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?

Maximize the impact and precision of your message! Now in its fourth edition, the Microsoft Manual of Style provides essential guidance to content creators, journalists, technical writers, editors, and everyone else who writes about computer technology. Direct from the Editorial Style Board at Microsoft—you get a comprehensive glossary of both general technology terms and those specific to Microsoft; clear, concise usage and style guidelines with helpful examples and alternatives; guidance on grammar, tone, and voice; and best practices for writing content for the web, optimizing for accessibility, and communicating to a worldwide audience. Fully updated and optimized for ease of use, the Microsoft Manual of Style is designed to help you communicate clearly, consistently, and accurately about technical topics—across a range of audiences and media.

This detailed, example-driven guide illustrates how much technical communicators can do to make written texts more suitable for a global audience. You'll find dozens of guidelines that you won't find in any other source, along with thorough explanations of why each guideline is useful.

Technical Reports are usually written according to general standards, corporate - sign standards of the current university or company, logical rules and practical - periences. These rules are not known well enough among engineers. There are many books that give general advice in writing. This book is specialised in how to write Technical Reports and addresses not only engineers, but also natural sci- th tists, computer scientists, etc. It is based on the 6 edition published in 2008 by st Vieweg in German and is now published as 1 edition by Springer in English. Both authors of the German edition have long experience in educating en- neers at the University of Applied Sciences Hannover. They have held many l- tures where students had to write reports and took notes about all positive and negative examples that occurred in design reports, lab work reports, and in theses. Prof. Dr. Lutz Hering has worked for VOLKSWAGEN and DAIMLER and then changed to the University of Applied Sciences Hannover where he worked from 1974 until 2000. He held lectures on Technical Drawing, Construction and Design, CAD and Materials Science. Dr. Heike Hering worked nine years as a Technical Writer and was responsible for many CAD manuals in German and English. She is now employed at TÜV NORD Akademie, where she is responsible for E-Learning projects, technical documentation and software training and supervises students who are writing their theses. Prof. Dr. -Ing.

With this new edition, Science and Technical Writing confirms its position as the definitive style resource for thousands of established and aspiring technical writers. Editor Philip Rubens has fully revised and updated his popular 1992 edition, with full, authoritative coverage of the techniques and technologies that have revolutionized electronic communications over the past eight years.

This book is full of practical advice and useful examples to help students and engineers write clearly, accurately and impressively. This updated fourth edition features new material on technical notes, inspection reports and business cases, along with abstracts and summaries. It is an essential aid for today's engineers.