CAPI
Process Improvement Engineering

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Project Documentation

You have hopefully learned writing mechanics: grammar, syntax, spelling, and usage. Unfortunately by emphasizing grammar, many students (possibly even you) often feel feel that they are a participle away from being a great writer or have narrowly missed being given a superior mark on their papers. While mechanics are important, they are only a small fraction of the writing process.

Composing the Documents

Many books address writing and emphasize the readability of surface prose — be concise, use transitions, avoid split infinitives, etc. The instructions and guides presented here do not emphasize how to just write — many manuals are available for this. Rather, the emphasis is on structuring and completing a series of documents that lead to formal engineering reports.

There is no single correct manner in which a technical report should be organized and written. Most major companies have their own particular ideas of format and style. The young engineer would do well to acquire this type of information quickly after starting on the job. We will use a somewhat standardized report format which is representative of the action-oriented style you can expect to encounter in industry. It differs from academic research reports, journal articles, and theses mainly in the order of presentation.

The objective is to emphasize the results and the relevance of the results in business decisions by position in the report and by text. Other parts of conventional reports are present but occur later in the report or as attachments.

These notes are intended to serve as a guide for writing engineering reports for the Unit Operations Laboratory courses at the University of Florida. A number of propositions on writing style and organizational strategies are given to assist students in the preparation of clear and accurate reports.

Using Computers to Generate Reports

Computers can increase the productivity and efficiency of the user. However, some computers have software and hardware limitations that sometimes produce results that are less than professional. If a particular piece of work is less than professional, the statement “that’s what my computer gave” is not an acceptable excuse. This particularly applies to graphical and tabular displays of results.

Our goal in this course is to produce professional work. This does not mean that everything needs to be computer generated. Reports must have a professional appearance.