As we pointed out, it isn't necessary to have participated in technical writing one to understand fully what's going on in technical writing two. They cover different areas and there's no particular sequence, so you can take two before one if you so desire. Today we're going to be talking about the elements of a technical report and I've borrowed some illustrations from the classic Allerson Wonderland illustrator so that you can appreciate more what's going on with technical writing. What we are going to be talking about today is first of all a quick review of the scientific method and the reason is that the basis of all technical reports closely follows the scientific method, which should not be surprising to anyone, and that will probably help you to remember what it's all about. Then we'll look at the outline and what we're going to do is take each of the separate elements in turn in a reasonable order that reflects what order they would normally appear in. So we'll look at the editor's quick points, the abstract, the executive summary, the introduction, the experimental program, results, discussion, conclusion, recommendations, terminology, notation, acknowledgments, and about the authors. These are all elements that could be found in a technical report. I have never in the 30 years I've been in professional practice seen a report that had all of them. So normally you kind of pick and choose depending on what the needs are for your particular type of report. After we've gone through that, which is the bulk of the presentation, we will look at some common errors and just common ways that people have of expressing themselves in writing that are not particularly desirable. And lastly, we'll look at some examples so you can try your hand at being an editor yourself. So let's look at the scientific method. The basic elements of that are, first of all, you have some kind of a problem or question that comes up in the course of your work or your life. Then based on what you observe, you formulate some kind of hypothesis. After which you develop some experiments or make observations that are designed to test that hypothesis to see whether it's false. Then in the process of that, you collect data, which you then evaluate, and based on that you form a conclusion. Now it shouldn't be greatly surprising that the core of any technical report closely follows this same structure. The introduction will cover both the problem or question and the hypothesis. You'll have one or more sections describing the experimental program. You report the results, that's the data that you collected. You discuss those results, that's your evaluation of the data, and then you have a conclusion. Some additional elements of a technical report may include editor's quick points, the abstract, the executive summary, the literature review, recommendations, notation, definitions or terminology, references, acknowledgment, and about the authors. Now the ones that I have put on the left side of the screen are ones that normally appear before the core of the report, and the ones on the right side of the screen are the ones that normally would appear afterwards, but these are not hard and fast rules. For example, PCI Journal puts the abstract toward the end, and it's not uncommon for both notations and definitions and terminology sections to appear at the beginning, particularly if you're doing something like a committee report. Those generally will have them at the beginning. Sometimes also people put a little blurb about the authors near the beginning. Now most of us are very, very pressed for time anymore, and so the way we read a technical paper is not that we start at the beginning and go straight through to the end. In most cases, the first thing you want to do is spend a little bit of time deciding whether it's even worth reading the paper at all. So the first thing you do is look at the title and decide whether the topic is even of interest to you. If it is, then you look at the editor's quick points to get some idea of what's in this, what am I going to learn from this, what am I going to get out of it. After that, you read the abstract, which should tell you not only what they did but also what kind of results they got and what it means. If that's still interesting, then you look at the conclusions and really see more about what it's going to try to come at from there. Only then, if you're still interested, do you bother to read the whole thing from the beginning to the end. Now you should be aware of this pattern as you write. Because of this, where the abstract plays such an important role in helping the reader decide whether it's worth reading the rest of the paper, it needs to be the best written and most important part of the paper. First of all, obviously more people are going to read it than the whole report because they may decide after they read it that it isn't worth getting the whole report. And also, this is the part that's archived and indexed. So when you look this up in some database, you can get the abstract fairly easily. You may have much more difficulty and even some expense involved in getting the full copy of the paper. When you are writing it, you want to write it last so that your ideas are as well formed as they're going to be about this topic. Also, for similar reasons, the conclusions need to be well thought out and well written. Now looking at the outline first, the white rabbit put on his spectacles. Where shall I begin, please, your majesty, he said. Then at the beginning, the king said very gravely, and go on till you come to the end. Then stop. It's very, very important that you have an outline and that you keep to it. You really do not want to make your reader ramble on and on in hopes that he'll get somewhere at some point if he just persists long enough. Nobody has that kind of time. You owe your reader the courtesy of having a clear outline and sticking to it. Could you tell me, please, which way I have to go from here? That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said the cat. I don't much care where, said Alice. Then it doesn't matter which way you go, said the cat, so long as I get somewhere, Alice added as an explanation. Oh, you're sure to do that, said the cat, if you only walk long enough. Please don't do this to your readers. The outline is in effect a kind of reconstruction of the investigation. You need to have some sort of background about it, what led you to this in the first place and why you're interested in this particular topic. Then you need to have your hypothesis set out. You need to describe your experiments clearly enough that someone else would be able to replicate them and get the same results. You need to report your data and observations. You need to analyze them in some way. You need to develop your conclusions. Notice that this reconstruction is a very sanitized version. You don't go in and talk about all the stuff that you did wrong before you found out how to do it the right way, for example. You don't talk about the fight that you had with your office mate as part of this that made it harder for you to get your work done. This is just a very sanitized version where you're just talking about the bare bones account of how you did this, what you did, and what results you got. The editor's quick points are something that we at PCI Journal use as a sort of teaser to let the reader know quickly what the paper is about. Normally this is only three bullet points, so it's very, very condensed. It contains a brief description of the research as well as the main findings. We normally would condense this from the abstract, so it's really very, very focused. The abstract is often at the beginning of the paper. We happen to place it at the end because we have the editor's quick points at the beginning and they sort of fulfill the same function. The abstract summarizes the research and the main findings. As I mentioned, busy readers would start here to see whether it's worth reading the whole paper. This is the part that's archived in databases, so this is the one that you should have ready access to after the fact. Although the abstract may appear first in the report, you want to write it last because that's at the point when you have got the best grasp of what you've done and what it all means because the process of writing itself is instrumental in the thinking of it. So yes, of course you thought about it when you planned your experimental attack, but you want to make sure that you have really thought out what all of your results mean and what their implications are and all of that stuff, so wait until the end to write the abstract. Abstracts are best if written according to a formula. The first thing you talk about is the context of the investigation or why you did the work in the first place. Then the nature of the work, that is what you did, and the scope of the work, how many or how you did it. The main findings and the implications are significant. Now if you're writing a paper, then the whole thing is only about six sentences. So your first sentence is the context of investigation. You give yourself about three sentences to talk about the nature and scope of the work and that could either be one sentence on the nature and two on the scope or maybe each sentence has a bit of both nature and scope, depending on how that works best for you. Then you have one sentence for the main findings and one for the implications or significance. So you really don't need that much. If you have a long report, something like a dissertation, the length would be up to a page and a half, in which case the first paragraph is the context and so on. And as I mentioned, this needs to be the best written and most informative section of all. So it's worth taking some time to really polish this and get it right. Now the executive summary resembles the abstract, but it isn't exactly the same. The executive summary is normally given in the context of a report to upper management or a client or some other business setting. It is similar to an abstract, but it has more detail. Specifically, its purpose is to support a decision or an action. Because of that, it needs to have recommendations or action items and those things are normally not going to be in an abstract. It's possible that a report would include both an abstract and an executive summary because in fact, they have different purposes and they're written to different readers. The person who reads the abstract is likely to be a technical person who is going to read the whole report or at least significant sections of it. On the other hand, the person who reads the executive summary is going to be a high level decision maker. And chances are, this person is not going to read anything else in this report. That's what subordinates are for. So if you want this person to read it, then you need to put it in the executive summary. You need to assume that they're not going to look up anything else. The introduction has a lot of stuff or could have a lot of stuff. Some of this is optional. One thing that's optional is the authorization or sponsorship. But normally in a commercial setting, you will say who commissioned or paid for the work. Now if you're doing a research report, the sponsorship will be in the acknowledgement. And this is very important because in some settings, for example in a publication, the fact that it was paid for by a certain person may indicate that there's a certain bias involved here. And that bias needs to be clear. You really are doing nobody any favors by hiding the fact that it was paid for by a certain person or entity. So it is very important that this be part of it so readers understand how they should be reading this. It's possible if you did this for a client that the authorization would be on the report cover. In a long report, you may want to have something about the structure of the report. So for example, if you have a dissertation or a committee document or even litigation support that's lengthy, you may have a section in the introduction that says Chapter 2 of the report covers such and such and Chapter 3 we talk about such and such and so on so that a person knows how to look for the information they want. The longer the report, the likelier it is that many of the readers involved will not be reading the entire thing. So they need to know how to find the information they should have. You do need to say something about defining the problem or the question. What motivated the investigation? What was already known? What led you to formulate this particular hypothesis in this way? The purpose of your work should be clear whether that's implicit or explicit. In a lot of cases, you will have some sort of literature review in which you summarize what was already known about the topic before you started. If you do this, you want to show the direction of research and progress and what holes appear in the knowledge. You also use this to set the context of the current work. If you have an exhaustive review, normally this is for an academic or a state-of-the-art report. And that kind of state-of-the-art report almost always comes from an academic thesis or dissertation. If you do this, you start with the oldest relevant reference and then normally progress chronologically or semi-chronologically to the most recent work. By semi-chronological, I mean that on occasion you'll have more than one line of research that leads to this particular thing and let's say they progress more or less independently for a time. So you may want to talk about one topic chronologically and then go to the other topic chronologically rather than switch back and forth between them. Be careful to include only the research that's relevant. Sometimes students in particular will gather up all the possible publications there ever were on this topic and try to report on all of it. That's not doing anyone any favors. What you really want to do is take the stuff that's relevant and then whatever was relevant, you don't just say 20 other people did this kind of work. You actually will take each one and say very briefly what it was about. So Smith and Jones investigated such and such and found such and such. And you may do it in a sentence or even less, but that's enough so that people at least can tell. The reason is that you're trying to leave tracks for your reader. It may be that certain readers, and this will be a minority of them, but there will be some, are going to be following in more detail what you did. And some of them may want to go and look up what other people have done on the topic because maybe you found references that they weren't aware of. And so you're really helping them out by telling them a little bit about what each one is about. If you just give them a list of a bunch of papers that were on the topic without defining it, that leaves them with the chore of going to find every one of those and deciding whether it was useful. Whereas if they read your literature review, they should be able to tell the two or three that were of most relevance to them, and then they can go and look for those and not worry about the other stuff. Be very, very careful to quote accurately what they did and what they found. Sometimes people like to read into other people's findings, stuff that really wasn't found out until later. Or they're looking to support their research perhaps a little more than it deserves to be supported. So be very, very careful that you quote only what they actually did and what they actually found. It may be that their evidence with yours and with other stuff that came later will actually support stronger conclusions. And you can say that too, but then you need to be very clear that what they actually found, what they determined and what you now looking at it later are determining based on additional information. When you start this literature review, make sure that you log the full reference information. That means the author's names, all of them, not just so and so at all. And the full title of the article, the full title of the journal, the volume number, the issue number, the date, the page numbers, all of those things need to be in there and you need to take it down now. Some people will put this off because it's tedious and they think, well, I'll just remember that it was Smith from 1982. Well, the best time to gather that information is when you're putting the literature review together. It will not get easier and trust me, if you actually try to publish it, you will have an editor on your back until you get all the details right. So it's a whole lot easier to do it at the beginning. This is a section that you want to write first in your report. First of all, you need this information to design your investigation. There's no sense in repeating what people have already done, and particularly if they did things wrong and learned about it. You want to know so that you don't repeat their mistakes as well. Also, if you do this first, you'll have a significant part of your report already written before you even get started in the lab, which is very helpful. You will probably need to update this a little bit, but that's usually pretty easy because by then you'll be aware of what else is being published in your field and you'll go in and just add those few at the end of your discussion. Some things not to do. First of all, don't pad it with your own or your friend's work. People do this sometimes just because everybody wants to get more credit for having their papers cited, and so it's really easy to just go in and add your own stuff, but if it isn't relevant to this particular work, leave it out. Also, be very careful not to read your own conclusions into some reference. If those researchers determined that that was something that they could find from it, then fine, but if they didn't, then just say that this is what they found and this is what they concluded. Don't add more. Also, be very careful not to omit references that don't support your agenda. You shouldn't really start your research with an agenda, but people often do, and you need to make very certain that you include all the relevant references, not just the ones that you like. Now, when you're choosing your references, the best sources will be things published in peer-reviewed journals. These are the gold standard of references, and these are also archived. Conference proceedings, on the other hand, are considered considerably less prestigious, even if they are peer-reviewed. And the reason for this is that for a peer-reviewed journal, there is a very limited number of papers that they can publish in a given year, so they have to set the bar pretty high. Whereas, if it's a conference proceedings, there are a lot of people who won't even attend the conference unless they can show their boss or their employer that they have got a conference, they've got a paper in the conference that they're presenting. So, chances are good that you're going to have a lower bar for acceptance than would somebody editing a journal. Also, while the contents of peer-reviewed journals are normally available readily after the fact and for many years to come, conference proceedings may or may not be available after the fact, so they may altogether disappear. From websites, content can change or disappear. Now, this is changing as many organizations are establishing what are called DOIs or digital object identifiers, and in that case it is permanent, but it often happens that websites themselves are not maintained and stuff disappears. It can be hard to judge the reliability, that's something that you have to look at pretty closely. If you do reference something that's on a website, you need to verify its URL or DOI to make sure that it does in fact lead you to the thing that you're trying to point it to. Now, with Wikipedia, of course, we all use it all the time, but you need to be very careful that that is not the source of information that you are referencing for your paper. Citations, you need to check the style manual or the report template. We have sent out as part of our handouts for this, the author guidelines that we use for the PCI journal, and you can see in there how we do our citations. However, while you're writing, use name and year, and the reason for this is that eventually you'll probably number them or something else, but you may end up in the process of writing changing things around a little bit. If you use numbers that can get confusing, whereas if you use the name and year, that's unequivocal and you won't get confused. As I mentioned, you need to log the complete reference information so that you have it. The next thing that you need to have in your introduction is the hypothesis, which may be in the form of either a statement or a question, but it should be really clear what it was that you were investigating in your project. The hypothesis has to be falsifiable, that is to say an investigation never actually shows that something is true, it just shows whether it's false. You can include a significance of your research. ACI actually requires this as a separate section. We don't require it, but we still want your research to be significant. And in fact, we ask our reviewers whether a manuscript would be of interest to our readers. If you include something on the significance of your research, it helps your reader understand why they should read your report. Now let's look at what's in the experimental program. The idea here is to leave enough tracks that your reader could replicate your work if desired. So that includes the materials you used, the specimens you made, any apparatus or equipment that you used, your instrumentation, the experiment design, the procedures, and for any of these things, you can describe them directly or you can just give them by reference. For example, if, as I used to do when I was in academia, you used the same suite of materials for a whole research program over several years, then you can simply say these materials are described in such and such reference. Same thing with your specimens, apparatus, and equipment. If you have some kind of standard procedure, either that you have used in your lab before or it's an ASTM or RYLM standard or whatever, you can just reference that standard. There's no need to sit there and describe it in detail again. Your experiment design, you probably do want to give a pretty detailed description of just so that people understand how you went about it. Any procedures that are not already standardized, you want to describe. And it's also important that you prefer references that readers could find and understand. So, for example, if it's an ASTM or AASHTO standard, anybody can find those. Those are readily available and they can read them. That's not hard. But suppose you used a Japanese standard. Well, probably your English-speaking reader is not able to read a Japanese standard. They may not be able to obtain it, and if they did, they wouldn't be able to get it anyway. So, in that case, you still will reference the Japanese standard, but you want to give more of an explanation of what's involved and how to do it so that even somebody who cannot read Japanese or can't get hold of that particular standard is still able to understand it and follow it. Don't just take some obscure thing that most people aren't going to be able to either get or read and expect that that's good enough. You need to summarize it in that case. Still cite the reference, but give people more detail to follow. Now, this is a section that is really helpful to write while you're maybe two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through your experimental program. And the reason is that by then, you have a good mastery of all the details of it, but if there's something that, as you write, you start to realize, hey, did we do it this way or that way, you can actually go back into the lab and say, oh, yeah, we did this. So, this is very helpful because then by the time you get your experimental work done, you also have your description already written. The next thing you do is go to the results. Graphs are something that engineers normally prefer to tables of numbers. So, if you have a choice in terms of how you depict it, graphs are probably going to be the way to go. You do need to show your actual data points and not just pretty smooth curves. You need to follow the publications guidelines for the units, the file types, the type font, and so on. We have our guidelines as have been handed out to you already so you can see how we do it. You need to label the axes clearly and the whole thing should be very legible not too cluttered. So, be careful not to try to put too much stuff on there. Usually that means that you need more than one graph. Also, the graph plus the caption should be understandable independent of the other text. And the reason is that people often take just that and refer to it in some other context. So, it should stand on its own. Similarly with tables, you need to label the rows and columns clearly. Avoid specimen codes if at all possible. Of course, we all need abbreviated specimen codes to have for something like labeling a core so that you can write on it with a grease pencil and you can get all the information in six or eight characters. But don't expect your reader to understand that. That was for you and your own convenience. But for them, you want to give a brief description of what things actually are rather than relying on specimen codes. Similarly as with the graph, the table plus caption should be understandable independent of the report. So, for example, if you had abbreviations in there or you had other terminology, you will need to explain that in the caption even if it was already part of the rest of the text. Significant figures are important for people to understand. And unfortunately, often people don't. You need to report the raw data to the precision that you measured. Now, there are certain test methods that will tell you to report the data to the nearest whatever it was. For example, ASTM C39 says report to the nearest 10 PSI. So, that's what you do. Then, if you have calculated values based on the raw data, you need to keep to the same number of significant figures or fewer. In other words, just because your calculator has 10 digits does not mean that you use all 10 digits. PCI's style is to report the data in the units that were measured, whether that's US customary or SI, as the primary units and then the converted units follow in parentheses. That way, if it happens that we make a mistake and our conversion isn't quite correct, then people know which one is the one that they can rely on. Discussion is the next thing that comes up. Indeed, she had quite a long argument with the lorry who at last turned sulky and would only say, I'm older than you and must know better. And this Alice would not allow without knowing how old it was. And as the lorry positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said. The discussion is the section where you interpret your results. This is where, if you have them, you would put a sample calculation. You may want some kind of statistical analysis. If you had outliers that you discarded, you need to discuss this. Now, ASTM E178 is actually a way of determining which are the outliers and what you throw out. There may be some other statistical tests that you used. My own preference is to throw out only those obvious mistakes for which you can cite a specific physical cause. But whichever method you used, you need to say that. If there was any data that you threw out, you need to explain exactly what it was, how you did it, what you did to determine what was to be thrown out. You need to discuss the reliability of your results. Did you repeat this test multiple times and get the same result every time? What is it that helps you understand how reliable the results are or not? One of the most useful things you can do is compare your work with previous work. Now, it may be that you did similar things in your own lab earlier. Maybe somebody else in your lab did similar things. Maybe somebody else somewhere else altogether did kind of similar things. There's all different ways that you can use to compare with previous work. Maybe somebody's used a different way of measuring the same thing or somewhat different things. Maybe their work would be possibly an upper bound or a lower bound on the results that you have. Whatever it is, though, it's extremely helpful if you can get anything that's at all comparable and then talk about how it does or doesn't compare and where the differences would be. If you get the same results as somebody else, then that's often reassuring. If you get different results, then it's worth exploring why it was that you got something different. Maybe you did something different and that's what caused it and that gives you some really useful insights. Or it may just mean that you made some serious error and you need to figure that out and not publish until you figured out what went wrong. You also need to look at the implications of your work, perhaps for design or for professional practice or whatever it is. But all of these things could go in the discussion. They may not all be relevant in every case. Once you have that, then you go to the conclusion. If there's no meaning in it, said the king, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. The conclusion needs to be solidly based on the evidence presented or evidence referenced in the open literature. It cannot rely on confidential or proprietary information. Occasionally I have seen things published where it was based on litigation and part of the court settlement was that nothing would be published on it and so they don't publish the results but they want to publish the conclusions. That's not acceptable. If you cannot publish the results, then you don't publish the conclusions either. You should not have any surprise endings here. This is not like a detective novel where there's some sort of plot twist at the end and who could see that coming anyway? It should be very, very clear. The results become the basis of the discussion and the discussion becomes the basis of the conclusions. There should be nothing else in here other than what's solidly based on what's been presented. You put the most important conclusion first, followed by the rest and you shouldn't let it dwindle down to total insignificance before you stop. Don't speculate. If you have solid data, then fine. If you don't, then don't have a conclusion. As part of the conclusion, you may want to have some recommendations. PCI journal readers are mostly precast concrete fabricators and their consultants. They want to know what the research results mean to them. How can they use what they learn from your paper? That's where the recommendations come in. Practitioners like to see practical results. Your boss would probably appreciate a gentle nudge in the right direction. Clients pay you to tell them what to do. You could either have a separate section called recommendations or make this part of the conclusion, depending on how many you have. You may have a terminology section to explain terms that are not clear or obvious to people. Alice had not the slightest idea what latitude was or longitude either, but she thought they were nice, grand words to say. The terminology section may be a separate section if there are enough terms. You may want to look at ACI's website. They have a very good terminology section on the website that has definitions of all kinds of technical terms that pertain to our industry. PCI's style manual also has some definitions that may be useful. However you do this, though, you need to have a one-to-one correspondence between a term and its meaning. This is not like other writing where you may have multiple terms that all mean more or less the same thing so you can get shades of meaning. In technical writing, we lose the nuances because we want to have absolute clarity of this means this and that's the only thing it can mean. For a definition, you can either have a formal definition or an informal definition. A formal definition comprises three parts and parallels the scientific process of classification. First thing is the term to be defined, then its class, group, or category, and lastly whatever it is that distinguishes it from that class, group, or category. Now this doesn't have to be as complicated as it sounds. For example, a square is a rectangle with equal sides. In this case, square is the term to be defined, its class, group, or category is rectangle, and what makes it distinct from all of the other rectangles is that it has equal sides. So you can see that it actually could be quite simple and straightforward. Less formally, a definition may simply identify or explain the term. Either way, though, you never use the term to define itself. You always want to define it in simpler rather than more complex terms and don't be like Humpty Dumpty. I meant by impenetrability that we've had enough of that subject and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life. That's a great deal to make one word mean, Alice said in a thoughtful tone. When I make a word do a lot of work like that, said Humpty Dumpty, I always pay it extra. Now, notation could also be a separate section. And in this case, you need to keep a log of the notation as you write. I have occasionally edited stuff where people did not keep straight what something stood for and a single term might have had three or four different definitions and they might have had a single definition that had three or four different symbols. It was really crazy and that's just ridiculous. What you need to have is a one-to-one correspondence between the term and its meaning, just as you do for the terminology. So that's why you keep a log. And if at all possible, stick with the standard notation. So if there's something that's in your field that people commonly use to stand for that, then use that. Don't get creative. It just gets confusing to people. You may have an acknowledgment section. This is where you thank any organization that contributed in cash or in kind to support the work. If the research sponsor has a standard disclaimer, usually it reads something like the opinions are those of the authors, blah, blah, blah, that's where you put it. And this is also where you thank anyone whose help or advice did not rise to the level of co-authorship. Some people like to turn everybody into a co-author just because they want to honor them. This is not an author and this kind of person who has provided you with help but is not actually involved heavily in the design or execution of the research and the writing of the paper and approving the final document is not an author and needs to be included in the acknowledgment rather than on the byline. Some places, some publications have an about the author section. Usually if this is there at all, they will have a headshot of each author, the person's full name, job title and affiliation. And sometimes some additional information depending on how much room they have for this. They may include their participation in the publisher organization such as PCI fellow or their technical committee membership. Sometimes they mention the other relevant organizations that the person is active in such as ACI or ASCE. It possibly would include their research interests or selected career highlights but this is where you want to be really selective and don't just matter on forever. You need to follow the publications author guidelines for the length and content. Usually we'll say no more than 100 words for example. And don't blather on too long. This is not to put your whole resume or your entire life story. It's just a few relevant facts that establish your credibility as the author of this particular topic. Now let's go over to some common errors to avoid because we see these quite a lot when we're editing. First of all, let's look at apostrophes. These are there to show either possession or ownership or to indicate omission of one or more letters. So for example, it's with an apostrophe means it is. It's without an apostrophe means belonging to it. We see this a lot where people put an apostrophe and they think it means possession. It does not in this case. It is not necessary in plurals of numbers and letters such as the 1980s, you don't put an apostrophe or five W's and an H, you don't need an apostrophe and W's. Comprise means to consist of, be composed of or contain. So we say the United States comprises 50 states. We do not say the United States is comprised of 50 states. Fewer and less are distinct and need to be used properly in their place. You use fewer with things that can be counted or quantified as units. So for example, fewer people attended the second meeting. You use less with things that are measured in bulk or aggregate such as the showerhead uses less water but the showerhead used fewer gallons of water per 10 minute shower. Here you actually are quantifying this in units. Pronouns and antecedents are sometimes tricky. The meaning of a pronoun is determined by the nearest noun preceding it for which it could stand. This noun is called the antecedent. And even Stigin, the patriotic Archbishop of Canterbury found it advisable, found what, said the duck. Found it, the mouse replied rather crossly. Of course you know what it means. I know what it means well enough when I find it, said the duck. It's generally a frog or a worm. The question is what did the Archbishop find? Then and then sound somewhat alike but they are distinct. Then with an A is a conjunction and clauses of comparison. For example, less than zero or worse than useless. Then with an E is an adjective of time. Only then could we begin to understand. Or steps one and two are completed first, then step three. Their, their and their sound alike but have also distinct meanings. Their T-H-E-R-E is an adjective of place. Their T-H-E-I-R is a pronoun of possession that is belonging to them. Their T-H-E-Y apostrophe R-E is a contraction of they are. It's too informal for technical writing. Your spell checker probably won't tell you when you've got it wrong because all of these are actual words. So you need to proofread carefully and make sure that you've got the right one. Their dishonesty is a matter of public record. They're all crooks there. In a list, all items should have the same form. So they should either be all nouns, all verbs, all phrases, or all sentences. You want to have the same grammatical structure for each item. The same goes for a sentence with more than one subject. So if you have good writing and to express oneself accurately are marks of clear thinking, you haven't thought this out properly. You need to have parallel structure so that you say good writing and accurate expression are marks of clear thinking. That is, you have an adjective and a noun in both cases as your phrase. Some overused and misused words include issue, which seems to be very, very popular these days. An issue means something produced, published, or offered, as the winter 2013 issue of PCI Journal. Or a point or matter of discussion. Instead use matter to be discussed, if that's what you're talking about, or problem, or difficulty or challenge, depending on which shade of meaning you're actually trying to get after. So avoid expressions like there were still a lot of issues they hadn't addressed. Instead go for something like there were still a lot of problems they hadn't resolved. Impact means a collision, or as a noun, or to strike forcefully as a verb. Instead of it, use effect as a noun, or effect with an A as the verb, except for the expression environmental impact because that is a technical term that you need to use the proper phrase for. So instead of saying how did the changes impact productivity, how did the changes affect productivity? Level means relative position on a vertical scale, or flat, smooth, and even, or to make horizontal or flat, or to raise. Use instead, as a noun, value, degree, or quantity, flat, smooth, even, or level as an adjective. In that case it is okay to say level. Level or one of its synonyms as the verb. That's usually not the way people are using it. We commonly see expressions like we investigated specimens with three different strength levels. Really you're investigating specimens with three different strength values, but you know what? You didn't need that word at all. And often that's what we find as we're editing that people just kind of throw this in and they really didn't need it at all. So think about whether you need to have it in there at all, or if you do, if you can use some other term. Community means a unified body of individuals, or an interacting population in a common location. Use instead who they actually are, so design professionals rather than the design community, or academics, or academia, not the academic community. And anybody who's actually spent any time in academia knows there's no real community there. They just fight over stuff. The design community, so call them design professionals, engineers, PCI members, please stay away from community. Lack of clarity is another common error. It seems very pretty, she said when she finished it, but it's rather hard to understand. You see, she didn't like to confess even to herself that she couldn't make it out at all. Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas, only I don't exactly know what they are. However, somebody killed something, that's clear at any rate. Another common error is using more words than necessary. I quite agree with you, said the Duchess, and the moral of that is be what you would seem to be, or if you'd like to put it more simply, never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others, that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you would have appeared to them otherwise. I think I should understand that better, Alice said very politely, if I had it written down, but I can't quite follow it as you say it. That's nothing to what I could say if I chose, the Duchess replied in a please don't, pray don't trouble yourself to say it any longer than that, said Alice. Now let's look at some examples, and these are actually taken, more or less, from the work of a professional writer. First example illustrates some misused words. So the level of craftsmanship that could be achieved using precast versus stone saved this project a tremendous amount of time, money, and energy. Now of course you know I'm going to attack level first. I think he really meant quality of craftsmanship. The next thing that I'm concerned about is versus, V-E-R-S-E-S, has to do with, for example, stanzas of a poem. I think he meant versus, V-E-R-S-E-U-S, or you could just say rather than, whichever you like. And then lastly, he refers to money, time, and energy, and by energy he did not actually mean the sort of thing that you measure in BTUs, but just effort. So let's just cut that, save this project a tremendous amount of money and time, call it good. Second example illustrates fractured logic. No painting or maintenance are needed and no debris from roofing or siding will need to be replaced if high winds occur, which often happens with other designs. Now of course everybody knows there's no such thing as no maintenance. You always have some. So let's just cut that out altogether and say no painting is needed. My next concern is debris from roofing and siding that would need to be replaced. I'm certain that if debris went missing, nobody would care to replace it. So let's cut that. We'll just say no roofing or siding will need to be replaced if high winds occur. Now this last phrase also is a little odd, which often happens with other designs. Well, the occurrence of high winds is actually the antecedent here, the way it's written. And you don't really affect the occurrence of high winds with design one way or the other, so let's just cut that out too and forget it. That way we have something that's much cleaner and more to the point. Our last example is one of redundancy. Designers convinced the owner that precast concrete panels embedded with thin brick would meet requirements better than laid up brick veneer. They explained that precast concrete could offer better quality control and faster production due to its offsite casting. It also could continue production through any weather, providing a reliable and faster schedule. Precast concrete also proved to be more economical, and best of all, it was fast to erect. So we actually have several things here that are repetitive. We have faster, faster, and fast, so we have that three times. We have production twice within two sentences, and also twice within two sentences. So let's see what we can do to try to reduce the repetition here. First thing we do is move economical up here, so we have offer better quality control and economy due to offsite casting. The next thing, because we had taken production out already, instead of saying it, we have to say production, so production could continue through any weather, providing a reliable and faster schedule. Now our last sentence, precast concrete also proved to be more economical, and best of all, it was fast to erect. You see that we've already covered economy up here, and we've already said faster schedule. So there's really nothing in this sentence at all that needs to be added. It's already there. So you can see that you can eliminate a lot of redundancy just by careful editing. Now just a couple of hints about the writing process. After you've completed your draft, you want to let it sit a day or two so that you can read it with fresh eyes. In that time, it's very useful if you can ask a friend or colleague to read it. Sometimes when we ourselves are involved in the writing of something, we're so intimately involved with it that we can't tell after a while whether it's any good, whether we've said what we need to say, whether it's repetitive or total nonsense. So it's really better to get somebody else who's not involved with it to read it. Ideally, that someone will be similar to your intended reader. You are almost assuredly more of an expert about the subject matter than the people who will be reading about this. Otherwise, why would they bother to read it? So you don't want it to be something that you would understand. You want it to be something that your client or your boss or whoever it is will understand. So find someone that represents your intended reader to read it for you if you can. After you've let it sit and after they've read it, then you can read it again with fresh eyes. Revise it as you need to. She generally gave herself very good advice, though she very seldom followed it. Okay, that's all I have.

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