planning, writing and editing.- How to avoid the biggest complaint about technical reports.- How to use three layers of sequencing to make the writing easier.- The most common format for technical reports - and three others. - How much detail to include.- Twelve big tips to improve the writing and several smaller tips.- How to satisfy both technical and non-technical readers.- How to cut the waffle.- How to edit your own work, which is never an easy thing to do.- Seventeen consistency checks to look for when editing.- How to get the best from the Microsoft grammar checker.- How to use the readability statistics.- Variations between British and US English.PLUS: A style guide with over 130 items of guidance, including all the punctuation marks. Did you know that the hyphen has been described as the punctuation mark to drive you mad?

Many factors affect the amount of temperature-induced movement that occurs in a building and the extent to which this movement can occur before serious damage develops or extensive maintenance is required. In some cases joints are being omitted where they are needed, creating a risk of structural failures or causing unnecessary operations and maintenance costs. In other cases, expansion joints are being used where they are not required, increasing the initial cost of construction and creating space utilization problems. As of 1974, there were no nationally acceptable procedures for precise determination of the size and the location of expansion joints in buildings. Most designers and federal construction agencies individually adopted and developed guidelines based on experience and rough calculations leading to significant differences in the various guidelines used for locating and sizing expansion joints. In response to this complex problem, Expansion Joints in Buildings: Technical Report No. 65 provides federal agencies with practical procedures for evaluating the need for through-building expansion joints in structural framing systems. The report offers guidelines and criteria to standardize the practice of expansion joints in buildings and decrease problems associated with the misuse of expansions joints. Expansions Joints in Buildings: Technical Report No. 65 also makes notable recommendations concerning expansion, isolation, joints, and the manner in which they permit separate segments of the structural frame to expand and to contract in response to temperature fluctuations without adversely affecting the buildings structural integrity or serviceability.

This report issues a call for urgent action to combat the growing epidemic of obesity, which now affects developing and industrialized countries alike. Adopting a public health approach, the report responds to both the enormity of health problems associated with obesity and the notorious difficulty of treating this complex, multifactorial disease. With these problems in mind, the report aims to help policy-makers introduce strategies for prevention and management that have the greatest chance of success. The importance of prevention as the most sensible strategy in developing countries, where obesity coexists with undernutrition, is repeatedly emphasized. Recommended lines of action, which reflect the consensus reached by 25 leading authorities, are based on a critical review of current scientific knowledge about the causes of obesity in both individuals and populations. While all causes are considered, major attention is given to behavioural and societal changes that have increased the energy density of diets, overwhelmed sophisticated regulatory systems that control appetite and maintain energy balance, and reduced physical activity. Specific topics discussed range from the importance of fat content in the food supply as a cause of population-wide obesity, through misconceptions about obesity held by both the medical profession and the public, to strategies for dealing with the alarming prevalence of obesity in children. "... the volume is clearly written, and carries a wealth of summary information that is likely to be invaluable for anyone interested in the public health aspects of obesity and fatness, be they students, practitioner or researcher." - Journal of Biosocial Science