12 Guidelines for writing noise-free engineering documents

General

Get to the point ^[1]: Few engineers have the time for “biblical” reading. Just as your sentences need to be direct your documents need to have the most important information at the beginning. This means moving from the general to the specific. In a longer report your main points should become quickly evident to your reader through an informative title followed by a summary of your findings, conclusions or recommendations, or whatever the important information is.

Provide accurate information

Even the clearest writing is useless when the information it conveys is wrong. If you refer to data in your Appendix B of the report when you mean Appendix D, the error could cause your readers to lose confidence in your report. Inaccurate reference to the work of others also will cause your readers to be highly suspicious of the reliability of your whole report. Inaccurate directions in a set of instructions or procedures might be frustrating at best, disastrous at worst.

There is also a great difference between fact and opinion. A fact is a dependable statement about external reality that can be verified by others. An opinion expresses a feeling or impression.

Note the difference between these two:

The second statement might be correct but is still only an opinion until supported by verifiable facts.

Present your material logically

Material must be organised in a way that each point, idea, and section is clearly and logically laid out. As always, think before writing, and keep your readers firmly in mind.

Make your ideas accessible

Without even reading a word, look at the pages of a document and get a good idea of how efficiently the material is presented. The impression comes from the structure of the material- specifically how well the material is laid out in visually accessible “chunks” for the reader. Most important here are 1) the subdivision of material into sections and subsections with hierarchical headings, and 2) paragraph length.

Use lists for some information

A well-organized list is sometimes the most efficient way to communicate information. There are numbered lists and bulleted lists. Bulleted lists are commonly used when items in the list are in no specific order:

Lengthy bulleted lists (more than 7 items) are hard for the reader to refer to, so use numbers for longer lists even if no order of priority is intended.

Punctuation and parallelism in lists. If the lead-in to your list ends with a verb, no colon is necessary. ‘The five priorities we established are’ would not require a colon after are since the list is needed to logically and grammatically complete the statement (see also example above). A lead-in like ‘We have established the following five priorities’ would be followed by a colon, however, since the statement is grammatically complete.

If the items in your list are complete sentences and include internal punctuation, you should conclude each one with a full-stop. Otherwise, a full-stop at the end of your list is optional. Capitalizing the first listed item is up to you, unless each entry is a complete sentence. Whichever style of punctuation and capitalization you use, be consistent.

Another concern when writing lists is to maintain grammatical parallelism between entries. This simply means if some entries begin with a verb, all entries should do. This makes for smoother reading and logical neatness.

Express yourself clearly

Engineering is considered a precise discipline. When you write, do not force your readers to work harder than necessary to understand what you have written. There are some pitfalls to avoid:

Ambiguity. Ambiguity causes readers to see more than one meaning in your writing, and often results from permitting words like they and it to point to more than one possible reference in a sentence.

Vagueness. Vagueness causes readers to see no useful meaning at all. Try to avoid phrases like pretty soon, substantial amount, or etc., and replace them with terms that have exact meaning such as in three days, or 8,564 CHF.

Coherence. Coherence comes from the word cohere, meaning the quality of sticking together. Coherence on writing refers to how well paragraphs and even complex documents ‘stick’ together. In a coherent paragraph all sentences clearly belong where they are because they address only the topic of the paragraph and are logically connected to each other.

For more, go to Chapter on Academic style.