Technical Report Writing

There are several useful ways to categorize the sections of a technical report. In this Chapter, they are grouped according to their rhetorical purpose. This is the most useful way to look at these pieces of text which, taken together, make up the bulk of most technical reports. The main elements are:

·        Descriptive
·        Analytical
·        Comparative
·        Conclusive
·        Persuasive
·        Summaries

The purpose of each is discussed in turn and examples are provided. Finally the role of reference lists, indexes and appendices completes this Chapter.

It is helpful to think of your report as made up of elements or sections, each one of which serves your basic rhetorical purpose. Look critically at your outline or report plan before you begin writing to see whether this is true or not. If some part of your plan doesn't seem to support your purpose consider eliminating it. It will probably only add word weight to your report and interfere with getting your main message to the readers.

While not an all inclusive list, the following six elements can usually be found in all technical reports.

These are perhaps the simplest report elements to write. Their purpose is to provide the reader with a word picture of some thing, condition or problem addressed in your report. Your High School English teacher would have called this "expository" writing. Most of the sentences in a descriptive paragraph are declarative,; i.e., they simply state a fact or objectively describe a situation.

If you have a great deal of description to provide do either or both of the following. First, wherever possible, generalize. For example, if you need to describe the condition of the street system of your City say something like, "Most of the streets are in fair to good condition, except on the east side where poor subgrade soils have led to numerous potholes and larger pavement failures." When you can't easily generalize, compress the description by creating tables or graphs to illustrate the conditions.

The analytical sections of the report, by contrast, are often the most difficult to write. Explaining to your reader an often long and difficult reasoning process can be challenging. Again, in order not to lose the majority of your audience's attention, you must write in a way that is almost the reverse of the actual process you probably used to arrive at your conclusions. Analysis usually proceeds in the opposite direction; i.e., from the particular detail to the generalization. It helps to formulate the analytical sections or paragraphs of your report by stating first your conclusions and then, second, third, fourth, etc. your reasons for believing them to be correct.

There are very few technical problems for which there is only one "right" solution. For that reason, you will frequently need to be able to compare several possible solutions to each other and present to your audience the one you believe should be selected. Comparisons may be further complicated by the fact that you may wish to compare your solutions on several bases. Look now at Figure 6-1, below.

This kind of "comparison matrix" can save pages of text. Ask yourself how many words it might take to compare twenty lawnmowers to each other at the level of detail this table does. Also note that the table is arranged so as to provide what is likely to be the most important information to the reader first. It lists price first, an overall rating second, even-ness third and so on. Finally, to make this an even better example, the table uses a graphical system of rating each set and feature, shown in the upper right hand corner of the table. In the original, this is also in color which makes the effect even better. You can tell at a glance which are the better sets and which less desirable. They are listed in order of best to worst and you need only look for the solid black circle symbols along side each model to tell why it was down-rated.

Use this kind of comparison wherever you can. It is easily understood by most of your readers and reduces your job as technical writer to summarizing it in the text of your report.

As you complete each main task of your technical investigation, take the time to assess the results. It is time well spent and will save you hours when you begin the writing part of your task. Ask yourself, what can we conclude from what we've just done? Are the results what we expected? Are they considerably different or surprising in any way? Are they reasonable? Or, will they require that we change our original plan of attack? If the answer to the last question is yes, then it is clearly time to go back and look at your report outline. Does it still fit the data you have or must you reformulate your writing plan as well as your technical problem solving procedure?

If the plans are both still good, this is a good time to write part of your report. Start with a simple list. List on a piece of paper the main conclusions you now feel confident in reaching. Then re-order the list so that the most important conclusions are first and secondary conclusions or side issues are listed last. Look at this list critically. Are these the conclusions you can support with your data? Is your logic correct or can someone shoot holes through it?

So far, so good. Now write the conclusive sections of your report within the framework you've decided upon. State the main conclusions first followed by the most telling reasons you arrive at those conclusions. Then, direct the reader to the parts of the report where he/she may find the detailed data that supports those conclusions.

Technical reports are very often written for the expressed purpose of persuading someone else to do something the author(s) of the report desires. Sometimes the desired action is to fund some project. At other times the report is written to effect some change within the organization. Whatever the reason, if you cannot convince others of the logic of your proposal, it will fail.

To persuade someone to do something, even something they are inclined to do anyway, you must give them some reason to do it. In other words, few of us do anything we think might harm us, or upset the status quo with which we are comfortable, or which might require more work on our part unless we can see something in it for us.

Persuasive elements usually appear in the conclusions and recommendations sections of your report. They need to be written as convincingly as possible. Remember, you are not trying to convince yourself; you are trying to convince your primary audience. If you failed early on to identify and characterize that audience, you have no chance of convincing "them". If you do know that audience pretty well, you have the first of your persuasion problems solved. You know what kinds of arguments to present. You know, for example that the Budget Director is concerned about costs, primarily and perhaps improved productivity second. You know your boss wants to look good to his superiors. Does your report make him look good? Can you rephrase some parts of it so that he can get credit for his contributions to the report? You need to state your recommendations as positively as possible and support them with the best arguments and evidence you have.

Your second problem in persuasion is to anticipate objections. It is likely that your solution will have some negative effects somewhere. It will probably cost something. It may require that additional staff be hired. It will probably affect the way people in your organization work. All these things are threatening and you must do two things about them.

First, do not duck these issues. And second, offer suggestions for meeting these reasonable objections. Everybody has problems; even your boss. Don't bring him/her yet another problem. Bring solutions.

Winston Churchill, again. Churchill had a three part formula for any speech. It went something like this; tell them what you are going to tell them, tell it, then tell them what you just told them. Translated for our purposes this advice may be rephrased; Summarize each main report section, sandwich in the substantive discussion and data, and then reiterate the main points. It may at first seem wasteful to repeat what we've already said elsewhere in our report, but it is repetition with a purpose. The reader needs to be reminded from time to time what those main points are. It is easy for him/her and, even for you as the writer, to forget where this discussion is all leading. The longer and more technically involved the report, the truer this is.

Try to summarize often but briefly. It is a good idea, just to remind yourself to do so, to begin each section with a summary or overview of the contents of that section. This has a decided advantage for some of your readers. Many of them do not need to know, and haven't got the time for, all the detail in your report. Help them by letting them know what is in each section before they have to read it all only to find out it does not contain any information of value from their point of view.

Listing references is tedious but necessary. Whenever you can, list them all in one place and number them. It is by far the easiest way for you and for your readers, particularly if you have many references to cite.

Bibliographies, a list of books cited, can be structured similarly. Most secretaries' handbooks can be relied upon to suggest some of the proper forms for creating these. Some of the better word processors will even create these for you as you write and tie the reference to the text in the report.

Creating an index is more of an art than most of us wish to undertake. Still there are several indexing computer programs around which help take much of the work out of this chore. Only the longest, most formal reports require an index but if you feel you need one, by all means include it. It is of tremendous help to your readers by saving them from thumbing through and guessing where in this long document you hid some obscure detail they need.

It is not unusual for the appendix to a report to be longer than the report itself. This is the place to bury that mass of detailed data that few, if any, of your readers really need. In many kinds of reports it simply cannot be left out. The report might be incomplete without it or cannot be checked by others, but only you and a few of your audience members will need to look at that data again.

The executive summary is the first thing to look for in any sizable report, after you've read the title. If you don't find one, you know the writer did not consider his audience's time of much value or failed to understand how busy they are. By that failure, the author has made sure that at least half of his potential audience will not read his report and probably not support his recommendations.

Number the pages of your report and the Figures, maps, graphs and other illustrations by Chapter or Section. This is preferable to simply beginning with page 1 and numbering pages consecutively thereafter.

The advantage of this will be obvious if your report goes through several revisions from the first through the final draft. Each major revision will otherwise require renumbering the entire report, including all the Figure numbers. Number the Figures separately and don't give them a page number. Doing so will avoid renumbering all the Figures each time you decide to add or delete one. Don't worry if the Figure numbers go; 4-1, 4-2, 4-6, 4-8. It doesn't matter to the reader and needn't matter to you that there is no Figure number 4-3, 4-4 or 4-5.

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