day in this first of two technical writing webinars is talk about the outline. We're going to look at what technical writing actually is and what distinguishes it from other kinds of writing. We'll give you an approach, a series of questions to ask yourself so that you can try to figure out how best to get your ideas across in this particular situation. We'll talk about how you can structure your report, also some items that have to do with writing style because technical writing style is very different in certain ways from other kinds of writing. And lastly we'll look at some ethical and legal considerations that pertain to writing and publishing. So what is technical writing and how does it differ from other writing? Well actually it's different mainly because the purpose is to convey scientific information clearly and accurately. And all of the particulars that make it different from other kinds of writing follow from this purpose. So for example it is concerned only with facts. It appeals only to the intellect and not to the emotions or the imagination which makes it very different for example from fiction or other kinds of literature. Also and we'll discuss this in some detail when we talk about the ethical considerations, it never crosses the line between science and advocacy. So if you are doing technical writing, you are just conveying facts, you are not arguing a case, you are not selling anything, you are not seeking to persuade anyone. You are simply presenting information in a factual manner. What are different types of technical reports? Well mostly when people think first of technical reports, they think of a couple of things. They think either of a paper in a technical journal or they think of a Ph.D. dissertation. These are sort of the classic ideas of what a technical report is. And in fact if you are a practicing professional, you may never have written a paper or a Ph.D. dissertation but you do technical writing regularly because there are plenty of other examples such as a memo to your boss. If it has technical content, it's a technical report. Your reports to your clients would almost always be technical reports as would any litigation support that you do. Also if you are writing project specifications or you are writing things that will go in to a building code, PCI or ACI committee documents are very definitely technical reports. Also if you are writing an instruction manual, maybe you are trying to instruct the technicians as to how to do a particular kind of experiment or procedure. If you are writing a proposal, whether that's a proposal to a client or a proposal to a granting organization, that's a technical report too. And sometimes even press releases are technical reports of a sort because they are trying to give the public some kind of technical information. So as you can imagine, all of these things have very different things about them and very different kinds of readers and so on. But they all have certain things in common and those are the things that we are going to talk about in this webinar. So let's look at what are some initial questions that you might want to ask yourself as you are trying to think of how to convey your ideas. Because of course how do I get my ideas across is really, really vital. And I've used this example from Winnie the Pooh. Pooh began to feel a little more comfortable because when you were a bear with very little brain and you think of things, you find sometimes that a thing which seems very thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out in the open and has other people looking at it. So if you are trying to get your ideas across so that other people can look at them and understand the same thing that you meant, that's what you're going to have to do here. Now one thing you need to do is figure out what it is that you want to accomplish. Now if you're an academic, of course you're thinking publish or perish. And the reason that's a cliche is that it's really true. Sometimes though if you're in business, you are looking to either get people to take some action or make a decision or at least give them the basis for that action or decision. Maybe you're trying to affect a change in a building or bridge code and you need to provide the technical basis to do that. Maybe you're presenting a solution to a problem or you're trying to determine the solution to a problem. You might be trying to inform the public of some technical matter. Many people use these to establish credibility and there you have to be a little bit careful that you don't cross into advocacy, that you're actually selling yourself. But in fact, if you are publishing papers about a particular topic, that helps to establish you as an expert in that topic. You may be looking for a successful proposal. You want the granting organization to give you the money to do the research or you want your client to pay you to do the work. You may be providing litigation support or an instruction manual or project specifications. In any case, you need to consider who are the readers who are going to take whatever it is that you write and use it in some particular way. Oftentimes they're engineers, but they could be architects or attorneys or technicians or they could be students, in which case you need to consider are they engineering students or law students or whatever kind of students they may be. It may be if you're writing a press release or some such thing that you're addressing the general public. You could be writing to your client or your boss and in each case, you need to think about how knowledgeable is this person or are these people? Are they people who have a general education? Are they people who have engineering degrees? Do they have advanced degrees? Are they specialized in the same area that you are or are they just generalists in that area or do they have no clue whatsoever about this and haven't taken science in high school? Something else you need to be aware of is what is their command of English? Are they highly educated native speakers? Are they fluent foreign speakers? Are they people who are perhaps not all that well educated at all in English? And that will affect what kind of vocabulary you use. Another thing that admittedly is more of a concern if you're speaking than when you're writing is what is their understanding of American culture? Sometimes though, an American context is inherent in what you're saying and you may not realize that, but for example, if you were reporting that you did a certain thing on your project because you need to comply with OSHA regulations, if some of your readers are reading it from overseas, they may have no idea what OSHA is. So you need to explain what OSHA is and you also need to explain which regulations it was and not by number, but specifically what they provide so that you can set a context for the readers that may not know. Another thing to concern yourself with is what does the reader want from it? Because that will determine the level of detail and the kind of information that you provide. Maybe they're just looking for a general understanding of your topic, in which case you don't need to get too specific. Maybe they're looking for the basis for a decision and if so, what is that decision? If you know that they're looking to make a certain kind of decision, then you need to provide them with all of the information that would feed that, but not a lot of extraneous material. Technicians, for example, may be looking for detailed instructions for something. How do they conduct an experiment in the lab? Or how do people repair some damaged concrete? Well, those are things that you need to provide detailed instructions for. Maybe they're just looking for information to use in the next project, so somewhat less detailed than instructions, but still fairly detailed. An attorney will be looking for the basis for a plaintiff's or defendant's argument. Because you are not the attorney and you are not the advocate, you will present the same information the same way, regardless of what the attorney is going to be doing with it. You just need to make sure that all the information is there and it's clear and it's easy to find. In business, a lot of times people are looking for recommended actions to take, because having done all the legwork that it took to put together this report, you now have become an expert on this topic. So you are the best one to provide the recommendations. Another thing to look at is whether there's any kind of predetermined format or content, as there often is. Companies almost always have standard formats, usually a standard letter report format and a standard long report format. Journals have author guidelines. And I can tell you, as the editor of a journal, that hardly anybody actually pays attention to them, but if you really want to surprise and impress people, then you should pay attention to those author guidelines. Very important, clients have requirements. And it's really, really important that you ask them and don't assume. It may be that your standard report format works 99% of the time, but who knows, maybe this client is the 1%. So make sure that you understand ahead of time what it is they're looking for and what form they want it in. Generally speaking, funding agencies have standard formats and outlines. And I can tell you, as somebody who has sat on several National Science Foundation panels, that they are looking for reasons not to fund your proposal because they've got a lot more requests for money than they have money to satisfy them. So it's really a very good reason on their part if they can say, oh, well, you didn't even bother to follow the format, so we couldn't find the information we were looking for. Don't do this to yourself. Often there are boilerplate disclaimers or blurbs that need to be included somewhere in the report. Almost always funding agencies have disclaimers, so do institutes that are publishing codes and the like. And companies almost always have standard blurbs that they put in. So you need to find out what those are and sometimes it saves you time, sometimes it just saves you a lot of trouble. If you're publishing something, you need to look at what kinds of images are acceptable in terms of minimum resolution and also what sort of electronic files are acceptable for them. We get a lot of stuff that's submitted to PCI Journal that we can't use because it's of such poor resolution that it would look blurry if we published it. Often litigation requires documentation of a chain of custody. So if you need that, it's very important to find out at the beginning because you can't reconstruct it after the fact. As I've alluded to several times in this, you need to find out these things before you start. And ideally before you even set the project budget because some of them will cost you more to provide and you don't want to be surprised by it. Now let's look at how you might structure your report. There's an outline and we're going to look at what outlines are. Then we're going to look at methods of organization because there actually are plenty of ways to do this and most people know about chronological organization and that's pretty much it. Then there are also things that you have either in or around your report that help you keep on track such as the thesis sentence, the structural paragraph, and the topic sentence. These things first of all will help you stay on track but they will also help your reader understand what the report is about, what's here, where it is, where it's going, and all that sort of thing so that they can easily find the information they're looking for because almost always they're not actually going to read the whole thing. The outline is like the skeleton of the report so it's the one that kind of gives it the framework or the shape of it. It organizes all of the topics into a logical or psychological sequence that builds to a conclusion. It's a guide for both the writer and the reader. And as I've mentioned, there's more than one way to organize any given section and you don't have to use the same kind of organization for every section. There's some that lend themselves best to one style and some to another and that's perfectly okay to use different methods within the report. Or it may be that your overall structure of the report, in other words the main points on the outline, would be organized in one method and the individual parts in other methods. That's okay too. When you're writing your report, you probably won't write the sections in their final order. As a reader, when you see a paper and you see maybe it starts with the abstract and then begins with an introduction and goes on to some of the other elements that we'll talk about, that's probably not how the writer wrote it. And we'll explain why it's better to sometimes start with something in the middle. However, whatever topic you are writing about, you want to stick with that topic and do not skip all over. If as you're writing you think of something else that needs to be in there somewhere but just not here, note it down and go back to what you were doing. But don't try to insert that somewhere in this area because it just confuses people. They need to be able to find what they're looking for and it needs to follow in a logical pattern. Now there are actually quite a lot of different logical ways to organize a report. You can do it chronologically, in other words in a time sequence. You can do it geographically or spatially and sometimes that's actually a much more useful method. You could do it on the basis of the functions or how things work. You could do it by order of importance, starting with the most important and moving to the less important things and hopefully not trailing off into total insignificance. There is a limit. You may do it by elimination of possible solutions, that you consider different possible solutions and start with the least likely and move to the best one. You may move from general principles to particular applications of those principles or you can do the opposite and start with the particulars and then induce some general conclusion. You may want to move from the simple case to the complex or especially if you're trying to provide the basis for a decision or action, you may want to consider it in terms of pros and cons. You can also look at relationships between cause and effect. Now these are actually 10 different ways that are all considered logical methods of organization and then there's one more called the psychological that is actually quite effective in business applications. So let's talk in detail about what each of these is. The chronological method is just organizing it in terms of a sequence of steps in the order in which they occurred or in which they're supposed to occur. And this works very well in simple situations in which time order is important. So for example, anything that describes how we did it or how you should do it fits this pattern very nicely. You might, for example, describe your experimental procedure or if you're giving instructions to somebody obviously you want to give them step by step and you put them in the order in which you want them to be performed. You might describe a construction sequence in this fashion or a repair procedure. However, a lot of times chronology is not the best or the most useful way of doing it. It may be that the geographical or spatial method will actually work better for you. In this case, you're starting in one location and moving to another in some logical fashion. This works especially well when location or geography has some significance to what you're describing. For example, if you are doing a site investigation, it may very well be that the location will relate to exposure conditions or to a construction sequence. Normally, for example, if you're talking about the placement of a slab, they started in one corner and moved perhaps in strips or perhaps in sections. By organizing your investigation and your report of your investigation spatially, you can catch that and that's very helpful. Or for example, if you are investigating a situation of how things survived after an earthquake or some other natural or man-made disaster, location is very significant because it could very well indicate the distance from the epicenter or the blast or whatever it is. It clearly relates to exposure condition and that becomes very important in what kind of tests you would do and what you would look for and what sort of damage you would see. If you do use this method, it's really helpful if you key the discussion to a map or a site plan that accompanies the report. That way, you can mark on the map and then reference those quadrants or those sections however you want to divide it so that you can get your reader to come along physically with you and proceed around the site or around the map. The functional method relates to how something works. In this method, what you do is examine each of the components by its function in the working of the whole. This is the kind of thing that might work very well if you're describing construction equipment or precast concrete plant operations or even BIM software because each module has a separate function. You may want to use the order of importance in which you put the most important items first. Often, a discussion of results will work this way where you'll start with the most significant of the results that you observed and move down. Conclusions, almost always you start with the most important first. Same with recommendations. What gave you the most bang for the buck, that's the one you put first. These are all the sort of things where you want to do this. You want to limit it too. You don't trail off to the point where you have every little detail. You want to figure out what it is that's important enough to make the cut. You're not necessarily putting every single thing you could here. Another type of organization is elimination of possible solutions. This is the one in which you discuss various alternatives beginning with the least likely and ending with the final choice. Obviously, this works well if you're talking about something that has to do with decision making. Most commonly, you'd be using this in business such as a report to your boss or to a client because often you're really concerned about decisions. However, you might also use it if you were reporting on a design or a construction problem that you solved because it may very well be that you considered other ways of doing it or even tried them before you came upon the one that really worked. It's often very helpful to the reader if you show what some of these other solutions were and why they didn't work or why you abandoned them. Another way of organizing is going from the general to the particular. In other words, you're discussing the general principles and then deducing specific applications from them. Often an introduction looks like this. And particularly if you're discussing a literature review, you'll often start with the most general kind of research that went into this specific application that you're looking at now. And then as research develops, you tend to get to the more and more particular. So this is how a literature review will often end up looking. You can, on the other hand, go from particular to general where you're discussing specific facts or observations and then inducing general principles from them. This is what the scientific method is all about. So this structure should be evident even implicitly in your discussion of the results because you should be going from all of these particular things that you have observed to some sort of specific principle or equation or whatever it is. And while you won't necessarily present the actual conclusion in the discussion, you need to be moving in that direction. Another way of organizing things is to go from simple to complex. In this case, you're starting from the simple or familiar case and building up to the more complex. And this is the sort of thing that really lends itself to teaching or instruction. So if you're teaching the reader how to do something, it stands to reason that you would start with a very simple version of it first and then build in the complexity. Or you may be helping the reader to understand something by starting with what he already knows and then moving to more complex applications of it. Another way of looking at decision making is by pro and con. So especially when you're supporting a decision or an action, a comparison among alternatives could take this form. And this is especially good if it's a little bit more nuanced than the elimination of possible solutions would be. So for example, if you want to have a memo to your boss, you may be having to consider different things and maybe you're not in a position to decide that this particular advantage is worth X number of dollars and X number of hours. So you may need to spell it out just in this form and not come to the decision or action, but just show what the relative advantages and disadvantages are. Similarly, in a report to a client, you may not have all the information that they do or have the power of decision making, or it may just not be that obvious. It may be that there are things that you really do have to give up to get what you want and only they can decide what that is. The last method that we're going to talk about of logical methods is cause and effect. And this works very well where the main purpose is to examine causal connections. In a report to a client, for example, you may want to use this form if that's what they're most concerned about. And often, especially if you're doing, whether it's troubleshooting or any sort of repair kind of procedure, you will probably want to consider this as a method for organizing it. Also, in litigation support, obviously, they're going to be pointing fingers at somebody, and so the first part of that is to find out what actually happened, what caused the problems that we're seeing. And usually in construction, there's more than one thing that went wrong and more than one party responsible. So this cause and effect discussion is really important. But even if you're doing something like writing repair recommendations, you do need to address the causes because there's no sense in just fixing it unless you really know that you have addressed the root cause, or it will just happen again. Now the psychological method is not actually a logical method, but it is often very effective. This is the one that puts the conclusions first, or the findings first, followed by the discussion and the supporting data. And this is something that is used in business because it allows the busy executive to get to the point immediately. Usually that executive is not the one that's going to deal with the details. They have subordinates for that. So in this type of report, you may not even include the data and calculations in the body of the report. They may go in the appendices because they're really not front and center the way the conclusions are. You may do a report to a client this way, and particularly if it's a complex project and a large organization. Litigation support sometimes runs like this. Attorneys often want to know what the findings are first, and then as they're interested in what those findings are, they can go and dig through the actual basis for them. Now moving on to how you keep yourself on track, the thesis sentence is really key to this. This is a one-sentence digest of your report. It may never appear as such anywhere in your report, but you want to formulate it before you start to write, and actually write it down and keep it handy as you write, because everything in your report should add up to the thesis sentence. So this is how you tell whether something goes into your report, because if it contributes somehow to the thesis sentence, it belongs there, and if it doesn't, you need to throw it out. Also, if you're trying to decide whether you're finished with your report, you need to read it through all together and make sure that there's everything there needed to support that thesis sentence, and if something is missing, then that will point it out to you rather nicely. Now structural paragraphs do appear in the report. These are placed between the main heading and the first subheading for every main section. They will serve as the introduction to that section, the transition from previous sections to this particular section. Later ones may have a review of what went on in previous sections or a summary of them as well. And what these do is inform the reader of the organization of the whole report, so that you can immediately see when you read this paragraph how this particular section fits into the entire structure of the report. And so obviously it's a way of connecting the main sections of the report as well. Now going down to the paragraph level, every paragraph is about something, and the topic sentence is what tells the reader what that is. Almost always the topic sentence is the first sentence of the paragraph, and if it isn't the first sentence, it will be the second. You do not want to make your reader dig through the entire paragraph to find out what it was about. In writing, you want to limit the content of the paragraph to that topic. And if you find yourself wandering off a little bit, maybe it's time just to hit the carriage return and start a new topic sentence and a new paragraph. Now let's look at writing style. Remember that we talked about the purpose of technical writing, to convey scientific information clearly and accurately. So the writing style also falls from that purpose. So it needs to be straightforward, clear, objective, and factual. Now something that a lot of people are not aware of is that for the purposes of promoting clarity, we need a one-to-one correspondence between a term and its meaning. And this is very, very different from any other kind of writing that you do. You've probably all had some English teacher, at least one, when you were in junior high or high school or whenever, who emphasized what a wonderful, rich vocabulary that English has and how when you write, you want to be able to use all different vocabularies so that you can get the nuance of meaning and how much more interesting it is to use a variety of words instead of repeating the same words over and over and over. Well, in technical writing, it's exactly the opposite. Here we value clarity over literary style. So in this case, once you decide or you have been told what a term means, that's what it means and nothing else. And when you have that meaning, you must use that term and not a synonym. And we do that, yes, we get a little bit more monotonous that way, but we do that because we want clarity no matter what. It has to be unequivocal. The writing also appeals to the intellect rather than the emotion or imagination. So you're not worried about how people feel about something. You're just presenting the facts. Because of that, we tend to make a very minimal use of metaphors, if at all. You're not trying to help people picture it or imagine it. If you want them to picture it, you draw them a picture or take a photograph. You need to keep the reader in mind as you're doing this. The person's type and level of education, their likely understanding of this topic, their purpose in reading, their command of English, and their understanding of American culture. Now, if you have a mixed readership, as we do for PCI Journal, you need to write for the least initiated reader. If you're writing for a very specialized technical journal, you can figure that most people who read it either have PhDs or are working on PhDs. You can be much more focused on your specific terminology. You can use a lot of abbreviations and so on. But if you're talking about an uninitiated or barely initiated reader, you're going to have to spell a lot more things out. Somebody who's more advanced may find that a little bit tedious, but that is necessary if that's the reader that you're writing for. Now, there's certain kinds of enemies of clarity that we do see quite a lot in things that are submitted to us for possible publication. One is the overuse of jargon, which is a specialized technical terminology of a subset of writers. So if you're going to be using this, be careful, because you really can't expect your reader to learn a lot of new terms. In other words, even if you define it, people are going to get pretty frustrated if they have to learn a lot of new words just to be able to read your paper. So use the standard everyday technical English where possible. And if it isn't possible, if there really is no standard word for this, then you need to define your terms. Also, be very, very careful of using acronyms and abbreviations, because these can really alienate the reader. In your handouts, I have an example of this that I used with permission from Concrete International. It was a letter to the editor in which the writer is using it in a rather humorous way to make the point that when people start making up their own abbreviations and acronyms, the prose quickly deteriorates to the point where nobody can make any sense of it. So if you must use them, limit yourself to a very few standard ones. Do not start making up your own, or any editor who knows what they're doing will eliminate them, because they're really doing no one a favor. If you must use one, you have to define it not only at its first use, but also in every figure and table caption. And the reason for that is that figures and tables frequently find themselves by themselves. A lot of times people are just flipping through your paper, and they happen to see a table or a figure that looks particularly interesting. They need to be able to see at a glance exactly what it means, and not have to paw through the whole text just to find out what some particular acronym meant, or what the specimen code meant. Which leads me to my last point on this slide, and that is specimen codes. These are the abbreviations that anybody will use, whether doing a research project or any kind of site investigation, as soon as you are taking samples or making specimens, you are going to have to find some way to mark with a grease pencil in perhaps six or eight characters the entire description of that specimen that is unique to that specimen and is like no other specimen code that pertains to your project. And so, after you've been working with these for a few months, or if it's a PhD dissertation perhaps several years, you get to the point where you have mastered your specimen codes, you know exactly what means what, and that's great. And then you start writing your paper, and people have no idea what you're talking about, and they really don't care. So, spell it out for them. Use brief descriptions that anyone could read. Do not make them learn your specimen codes. Now, we've talked several times about things that have to be defined, so let's look at what definitions are. Formal definitions comprise three parts and parallel the scientific process of classification. They have the term to be defined, its class, group, or category, and its distinguishing characteristics. What makes it different from all other items that are in that class, group, or category? And this may sound really complicated, but in fact, here's an example. A square is a rectangle with equal sides. The term is square. The class or category is rectangle, and equal sides are what distinguish the square from every other rectangle. So, you can see it doesn't have to be complicated to be a formal definition. However, you also have the option of just defining it informally, simply to identify or explain the term. And it's perfectly okay if you have several different things that you have to define to define some formally and some informally. There's nothing wrong with mixing styles like that. Either way, though, you need to be very careful not to use the term to define itself. That's just circular, and it's not going to help anyone. You also want to define your term in simpler, not more complex, terms. If people need to have it defined in the first place, it's because they don't understand, so making it more complicated is really going to be counterproductive. And as our example, we again go back to AAMILM, well, said Owl, the customary procedure in such cases is as follows, what does crestamony proceed cake mean, said Pooh, for I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me. It means the thing to do. As long as it means that, I don't mind, said Pooh humbly. And I want you to notice here that Owl has done very well here in defining his term in much simpler phrases that actually are just a collection of words of one syllable because long words bother Pooh. So this is a perfectly good example of an informal definition that does the job. Now some resources that you may want to consult in your writing, report templates I've already mentioned, but it is useful to know if your company or organization has templates to use, then use them. You'll save yourself a lot of time. If you're writing for a journal, get their author guidelines. They will really appreciate it if you use them. ACI's website has a really nice terminology tab. And basically the way they've developed this is they, whenever anybody uses terms in any of their reports, they'll look at the terminology section to see if there's already a good definition of it. If there isn't, then they will write a definition and supply it to the terminology section. So it's a continuing, growing, developing resource. But it's very helpful if you're looking for how somebody defines something, what it actually means, even how it's spelled, if that's a concern for you. PCI has, actually is developing a style manual. We at PCI Journal have our style manual. We're certainly willing to let people have copies of it if they're interested. But that is quite useful. And TAC is currently in the process of developing a style manual as well that will be imposed on everybody for all of our documents. ACI has a technical committee manual that addresses a lot of these things and is very useful because it relates to our industry as well. And the Chicago Manual of Style. And it's probably helpful for people because you may not be aware of this, but Chicago Manual of Style is a standard reference that is put out by University of Chicago Press. And it is commonly used for any sort of scientific or technical writing. It becomes the basis for what people do with the ACI committee manuals or with our PCI manual for that matter. And what we normally do is our own technical committee manuals or style manuals will only talk about the stuff that isn't in the Chicago Manual of Style. So for example, Chicago Manual of Style does not have the particular vocabulary that pertains to the concrete construction industry or to the precast concrete production or to post-tensioning. So the organizations that deal with these or that need to have their own style manual then address those matters. And so what happens is if you're looking something up and you might first look in the PCI style manual to see if we say anything about it. If we don't, then you might look at ACI and see if they have anything to say about it. And if they don't, then you'd look it up in Chicago Manual of Style to determine what the particulars of your case are. Lastly, we want to look at some ethical and legal considerations that pertain to writing and publishing. I've alluded several times to the separation between science and advocacy. It's very important whenever you're doing any sort of investigation or troubleshooting or whatever that you start with a hypothesis and not a conclusion and particularly not an agenda. These people set out to prove something that is really unethical. You set out to find out whether something is true or whether something is false. You always want to stick to the facts and not shade them with opinion. You also want to avoid any kind of speculation. Your conclusions should be based on the data that you have presented and not on wishful thinking. Also, you need to report all of your findings and not just the ones that fit your theory or your client's interest. This goes back to having an agenda rather than making this an open inquiry. It's possible in some situations that you will have to omit certain references for the sake of space. But don't omit them just because they don't support your viewpoint. That's unethical. Also, do not use your publications to provide credibility for your expert witness work, your product, or your client. Now, this is kind of tricky because, of course, when you publish something, then the fact that your name is on it does lend you a certain kind of credibility and there's nothing wrong with that. That's just professional development and that's fine. But if you are specifically trying to do this, and probably the best way for me to talk about this is to talk about some examples. For example, I saw one where a company was really aggressively pushing its expert witness work and their expertise. And so they would publish information that pertained to lawsuits that they had been involved in. But in one case, for example, they had actually, it was actually part of the court settlement provided that no information about the case was to be given out. And so they were legally bound not to give information, but they still wanted to build credibility. So they referenced that closed documentation to give credibility to their work and then they based their conclusions on that closed documentation. That's something that should never have been published. And in fact, when I was on that organization's publications committee, I made sure that we changed our rules to prevent that sort of thing from happening again, because it's something that should not be done. Another question that comes up is authorship, because sometimes you have people listed as authors who aren't really authors, and sometimes you have people who should be listed and aren't. And in either case, that is also unethical. So who's an author? Well, everyone who made a significant intellectual or scholarly contribution to the paper. And that means that they made some contribution to the conception, design, execution, analysis, and or interpretation of the data. In other words, they did something to get the information that is going into the paper. And they also were involved in drafting, reviewing, and or revising the manuscript. And they approved the final manuscript. So you have to have all of those things to be able to consider yourself an author of the paper. Normally the lead author, that's the first author in the list, takes primary responsibility for the manuscript. In an academic setting, the lead author normally would be the student. But each author takes responsibility for at least one component of the work and should be able to identify who is responsible for all other components. Now, equally, there's a question of who is not an author. And there actually are terms for this kind of thing because these practices, while they're not ethical, are common enough that we have to have names for them. One is guest authorship. And that is where the person is listed as an author to lend prestige or credibility to the work. And usually this would be like a famous professor or the president of the company or something like that. But that person actually had nothing to do with the production of the report. There's also something called gift authorship, where the person is listed out of obligation, tribute or dependence within the context of an anticipated benefit when the person did not contribute to the work. In other words, say you're the junior professor and you're hoping to get promoted and get tenure, that you might list a senior professor just hoping that he'll make sure that you get tenure. Guest authorship, on the other hand, is when the person is not listed even though they contributed significantly to the work. And this would be probably more common in academia where maybe the student did all the work but the professor's name is the only one that appears on the document. Or sometimes the graduate student and the professor will be on there, but the undergraduates who actually did all the grunt work are not included. So what do you do if you want to give somebody some tribute that really is deserved? Well, that's where you use the acknowledgments. You thank those people whose contributions to the work were significant but don't rise to the level of authorship. Another thing that we see quite a lot is the question of plagiarism. And of course, nobody is reinventing the wheel. It's fine and in fact necessary to quote or cite the work of others because all of what we know now is based on stuff that other people have done before us and we need to acknowledge that. But we need to be sure to attribute the work, the ideas, and the findings to the appropriate source. Also, very important to quote the work accurately and not read your own ideas into it. And in fact, I would strongly encourage you if you are going to quote something to have the actual thing that you're quoting in front of you while you do it so that you can verify that you've got it right. Also, something that a lot of people are not aware of is that for lengthy passages, you need to get written permission to quote. You know, you may have three or four lines and that's no big deal. You just quote them and cite them and that's that. But if you wanted to quote, say, a paragraph or more, then you actually need to go to that person, whoever owns the copyright, and get them to sign off on it so that you have permission to use that quote. Normally this isn't actually all that hard to do because normally the ownership resides either with the author or with the publisher. So those are only two places that you have to go to ask. And usually if you ask one, they'll let you know who actually owns it. But don't put it off until the end because occasionally you'll have a problem where the publisher owns the rights and then the publisher is bought out by some other publisher and they're bought out by somebody else. Or you have an author who has died and copyright outlives us all because it goes on for at least 75 years after the person has died and it can be renewed after that. So just because the person is dead doesn't mean you're off the hook. You still have to find out who owns it and get their signature. Now an acknowledgment is an optional section at the end in which you can thank any organization that contributed in cash or in kind to support the work. Now sometimes this is just good manners that you are thanking them because they helped you. But in other cases it's very important for the reader to understand, for example, if there was some particular organization that paid you to do the research, then they may have an interest in your having certain findings and suppressing certain other findings. So even if you were too ethical to do that, you still need to let people know that your work was sponsored by a particular organization so they can make their own judgments as to the validity. If the research sponsor has a standard disclaimer, and almost all of them do, such as the opinions or those of the authors and blah, blah, blah, it goes here. Also this is where you thank anyone whose help or advice did not rise to the level of co-authorship.

technical writing

scientific information

types of technical reports

intended audience

structuring a report

thesis statements

writing style

ethical and legal considerations