essay of technical report

Technical Report: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps & Structure Included)

A technical report can either act as a cherry on top of your project or can ruin the entire dough.

Everything depends on how you write and present it.

A technical report is a sole medium through which the audience and readers of your project can understand the entire process of your research or experimentation.

So, you basically have to write a report on how you managed to do that research, steps you followed, events that occurred, etc., taking the reader from the ideation of the process and then to the conclusion or findings.

Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it?

Well hopefully after reading this entire article, it won’t.

However, note that there is no specific standard determined to write a technical report. It depends on the type of project and the preference of your project supervisor.

With that in mind, let’s dig right in!

What is a Technical Report? (Definition)

A technical report is described as a written scientific document that conveys information about technical research in an objective and fact-based manner. This technical report consists of the three key features of a research i.e process, progress, and results associated with it.

Some common areas in which technical reports are used are agriculture, engineering, physical, and biomedical science. So, such complicated information must be conveyed by a report that is easily readable and efficient.

Now, how do we decide on the readability level?

The answer is simple – by knowing our target audience.

A technical report is considered as a product that comes with your research, like a guide for it.

You study the target audience of a product before creating it, right?

Similarly, before writing a technical report, you must keep in mind who your reader is going to be.

Whether it is professors, industry professionals, or even customers looking to buy your project – studying the target audience enables you to start structuring your report. It gives you an idea of the existing knowledge level of the reader and how much information you need to put in the report.

Many people tend to put in fewer efforts in the report than what they did in the actual research..which is only fair.

We mean, you’ve already worked so much, why should you go through the entire process again to create a report?

Well then, let’s move to the second section where we talk about why it is absolutely essential to write a technical report accompanying your project.

Read more: What is a Progress Report and How to Write One?

Importance of Writing a Technical Report

1. efficient communication.

Technical reports are used by industries to convey pertinent information to upper management. This information is then used to make crucial decisions that would impact the company in the future.

Technical team communicating with each other

Examples of such technical reports include proposals, regulations, manuals, procedures, requests, progress reports, emails, and memos.

2. Evidence for your work

Most of the technical work is backed by software.

However, graduation projects are not.

So, if you’re a student, your technical report acts as the sole evidence of your work. It shows the steps you took for the research and glorifies your efforts for a better evaluation.

3. Organizes the data

A technical report is a concise, factual piece of information that is aligned and designed in a standard manner. It is the one place where all the data of a project is written in a compact manner that is easily understandable by a reader.

4. Tool for evaluation of your work

Professors and supervisors mainly evaluate your research project based on the technical write-up for it. If your report is accurate, clear, and comprehensible, you will surely bag a good grade.

A technical report to research is like Robin to Batman.

Best results occur when both of them work together.

So, how can you write a technical report that leaves the readers in a ‘wow’ mode? Let’s find out!

How to Write a Technical Report?

Writing a technical report can feel daunting, but it becomes much more manageable when you break it down into clear steps. This guide will equip you with the knowledge to craft a clear, impactful report that effectively communicates your findings.

Step 1: Understand the Purpose and Audience

The first step is to understand the purpose and audience. What is the goal of your report? Are you aiming to inform, persuade, or explain a technical concept? Identifying your objective will steer the direction and content of your report.

Equally important is knowing your readers. Who will be consuming your report? Are they colleagues with a deep technical background or stakeholders with a broader understanding? Tailoring the language and technical depth to their level is crucial for successful communication.

Step 2: Gather and Organize Information

Once you understand your mission and audience, it’s time to gather your resources. This includes research findings, experimental data, technical specifications, or case studies relevant to your topic. Ensure you have all the necessary evidence and references to support your conclusions.

As you gather this information, organize it methodically. Create an outline using clear headings to structure your report. A common structure includes an introduction, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion, and optional recommendations.

Typical sections include:

Table of Contents
Introduction
Methodology
Appendices (if necessary)

An outline acts as a roadmap, ensuring you cover all necessary points logically.

A lady creating table of contents in a technical report

Step 3: Write the Introduction

Writing the introduction of a technical report is a crucial step in effectively conveying the purpose and scope of your work to the reader. The introduction sets the stage for the rest of the document, providing context, background information, and an overview of the report’s objectives.

1. Begin with a Hook

Just like any good piece of writing, your introduction should start with a hook to grab the reader’s attention. This could be a startling statistic, an intriguing question, or a relevant quote. The goal is to engage your audience right from the start.

2. Provide Background Information

After capturing the reader’s attention, provide some background information that sets the context for your report. This section should give the reader a brief overview of the topic and explain why it is important. Include relevant historical data, recent developments, or industry trends that highlight the significance of your study.

3. State the Purpose and Objectives

Clearly state the purpose of your report and outline its main objectives. This helps the reader understand what to expect and sets the direction for the rest of the document. Be concise but specific about what your report aims to achieve.

4. Define the Scope

It’s important to define the scope of your report so that the reader knows what is included and what is not. This section should outline the boundaries of your study, including any limitations or exclusions. Defining the scope helps manage reader expectations and keeps your report focused.

Step 4: Describe the Methodology

The methodology section is like a transparent blueprint. Here, you detail the methods and procedures used to gather data and conduct analysis. The description should be specific enough that someone could replicate your work.

1. Outline Your Research Design

Start by outlining your research design. This is the overall strategy you used to integrate the different components of your study in a coherent and logical way. Here are some points to consider:

Type of Study: Is it experimental, observational, qualitative, quantitative, or a mix of these?
Approach: Did you use a case study, survey, field research, or laboratory experiment?

2. Describe Your Procedures

Detail the procedures you followed in conducting your research or project. This includes:

Steps Taken: List the steps in chronological order.
Tools and Materials: Specify any tools, instruments, or materials used.
Protocol: Describe any specific protocols or guidelines followed.

3. Explain Data Collection Methods

How did you gather your data? Provide detailed information about your data collection methods:

Sampling: Explain your sampling method and why you chose it.
Data Sources: Describe the sources from which you collected data.
Collection Techniques: Discuss techniques used (e.g., surveys, interviews, observations).

4. Detail Data Analysis Procedures

After data collection, what did you do next? Explain how you processed and analyzed the data:

Analytical Tools: Specify any software or tools used for analysis.
Techniques: Describe the statistical or qualitative techniques applied.
Steps: Outline the steps followed in the analysis process.

5. Address Limitations

No study is perfect. Discuss any limitations in your methodology that could affect your results:

Constraints: Mention any constraints (time, budget, access to resources).
Biases: Identify potential biases or sources of error.
Impact: Explain how these limitations might impact your findings.

Step 5: Present the Results

Presenting results is a critical step in writing a technical report. This section showcases the outcomes of your work and forms the core of your report. It’s where your data, analysis, and insights come together to tell a coherent story.

1. Structure Your Results Section

Organize by Objectives or Hypotheses:

Align your results with the objectives or hypotheses stated in your introduction. This ensures clarity and continuity.
If you had multiple objectives, present the results corresponding to each one in separate subsections.
Use Subheadings: Break down your results into logical subsections using descriptive subheadings. This helps the reader navigate through your findings easily.

2. Present Data Effectively

Utilize tables, graphs, and charts to present data visually. These tools can make complex data more understandable and highlight key trends and patterns.
Ensure all tables and figures are clearly labeled and referenced in the text. Each should have a number (e.g., Table 1, Figure 2) and a descriptive caption.
Supplement visual data with clear and concise narrative descriptions. Explain what the data shows and highlight significant findings.
Avoid simply repeating what is shown in tables and figures. Instead, focus on interpreting the data.

3. Highlight Key Findings

Point out the most important and relevant results. These are the findings that directly address your research questions or objectives.
Use bullet points or numbered lists to highlight key findings for easy reference.
If applicable, discuss the statistical significance of your results. Mention p-values, confidence intervals, or other statistical measures to validate your findings.

4. Discuss Trends and Patterns

Look for and discuss any trends or patterns in your data. Are there any recurring themes or consistent changes over time?
Highlight any unexpected results and offer possible explanations for them.
Compare your results with previous studies or baseline data. This can provide context and underscore the significance of your findings.

5. Ensure Clarity and Precision

Use clear and straightforward language. Avoid jargon and complex sentences that might confuse the reader.
Be precise in your descriptions. Provide exact numbers, percentages, and units of measurement.
Present your results objectively without over-interpretation. Stick to what the data shows and save broader implications and interpretations for the discussion section.

6. Use Visual Aids Appropriately

Choose the right type of visual aid for your data. Use bar charts for comparisons, line graphs for trends, pie charts for proportions, and tables for detailed data.
Ensure your visual aids are of high quality and easy to read. Use appropriate scales, labels, and legends.
Keep them simple and avoid clutter. A well-designed visual aid can significantly enhance understanding.

Avoid interpreting the results in this section; save that for the discussion.

Step 6: Discuss the Findings

The discussion section goes beyond just presenting the results. Here, you delve deeper by interpreting and explaining their meaning and implications. Relate your findings to existing research or established theories and discuss any discrepancies or unexpected outcomes.

Explain how your results contribute to the field or address the problem stated in the introduction. Don’t forget to acknowledge any limitations of your study and suggest areas for future research or improvements. This strengthens your report and demonstrates a well-rounded understanding of the topic.

Step 7: Conclude and Recommend

Finally, conclude with clarity and recommendations. Summarize the main points of your report and restate their importance. Avoid introducing new information here. If applicable, provide clear and concise recommendations based on your findings.

Offer practical solutions or propose next steps. The conclusion should leave a lasting impression, solidifying the reader’s understanding of the report’s significance and its takeaways.

Final Tips:

Proofread and Edit: Carefully review your report for clarity, coherence, and conciseness. Check for grammatical errors and ensure that all technical terms are used correctly.
Include References: List all sources cited in your report, following the appropriate citation style.
Appendices: Add any additional material that supports your report, such as raw data, detailed calculations, or supplementary information, in the appendices.

AND VOILA! You’re done.

…and don’t worry, if the above process seems like too much for you, Bit.ai is here to help.

Read more: Technical Manual: What, Types & How to Create One? (Steps Included)

Bit.ai : The Ultimate Tool for Writing Technical Reports

Bit.ai: Tool to create technical reports

What if we tell you that the entire structure of a technical report explained in this article is already done and designed for you!

Yes, you read that right.

With Bit.ai’s 70+ templates , all you have to do is insert your text in a pre-formatted document that has been designed to appeal to the creative nerve of the reader.

You can even add collaborators who can proofread or edit your work in real-time. You can also highlight text, @mention collaborators, and make comments!

Wait, there’s more! When you send your document to the evaluators, you can even trace who read it, how much time they spent on it, and more.

Exciting, isn’t it?

Start making your fabulous technical report with Bit.ai today!

Few technical documents templates you might be interested in:

Status Report Template
API Documentation
Product Requirements Document Template
Software Design Document Template
Software Requirements Document Template
UX Research Template
Issue Tracker Template
Release Notes Template
Statement of Work
Scope of Work Template

Wrap up(Conclusion)

A well structured and designed report adds credibility to your research work. You can rely on bit.ai for that part.

However, the content is still yours so remember to make it worth it.

After finishing up your report, ask yourself:

Does the abstract summarize the objectives and methods employed in the paper?

Are the objective questions answered in your conclusion?

What are the implications of the findings and how is your work making a change in the way that particular topic is read and conceived?

If you find logical answers to these, then you have done a good job!

Remember, writing isn’t an overnight process. ideas won’t just arrive. Give yourself space and time for inspiration to strike and then write it down. Good writing has no shortcuts, it takes practice.

But at least now that you’ve bit.ai in the back of your pocket, you don’t have to worry about the design and formatting!

Have you written any technical reports before? If yes, what tools did you use? Do let us know by tweeting us @bit_docs.

Further reads:

How To Create An Effective Status Report?

7 Types of Reports Your Business Certainly Needs!

What is Project Status Report Documentation?

Scientific Paper: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps and Format)

Business Report: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps & Format)

How to Write Project Reports that ‘Wow’ Your Clients? (Template Included)

Business Report: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps & Format)

Internship Cover Letter: How to Write a Perfect one?

Periodic report: what is it and how to create it, how to create an incredible training manual (free template included), enterprise content management: a guide to implementing ecm, creative brief: what is it and how to write it (free template), electronic signatures and their impact on remote work, learn the benefits of knowledge-sharing between software teams.

About Bit.ai

Bit.ai is the essential next-gen workplace and document collaboration platform. that helps teams share knowledge by connecting any type of digital content. With this intuitive, cloud-based solution, anyone can work visually and collaborate in real-time while creating internal notes, team projects, knowledge bases, client-facing content, and more.

The smartest online Google Docs and Word alternative, Bit.ai is used in over 100 countries by professionals everywhere, from IT teams creating internal documentation and knowledge bases, to sales and marketing teams sharing client materials and client portals.

👉👉Click Here to Check out Bit.ai.

5 Types of Technical Writing

Become a Certified Technical Writer

Technical writing spans various industries, each with its unique demands and requirements. Understanding the different types of technical writing enhances one’s ability to communicate complex information, whether crafting user manuals, developing product documentation, or preparing technical reports.

Discover how each type functions and why mastering them elevates your technical communication skills.

If you’re interested in learning via video, then watch the video below. Otherwise, skip ahead.

Five Types of Technical Writing in 2024

From detail-oriented technical reports to extensively researched white papers, examples of technical writing span dozens of industries and operations.

Here are the five most prevalent forms of technical writing you can adopt as a career.

Medical and Scientific Papers

Technical writing within the medical and science realm comes under the traditional technical writing umbrella.

This is the first example of modifying technical information to make it understandable for a specific audience.

Researchers use this academic to interpret their findings, organize and condense them into engaging content, and publish it in various journals, newsletters, and online platforms.

The skill requirements for medico-scientific papers include:

Exceptional attention to detail when breaking down high-value experiments and findings
High accuracy when inserting names, dates, citations, etc.
Effective organizational skills, especially when taking all the raw data and organizing it into a user-friendly content form
A flair for authority and credibility that lends itself very well to academics in general

User Manuals and Assistance Guides

User guides are a common form of technical writing that even non-technical professionals encounter.

This type looks to answer specific usage-related questions for consumer products and improve everyone’s end-user experience.

User help guides break down the product into its constituent parts, explain how each part functions, and answer questions about each piece’s solutions. Furthermore, they involve answering queries as consumers use the product for an extended period.

Check out our Technical Writing Certification Course if you’re interested in technical writing for user guides and other technical documentation.

Standard skill requirements for the technical writing of user guides include:

Thorough knowledge of how to organize instruction manuals into stages and sections based on how the product works
A knack for creating solution-oriented content that perfectly explains how to solve a specific problem
Complete understanding of each product
A direct and no-frills style with clear and concise points and minimal use of fluff or filler content

Product or repair manual writers can find jobs with various employers, from copywriting firms to production companies. However, technical writing is a somewhat limited field, so look for an employer that offers progressive growth when applying for a job in this genre.

Books and Guides by Technical Writers

Writing technical books and long-form guides differs from the previous genre due to the length of the content, its conceptual nature, and the amount of detail they go into.

This type of writing extends a simple user guide. It talks about the intentions and purpose behind the product (usually software products).

Interestingly, even though they are more detailed, technical books must be written so any user can comprehend them.

The skill requirements for writing this form of technical documentation include:

The ability to transform complex, jargon-heavy information into simplified and informative content
Complete understanding of the formatting, structure, pacing, and length that’s ideal for these technical documents
Knowledge of when and how to insert visual aids such as graphs, images, and tables to make the content more engaging
Some experience in writing long-form content on a variety of subjects

These books can also serve as troubleshooting guides for software programs. In this role, they have to account for all the possible problems the program could encounter and explain solutions for each one.

Assembly Manuals

Assembly and repair manuals are another niche form of technical writing.

This is due to the technical skills required to understand the disassembly and re-assembly process of a specific machine or piece of equipment. Most general repair guides contain assembly manuals for various types of machinery.

Assembly guides are different from any other form of technical communication because most (if not all) companies require you to be able to perform disassembly.

The skill requirements for assembly manuals and guides include:

A theoretical and practical understanding of the equipment and repair processes involved
Experience working with and repairing machinery of a similar type or function
Ability to research (to find better, more efficient disassembly and repair processes)
Extensive knowledge of how production lines work and how to keep the machinery operating optimally

While most companies are looking for technicians with writing skills, some accept career writers who are willing to learn about processes.

Technical Documents, Reviews, and Reports

Corporate content development contains reviews and reports for stakeholder meetings, proposals, and business pitches.

It’s another versatile form that mixes academic reporting and technical research-based guides. Reports are technical documents that explain the process and outcome of any research, be it scientific or business-centric.

Technical reports take several forms, such as feasibility reports, primary research reports, business plans and prospectuses, short-form proposals, press releases, and case studies.

High-level understanding of the process that’s under focus, as well as how similar processes progress over time
Complete knowledge of the product, as well as past, current, and (proposed) future operations
The ability to communicate in a business-savvy manner while also maintaining an adequate amount of technical know-how in the content
Excellent English language skills with an emphasis on conveying a business message

Technical reports are essential parts of corporate operations. This makes the job quite well-paying in most cases.

Technical Writing Skills in 2024

Regarding academic skills such as writing and linguistics, there is no substitute for an education that supports the skills.

The same is mostly true for technical writing, with the only caveat being that you also need to be knowledgeable in the actual technical processes.

But education and technical knowledge won’t bring you career success as a technical writer in 2024. You need a few more skill pointers to become a great technical writer :

Research Skills: The ability to perform highly detailed research is the cornerstone of a successful career. Most technical writing involves some form of research and study before the actual writing. Ensure that you develop the ability to research extensively and be highly observant throughout the research to find the most valuable points for your content.
Efficient Planning: Unless you have a complete timeline to develop your technical content, you must learn how to manage your research, outlines, content writing, and distribution efficiency. Planning for the content ahead of time or developing a system to wrap up high-level content quickly will help you stick to deadlines without compromising quality.
Observation Skills: Most technical content is long-form and involves many complex data points. Develop a keen sense of observation, which will help you pick valuable data from a sea of random information.
Being Tech-Savvy: Digital ages require knowledge of content development software systems in 2024, especially to develop more high-quality content quickly. If you’re not already, take online courses in content writing software systems before applying for a job.

These technical writing skills will help you succeed in your career. Additionally, make sure that this type of content appeals to you as a technical writer and that you’re willing to explore the various sides of it throughout your career.

Final Thoughts

According to the BLS, most technical writers make over six figures a year. When technical writers take home these figures, it makes it one of the best-paying jobs in the professional field of writing and media. Technical writers are desperately needed to make communications clear, and technical writers can involve themselves in many demands to create a technical document or technical documentation.

To ensure that you excel in your career, find out where your technical marketing communication strengths lie and what technical documentation skills companies value, and apply for jobs accordingly.

Here are the most frequently asked questions about technical writing.

What is technical writing, and how does it relate to software development?

Technical writing is a specialized form of communication that focuses on creating clear, concise, and accurate documentation for complex topics. In the context of software development, technical writing involves creating various types of documents, such as technical manuals and technical specifications. These documents are crucial for developers, end-users, and stakeholders as they provide essential information about software functionality, features, and usage. Effective technical writing ensures that all parties involved have a comprehensive understanding of the software and its capabilities, which can facilitate smoother development processes and user interactions.

How do I create technical documentation for a new software product?

Creating technical documentation for a new software product requires a systematic approach. Start by gathering detailed information about the software from the development team, including its features, functionalities, and architecture. Use this information to draft technical manuals and specifications that outline how the software works and how it should be used. Ensure the documentation is structured logically, with clear headings and subheadings, and include diagrams or screenshots if necessary to enhance understanding. Additionally, it’s essential to write in a style accessible to your target audience, whether they are developers, users, or other stakeholders.

What role do technical manuals play in business or sales proposals?

Technical manuals play a crucial role in business or sales proposals by providing detailed information about the technical aspects of a product or service. When included in a proposal, these manuals can help potential clients or partners understand the specifications and capabilities of what is being offered. This can be particularly important for complex products or services where technical details are a significant factor in the decision-making process. By presenting well-structured technical manuals, you demonstrate transparency and expertise, which can strengthen your proposal and build confidence with your audience.

How do technical specifications differ from technical manuals in documentation?

Specifications and manuals serve different purposes in the documentation. Technical specifications detail a product or system’s specific technical requirements, features, and performance criteria. They provide a comprehensive list of what the product is expected to achieve and the standards it must meet. In contrast, technical manuals are more comprehensive guides that include instructions for using, operating, and maintaining the product. While specifications outline “what” a product is, technical manuals explain “how” to use it effectively. Both are essential for complete and effective technical documentation but address different product lifecycle aspects.

How can a technical report enhance a business or sales proposal?

A technical report can enhance a business or sales proposal by providing in-depth analysis and evidence supporting the proposed solution or product. Including a technical report in your proposal adds credibility and demonstrates a thorough understanding of the technical aspects related to the project. It often includes data, research findings, and detailed explanations that validate the proposed approach or technology. This level of detail can reassure potential clients or partners of the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solution, thereby strengthening the overall proposal and increasing its chances of success.

What is the importance of including a technical report in technical documentation?

Including a technical report in technical documentation is crucial for providing a detailed and objective account of a project’s technical aspects. A technical report offers a comprehensive analysis of technical data, methodologies, and results, which can be valuable for stakeholders seeking to understand a project’s technical background and outcomes. It helps document the development process, testing procedures, any issues encountered, and their resolutions. This thorough documentation is essential for future reference, troubleshooting, and ensuring that all technical aspects are well-recorded and accessible for review or compliance purposes.

If you are new to technical writing, we recommend taking our Technical Writing Certification Course . You will learn the fundamentals of being a technical writer, how to dominate technical writer interviews, and how to stand out as a technical writing candidate.

We offer a wide variety of programs and courses built on adaptive curriculum and led by leading industry experts.

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Study guides

Guide to Technical Report Writing

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Guide to Laboratory Writing

School of Engineering and Informatics (for staff and students)

Table of contents

1 Introduction

2 structure, 3 presentation, 4 planning the report, 5 writing the first draft, 6 revising the first draft, 7 diagrams, graphs, tables and mathematics, 8 the report layout, 10 references to diagrams, graphs, tables and equations, 11 originality and plagiarism, 12 finalising the report and proofreading, 13 the summary, 14 proofreading, 15 word processing / desktop publishing, 16 recommended reading.

A technical report is a formal report designed to convey technical information in a clear and easily accessible format. It is divided into sections which allow different readers to access different levels of information. This guide explains the commonly accepted format for a technical report; explains the purposes of the individual sections; and gives hints on how to go about drafting and refining a report in order to produce an accurate, professional document.

A technical report should contain the following sections;


Title page	Must include the title of the report. Reports for assessment, where the word length has been specified, will often also require the summary word count and the main text word count
Summary	A summary of the whole report including important features, results and conclusions
Contents	Numbers and lists all section and subsection headings with page numbers
Introduction	States the objectives of the report and comments on the way the topic of the report is to be treated. Leads straight into the report itself. Must not be a copy of the introduction in a lab handout.
The sections which make up the body of the report	Divided into numbered and headed sections. These sections separate the different main ideas in a logical order
Conclusions	A short, logical summing up of the theme(s) developed in the main text
References	Details of published sources of material referred to or quoted in the text (including any lecture notes and URL addresses of any websites used.
Bibliography	Other published sources of material, including websites, not referred to in the text but useful for background or further reading.
Acknowledgements	List of people who helped you research or prepare the report, including your proofreaders
Appendices (if appropriate)	Any further material which is essential for full understanding of your report (e.g. large scale diagrams, computer code, raw data, specifications) but not required by a casual reader

For technical reports required as part of an assessment, the following presentation guidelines are recommended;

Script	The report must be printed single sided on white A4 paper. Hand written or dot-matrix printed reports are not acceptable.
Margins	All four margins must be at least 2.54 cm
Page numbers	Do not number the title, summary or contents pages. Number all other pages consecutively starting at 1
Binding	A single staple in the top left corner or 3 staples spaced down the left hand margin. For longer reports (e.g. year 3 project report) binders may be used.

There are some excellent textbooks contain advice about the writing process and how to begin (see Section 16 ). Here is a checklist of the main stages;

Collect your information. Sources include laboratory handouts and lecture notes, the University Library, the reference books and journals in the Department office. Keep an accurate record of all the published references which you intend to use in your report, by noting down the following information; Journal article: author(s) title of article name of journal (italic or underlined) year of publication volume number (bold) issue number, if provided (in brackets) page numbers Book: author(s) title of book (italic or underlined) edition, if appropriate publisher year of publication N.B. the listing of recommended textbooks in section 2 contains all this information in the correct format.
Creative phase of planning. Write down topics and ideas from your researched material in random order. Next arrange them into logical groups. Keep note of topics that do not fit into groups in case they come in useful later. Put the groups into a logical sequence which covers the topic of your report.
Structuring the report. Using your logical sequence of grouped ideas, write out a rough outline of the report with headings and subheadings.

N.B. the listing of recommended textbooks in Section 16 contains all this information in the correct format.

Who is going to read the report? For coursework assignments, the readers might be fellow students and/or faculty markers. In professional contexts, the readers might be managers, clients, project team members. The answer will affect the content and technical level, and is a major consideration in the level of detail required in the introduction.

Begin writing with the main text, not the introduction. Follow your outline in terms of headings and subheadings. Let the ideas flow; do not worry at this stage about style, spelling or word processing. If you get stuck, go back to your outline plan and make more detailed preparatory notes to get the writing flowing again.

Make rough sketches of diagrams or graphs. Keep a numbered list of references as they are included in your writing and put any quoted material inside quotation marks (see Section 11 ).

Write the Conclusion next, followed by the Introduction. Do not write the Summary at this stage.

This is the stage at which your report will start to take shape as a professional, technical document. In revising what you have drafted you must bear in mind the following, important principle;

the essence of a successful technical report lies in how accurately and concisely it conveys the intended information to the intended readership.

During year 1, term 1 you will be learning how to write formal English for technical communication. This includes examples of the most common pitfalls in the use of English and how to avoid them. Use what you learn and the recommended books to guide you. Most importantly, when you read through what you have written, you must ask yourself these questions;

Does that sentence/paragraph/section say what I want and mean it to say? If not, write it in a different way.
Are there any words/sentences/paragraphs which could be removed without affecting the information which I am trying to convey? If so, remove them.

It is often the case that technical information is most concisely and clearly conveyed by means other than words. Imagine how you would describe an electrical circuit layout using words rather than a circuit diagram. Here are some simple guidelines;

Diagrams	Keep them simple. Draw them specifically for the report. Put small diagrams after the text reference and as close as possible to it. Think about where to place large diagrams.
Graphs	For detailed guidance on graph plotting, see the
Tables	Is a table the best way to present your information? Consider graphs, bar charts or pie charts. Dependent tables (small) can be placed within the text, even as part of a sentence. Independent tables (larger) are separated from the text with table numbers and captions. Position them as close as possible to the text reference. Complicated tables should go in an appendix.
Mathematics	Only use mathematics where it is the most efficient way to convey the information. Longer mathematical arguments, if they are really necessary, should go into an appendix. You will be provided with lecture handouts on the correct layout for mathematics.

The appearance of a report is no less important than its content. An attractive, clearly organised report stands a better chance of being read. Use a standard, 12pt, font, such as Times New Roman, for the main text. Use different font sizes, bold, italic and underline where appropriate but not to excess. Too many changes of type style can look very fussy.

Use heading and sub-headings to break up the text and to guide the reader. They should be based on the logical sequence which you identified at the planning stage but with enough sub-headings to break up the material into manageable chunks. The use of numbering and type size and style can clarify the structure as follows;

devices

In the main text you must always refer to any diagram, graph or table which you use.
Label diagrams and graphs as follows; Figure 1.2 Graph of energy output as a function of wave height. In this example, the second diagram in section 1 would be referred to by "...see figure 1.2..."
Label tables in a similar fashion; Table 3.1 Performance specifications of a range of commercially available GaAsFET devices In this example, the first table in section 3 might be referred to by "...with reference to the performance specifications provided in Table 3.1..."
Number equations as follows; F(dB) = 10*log 10 (F) (3.6) In this example, the sixth equation in section 3 might be referred to by "...noise figure in decibels as given by eqn (3.6)..."

Whenever you make use of other people's facts or ideas, you must indicate this in the text with a number which refers to an item in the list of references. Any phrases, sentences or paragraphs which are copied unaltered must be enclosed in quotation marks and referenced by a number. Material which is not reproduced unaltered should not be in quotation marks but must still be referenced. It is not sufficient to list the sources of information at the end of the report; you must indicate the sources of information individually within the report using the reference numbering system.

Information that is not referenced is assumed to be either common knowledge or your own work or ideas; if it is not, then it is assumed to be plagiarised i.e. you have knowingly copied someone else's words, facts or ideas without reference, passing them off as your own. This is a serious offence . If the person copied from is a fellow student, then this offence is known as collusion and is equally serious. Examination boards can, and do, impose penalties for these offences ranging from loss of marks to disqualification from the award of a degree

This warning applies equally to information obtained from the Internet. It is very easy for markers to identify words and images that have been copied directly from web sites. If you do this without acknowledging the source of your information and putting the words in quotation marks then your report will be sent to the Investigating Officer and you may be called before a disciplinary panel.

Your report should now be nearly complete with an introduction, main text in sections, conclusions, properly formatted references and bibliography and any appendices. Now you must add the page numbers, contents and title pages and write the summary.

The summary, with the title, should indicate the scope of the report and give the main results and conclusions. It must be intelligible without the rest of the report. Many people may read, and refer to, a report summary but only a few may read the full report, as often happens in a professional organisation.

Purpose - a short version of the report and a guide to the report.
Length - short, typically not more than 100-300 words
Content - provide information, not just a description of the report.

This refers to the checking of every aspect of a piece of written work from the content to the layout and is an absolutely necessary part of the writing process. You should acquire the habit of never sending or submitting any piece of written work, from email to course work, without at least one and preferably several processes of proofreading. In addition, it is not possible for you, as the author of a long piece of writing, to proofread accurately yourself; you are too familiar with what you have written and will not spot all the mistakes.

When you have finished your report, and before you staple it, you must check it very carefully yourself. You should then give it to someone else, e.g. one of your fellow students, to read carefully and check for any errors in content, style, structure and layout. You should record the name of this person in your acknowledgements.


Word processing and desktop publishing packages offer great scope for endless revision of a document. This includes words, word order, style and layout.	Word processing and desktop publishing packages never make up for poor or inaccurate content
They allow for the incremental production of a long document in portions which are stored and combined later	They can waste a lot of time by slowing down writing and distracting the writer with the mechanics of text and graphics manipulation.
They can be used to make a document look stylish and professional.	Excessive use of 'cut and paste' leads to tedious repetition and sloppy writing.
They make the process of proofreading and revision extremely straightforward

Two useful tips;

Do not bother with style and formatting of a document until the penultimate or final draft.
Do not try to get graphics finalised until the text content is complete.
Davies J.W. Communication Skills - A Guide for Engineering and Applied Science Students (2nd ed., Prentice Hall, 2001)
van Emden J. Effective communication for Science and Technology (Palgrave 2001)
van Emden J. A Handbook of Writing for Engineers 2nd ed. (Macmillan 1998)
van Emden J. and Easteal J. Technical Writing and Speaking, an Introduction (McGraw-Hill 1996)
Pfeiffer W.S. Pocket Guide to Technical Writing (Prentice Hall 1998)
Eisenberg A. Effective Technical Communication (McGraw-Hill 1992)

Updated and revised by the Department of Engineering & Design, November 2022

School Office: School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Chichester 1 Room 002, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QJ [email protected] T 01273 (67) 8195 School Office opening hours: School Office open Monday – Friday 09:00-15:00, phone lines open Monday-Friday 09:00-17:00 School Office location [PDF 1.74MB]

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Writing Tips

A Guide to Technical Writing (With Examples)

4-minute read

5th May 2023

You can find technical writing in lots of places, including in your home, at your job, in many industries, and in businesses of all sizes. If you need help with business writing specifically, check out how we can assist you .

In today’s post, we’ll break down what technical writing is and how to do it effectively. We’ll also provide some handy examples.

What Is Technical Writing?

Technical writing doesn’t always look very technical! It can be anything that describes how to do a task or how to operate a machine or system. Or it can cover a specialized topic. Technical writing includes recipes in your favorite cookbook, board game instructions, operator manuals, health and safety regulations, legal documents, and financial reports.

Instructions for Carrying Out a Task

This type of technical writing can be a recipe for a cake, the instructions for a board game, tips on how to walk your dog to heel, or the script for a social media video on how to cut your own hair.

Operating Manuals for Machinery, Appliances, or Systems

Technical writing can also be the user guide for a dishwasher, for a factory machine that makes cardboard boxes, a “how to” guide for spreadsheets, or instructions for changing the oil in your motorcycle.

Specialized Topics

The list here could be very, very long! Technical writing on specialized topics includes a company’s business reports, a medical consultant’s letter to a patient, health and safety regulations, employment policies, and legal documents.

So How Do I Produce a Great Piece of Technical Writing?

Let’s take it in three stages: Who? What? How?

Who Is It For?

In any type of writing, knowing your audience is important. This is particularly true of technical writing. Here are some examples of who might read technical writing:

· A renter of an apartment that needs details on their lease

· An electrical engineer who needs to know how the wiring is laid out in the apartment block

· The janitor of that same building who needs to know the location of the emergency lights

· The occupant of apartment 61, who needs to know how to use the oven in their kitchen

They all need information presented to them, but what information do they need?

What Do They Need?

The renter needs a legal document that leaves no room for doubt about their legal rights and obligations and those of their landlord. The document will be very detailed, containing terms that need careful explanation.

The electrical engineer needs accurate, clear information about the wiring, as they could get hurt or cause harm to someone else if the diagram is inaccurate.

The janitor needs clear directions and a map of where the emergency lights are.

The occupant of apartment 61 needs instructions that are written in plain English so they can use their oven safely.

How Should Technical Writing Be Composed?

Follow these steps when writing a technical document:

· Research and know your subject thoroughly.

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Subscribe to our newsletter and get writing tips from our editors straight to your inbox.

· Decide on the appropriate writing style. Just because it’s technical, doesn’t mean it has to contain lots of jargon . Be concise, be direct, and be straightforward.

· Consider whether you need to include diagrams, maps, images, charts, and/or tables.

· If writing instructions, take it one step at a time, write objectively , and make sure the instructions work!

Examples of Technical Writing

Let’s look at some examples:

The first version contains unnecessary words, but the warnings are not specific enough. The instructions should be concise and clear. In the second version, the danger is stated right away, and the critical warnings are concise and specific.

In these examples, the first version is unnecessarily wordy. It provides a lot of detail for minor tasks but gives vague instructions for bigger tasks. The second version is much clearer. The instructions are easier to follow, and they include each necessary step.

Good technical writing needs the following attributes:

1. Relevance

2. Accuracy

4. Accessibility

5. Simplicity

Really good technical writing will include these attributes every time.

Is technical writing difficult?

Technical writing does not have to be difficult if you follow our guide and do your research beforehand.

Are there professional bodies for technical writers?

There are several professional organizations for technical writing. This list from UTA Libraries is very useful.

What can I do if I’m not sure that my technical writing style is appropriate to my subject?

We have experts in many fields who can check your writing and advise on style .

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Education and Communications
Technical Writing

How to Write a Technical Report

Last Updated: September 28, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Christopher M. Osborne, PhD . Christopher Osborne has been a wikiHow Content Creator since 2015. He is also a historian who holds a PhD from The University of Notre Dame and has taught at universities in and around Pittsburgh, PA. His scholarly publications and presentations focus on his research interests in early American history, but Chris also enjoys the challenges and rewards of writing wikiHow articles on a wide range of subjects. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 89,344 times. Learn more...

Engineers, scientists, and medical professionals need to be good writers too—and technical reports prove it! A good technical report presents data and analysis on a specified topic in a clear, highly-organized, and effective manner. Before you begin writing, define your message and audience, and make an outline. Then, write the main body of the report and surround it with the other necessary sections, according to your chosen layout.

Technical Report Outline

Planning Your Report

Step 1 Establish the message you want to convey through the report.

For instance, you may want to convey the message that a new technique for extracting a particular chemical compound is both safer and more cost-effective.
The best technical reports remain clear and focused throughout—they have a specific purpose and convey the information in a logical order.
Work with advisors, supervisors, or colleagues to fine-tune the message and/or goal of your report. These can vary widely depending on whether the report is being produced for academic, business, or other purposes.

Step 2 Define your audience before you begin writing.

If others in your field will be reading the report, it can be more “technical” in language and detail. In many cases, though, technical reports are intended for those outside of your particular discipline. If so, cut back on the jargon for non-expert readers.
Consider having a non-expert friend look over your report throughout the process to give you feedback on its accessibility to a broad audience.

Step 3 Create an outline to follow while you write.

Determine which particular sections your report must or may have. Consult the person or organization to whom you’ll be submitting the report for any layout requirements.

Writing the Main Body of the Report

Step 1 Create a thorough but focused introduction to the report.

In most cases, the introduction will likely be 1-3 paragraphs in length.
The end of the introduction should clearly state what the report “does.” It might do so by way of a direct statement (“This report analyzes…”), or by providing a series of questions (which may in some cases be bulleted or numbered) to be addressed.

Step 2 Provide background information and/or a literature review in the next section.

Essentially, you want readers who may be new to the subject matter to feel like they have at least a rudimentary grasp of it after reading this section.

Step 3 Follow up with a clear and detailed project description.

If, for instance, your report is focused on a particular experiment, be specific on the way it was conceived, set up, and conducted.
This is sometimes called a “methods” section, since you are describing the methods used to conduct your research.

Step 4 Present your data and describe what it all means in the next sections.

It can be hard to determine how much data to present. Giving too little can significantly weaken your analysis and the overall report. Giving too much, however, can drown the reader in a sea of tables and figures. Make sure you provide all essential data, and err on the side of providing a bit too much unless otherwise instructed.
Present your data in a logical order, so that each table or figure leads into the next one.

Be as bold in your conclusions as your data and analysis permits you to be. Don’t use terms like “might,” “perhaps,” “could,” and so forth—write something like, “The data shows that…” However, don’t draw conclusions that aren’t supported by your data.

Adding Components in the Proper Layout

Step 1 Check for specific guidelines with your university, employer, etc.

Executive Summary
Table of Contents
List of Figures / List of Tables
Main Report: Introduction; Background / Literature Review; Project Description; Data / Description of Data; Conclusion
Acknowledgements

Step 2 Create a simple title page at the beginning of your report.

Write the abstract after you’ve written the actual report. You want it to be a condensed description of what you have written, not of what you intend to write.
Check to see if there is a specific word limit for your abstract. Even if there isn’t, 300 words is a good word limit to aim for.

Step 4 Create an executive summary that condenses the report by about 90%.

The executive summary should focus on your findings, conclusions, and/or recommendations, and allow the report itself to present the data—although highlights of the data should be provided.
Depending on your situation, you may need to write an abstract, an executive summary, or both.

Step 5 Draw up a table of contents, list of tables, and list of figures.

Check for any formatting guidelines for these sections. If the format is left up to you, keep things simple and straightforward.

Step 6 Follow the main body of the report with an acknowledgments section.

This section typically runs 1-2 paragraphs, and follows a fairly simple “The author would like to thank…” format.

Step 7 Include citations in the references section, using a consistent format.

In some cases, you may also be expected to provide a listing of works you have consulted but not specifically cited in the work. Check with the relevant department, organization, individual, etc., if you’re not sure. [13] X Research source

Use a consistent, easy-to-navigate format when creating appendices. They aren’t meant to be dumping grounds for random snippets of data or information.

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1 The Formal Technical Report

For technical reports, formal and informal, readers are generally most interested in process and results. Clear presentation of results is at least as important as the results themselves; therefore, writing a report is an exercise in effective communication of technical information. Results, such as numerical values, designed systems or graphs by themselves are not very useful. To be meaningful to others, results must be supported by a written explanation describing how results were obtained and what significance they hold, or how a designed system actually functions. Although the person reading the report may have a technical background, the author should assume unfamiliarity with related theory and procedures. The author must consider supplying details that may appear obvious or unnecessary. With practice, the technical report writer learns which details to include.

The formal technical report contains a complete, concise, and well-organized description of the work performed and the results obtained. Any given report may contain all of the sections described in these guidelines or a subset, depending upon the report requirements. These requirements are decided by the author and are based on the audience and expected use of the report. Audience and purpose are important considerations in deciding which sections to include and what content to provide. If the purpose is to chronicle work performed in lab, as is typical for an academic lab report, the audience is typically the professor who assigned the work and the contents usually include detailed lab procedure, clear presentation of results, and conclusions based on the evidence provided. For a technical report, the audience may be colleagues, customers, or decision makers. Knowing the audience and what they are expecting to get out of reading the report is of primary consideration when deciding on sections to include and their contents.

There are certain aspects to all reports that are common regardless of audience and expected usage. Rather than relegate these overarching report-writing considerations to a secondary position, these items are presented before detailing the typical organization and contents for technical reports.

Universal Report-Writing Considerations

The items listed in this section are often overlooked by those new to technical report writing. However, these items set the stage for how a technical report is received which can impact the author, positively or negatively. While in an academic setting, the author’s grade could be impacted. While in a professional setting, it is the author’s career that could be affected. Effective communication can make the difference in career advancement, effective influence on enacting positive change, and propelling ideas from thought to action. The list that follows should become second nature to the technical report writer.

Details to consider that affect credibility:

Any information in the report that is directly derived or paraphrased from a source must be cited using the proper notation.
Any information in the report that is directly quoted or copied from a source must be cited using the proper notation.
Any reference material derived from the web or Internet must come from documentable and credible sources. To evaluate websites critically, begin by verifying the credibility of the author (e.g. – credentials, agency or professional affiliation). Note that peer reviewed materials are generally more dependable sources of information as compared to open source. Peer review involves a community of qualified experts from within a profession who validate the publication of the author. Open source information may be created by non-qualified individuals or agencies which is often not reviewed and/or validated by experts within the field or profession.
Wikipedia is NOT a credible reference because the information changes over time and authors are not necessarily people with verifiable expertise or credentials.
Provide an annotated bibliography of all references. Typically, annotations in technical reports indicate what the source was used for and establish the credibility of the source. This is particularly important for sources with credibility issues. However, an annotation can clarify why a source with questionable credibility was used.
With the increasing availability of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) such as provided by ChatGPT, where GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, credibility will likely be challenged more frequently and will be more difficult to establish. Generative AI models may provide invalid responses and a knowledgeable reader will pick up on that quickly.
Make sure to know the consequences if you violate rules provided by your instructor in an academic setting or by your employer in a workplace setting for presenting work by another or by AI as if it were your own (without citation). Additionally, there may be rules on how much of your work can be AI-generated and what annotation you are required to provide when using generative AI. Know the rules and if you can’t find the rules, ASK.
See Appendix A for information about citing sources and AI-generated content.

Details to consider that affect the professional tone:

Passive voice: “The circuit resistance will be measured with a digital multimeter”.
Active voice: “Measure the circuit resistance with a digital multimeter”.
Avoid using personal pronouns such as “you”, “we”, “our”, “they”, “us” and “I”. Personal pronouns tend to personalize the technical information that is generally objective rather than subjective in nature. The exception is if the work as a whole is meant to instruct than to inform. For example, technical textbooks whose only purpose is to instruct employ personal pronouns.
Avoid using “it”. When “it” is used, the writing often leads to a lack of clarity for the reader as to what idea/concept “it” is referring to, thus negatively impacting overall clarity of the writing.
Use correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Pay attention to and address spell and grammar check cues from writing software such as Microsoft (MS) Word.

Details to consider that affect the professional appearance:

All figures and tables must be neatly presented and should be computer generated. Use a computer software package, such as Paint, Multisim, AutoCAD, or SolidWorks, to draw figures. If inserting a full-page figure, insert it so can be read from the bottom or from the right side of the page . ALL figures and tables must fit within or very close to the page margins.
Generate ALL equations using an equation editor and provide each equation on its own line. Under normal circumstances, there is no reason to embed an equation within a paragraph. Depending on presentation and how many equations are involved, number the equations for easy reference.
Refer to appendix B for information on how to automatically create a Table of Contents and properly number pages.
If the report includes an abstract, it should be on an unnumbered page after the title page and before the Table of Contents or it can be included on the title page.
For all hard copy reports, all pages of the report must be 8 ½“ X 11” in size. Any larger pages must be folded so as to fit these dimensions. HOWEVER, in this day and age, an electronic submission is most common. Keep in mind that with an electronic submission, it is easier to provide an appealing look with color since a color printer is not required.

Details to consider that affect readability:

Every section and sub-section of the report needs to start with an introductory paragraph that provides the context for the section or sub-section.
Every figure, graph, table, and equation needs to be introduced to the reader prior to being presented to the reader. This introduction provides the context.
ALWAYS NUMBER AND PROVIDE A TITLE FOR ALL FIGURES .
Make sure that the verb used can actually operate on the noun. For example, stating “the goal for this report is to observe …” implies that the report can observe when it is likely that the goal of the work reported on is to make certain observations.
Check for spelling and grammar errors which are often highlighted with cues by the text editing software. Follow capitalization, punctuation, and indentation norms. Remember to capitalize the names of proprietary items such as licensed software.
Define acronyms and abbreviations prior to using them.

Finally, always consider carefully the context of information provided. Know your audience. Thoughtfully consider if a statement is clearly supported by the information provided without leaving your reader confused. Remember that by the time you are writing a report, you should know the information inside and out, but your audience is reading your report to learn.

Standard Components of a Formal Technical Report

Technical reports should be organized into sections and are typically in the order described in this section. While this is the recommended order, certain reports may lend themselves to either reordering sections and/or excluding sections.

The format for this page may vary, however, the following information is always included: report title, who the report was prepared for, who the report was prepared by, and the date of submission. This is not a numbered page of the report.

An abstract is a concise description of the report including its purpose and most important results . An abstract should not be longer than half a page, single-spaced, and must not contain figures or make reference to them. Technical authors are generally so focused on results that they neglect to clearly state the purpose for the work. That purpose is derived from the objectives or goals, most commonly provided by the person who assigned the work. In stating the purpose, it is critical to include key words that would be used in a database search since searches of abstracts are commonly used by professionals to find information they need to do their jobs and make important decisions. Results are summarized in the abstract but how much quantitative information is provided varies with report audience and purpose. It is common to include maximum percent error found in the experimental results as compared to theory. Do not use any specific technical jargon, abbreviations, or acronyms. This is not a numbered page of the report.

Include all the report sections and appendices. Typically, sub-sections are also listed. This is not a numbered page of the report.

The Table of Contents is easy to include if you properly use the power of the software used to generate the report. The Table of Contents can be automatically generated and updated if the author uses built in report headings provided in the styles menu. It is worth the time and effort to learn these tools since their application are ultimately time-savers for report writers. Directions are provided in Appendix B on creating a Table of Contents in MS Word using section headings.

Introduction

The length of the Introduction depends on the purpose but the author should strive for brevity, clarity, and interest. Provide the objective(s) of the work, a brief description of the problem, and how it is to be attacked. Provide the reader with an overview of why the work was performed, how the work was performed, and the most interesting results. This can usually be accomplished with ease if the work has clearly stated objectives.

Additionally, the introduction of a technical report concludes with a description of the sections that follow the Introduction. This is done to help the reader get some more detailed information about what might be found in each of the report sections included in the body of the report (this does not include appendices). This can feel awkward but providing that information is the accepted standard practice across industries.

Be careful not to use specific technical jargon or abbreviations such as using the term “oscope” instead of “oscilloscope”. Also, make sure to define any acronyms or abbreviations prior to using them. For example, in a surveying lab report a student might want to refer to the electronic distance measuring (EDM) device. The first time the device is referred to, spell out what the acronym stands for before using the acronym, as demonstrated in the previous sentence. Apply this practice throughout wherever an acronym or abbreviation is used but not yet defined within the report.

Background Theory

The purpose of this section is to include, if necessary, a discussion of relevant background theory. Include theory needed to understand subsequent sections that either the reading audience does not already comprehend or is tied to the purpose for the work and report. For example, a report on resistor-capacitor electric circuits that includes measurement of phase shift would likely include a theoretical description of phase shift. In deciding what should or should not be included as background theory, consider presenting any material specific to the work being reported on that you had to learn prior to performing the work including theoretical equations used to calculate theoretical values that are compared to measured values. This section may be divided into subsections if appropriate. Keep the discussion brief without compromising on content relevant to understanding and refer the reader to and cite outside sources of information where appropriate.

The purpose of this section is to provide detailed development of any design included in the report. Do not provide a design section if there is no design aspect to the work. Be sure to introduce and describe the design work within the context of the problem statement using sentences; a series of equations without description and context is insufficient. Use citations if you wish to refer the reader to reference material. Divide this section into subsections where appropriate. For example, a project may consist of designing several circuits that are subsequently interconnected; you may choose to treat each circuit design in its own subsection. The process followed to develop the design should be presented as generally as possible then applied using specific numbers for the work performed. Ultimately, the section must provide the actual design tested and include a clear presentation of how that design was developed.

Theoretical Analysis

Although a theoretical analysis might be part of a design, the author needs to decide if that analysis should be included as part of the design section or a separate section. Typically, any theoretical work performed to develop the design would be included in the design section but any theoretical analysis performed on the design would be included in a separate section. Do not provide a theoretical analysis section if the theoretical work is all described as part of background theory and design sections. However, in most cases, a theoretical analysis section is included to provide important details of all analyses performed. Be brief. It is not necessary to show every step; sentences can be used to describe the intermediate steps. Furthermore, if there are many steps, the reader should be directed to an appendix for complete details. Make sure to perform the analysis with the specific numbers for the work performed leading to the theoretical values reported on and compared to experimental values in the results section of the report. Worth repeating: perform the analyses resulting in the numbers that are included as the theoretical values in the results section of the report. Upon reading the results section, the reader should be familiar with the theoretical values presented there because the reader already saw them in this section.

This section varies depending on requirements of the one who assigned the work and the audience. At a minimum, the author discusses the procedure by describing the method used to test a theory, verify a design or conduct a process. Presentation of the procedure may vary significantly for different fields and different audiences, however, for all fields, the author should BE BRIEF and get to the point . Like with any written work, if it is unnecessarily wordy, the reader becomes bored and the author no longer has an audience. Also, the procedure section should never include specific measurements/results, discussion of results, or explanation of possible error sources. Make sure all diagrams provided are numbered, titled, and clearly labeled.

Depending on the situation, there are two likely types of procedure sections. In one case, a detailed procedure may have already been supplied or perhaps it is not desirable to provide a detailed description due to proprietary work. In another case, it might be the author’s job to develop and provide all the detail so work can be duplicated. The latter is more common in academic lab settings. Writing guidelines for these possible procedure sections are provided below.

Procedure Type 1

Use this procedure type if you have been supplied with a detailed procedure describing the steps required to complete the work or detailed procedure is not to be supplied to potential readers (procedure may be proprietary). Briefly describe the method employed to complete the work. This is meant to be a brief procedural description capturing the intention of the work, not the details. The reader may be referred to the appendix for detailed procedure steps. The following list provides considerations for this type of procedure section.

Example: For measurements made over a range of input settings, provide the actual range without including the details of the specific input settings or order data was taken (unless order affects results).
If required by the person who assigned the work, include the detailed procedure in the appendix.
MUST provide detailed diagram(s) of all applicable experimental set-ups (i.e. circuit diagram) that include specific information about the set-up, such as resistor values.
Provide diagrams and/or pictures that will further assist the reader in understanding the procedural description.
Provide a details of any work performed for which prescribed steps were not provided and that the author deems necessary for the reader’s comprehension.
To test the theory of superposition, the circuit shown in Figure 1 is employed. The circuit is constructed on the lab bench and using MultismTM, a circuit simulation software. In both settings, a multimeter is used to measure the output voltage, as shown in Figure 1, for the following three cases: (1) Source 1 on and Source 2 off, (2) Source 1 off and Source 2 on, and (3) both sources on. These measurements are compared to the output voltage derived using theory as described earlier. Refer to the appendix for further detail or procedure.
In order to test the theory of superposition, first each team member must calculate the output voltage for the circuit shown in Figure 1 for the following three cases: (1) Source 1 on and Source 2 off, (2) Source 1 off and Source 2 on, and (3) both sources on. Then one team member is assigned to build the circuit on the lab bench while the other team member constructs the circuit in Multisim. Once constructed, turn Source 1 on and Source 2 off then connect the positive lead of the meter to the positive end of the output voltage and the negative lead of the meter to the negative end of the output voltage. Record the meter reading. Next turn on Source 2 and turn off Source 1. Again, measure the output voltage using the meter ….

Procedure Type 2

Use this procedure type if you have not been supplied with a detailed description of the steps required to complete the work and/or you were required to develop and report procedure. The reader should be able to repeat the work based on the content supplied in this section.

Equipment use
Equipment maintenance
Define terms specific to the technology
Measurement techniques and/or calibration
The description should be sufficiently clear so that the reader could duplicate the work. Do not assume that the reader has prior knowledge or access to prior reports, textbooks, or handouts.
If part of the procedure was successfully described in a previous report, either repeat the procedure or include that report in the appendix and refer the reader to it.
Where appropriate, provide additional diagrams and/or pictures to assist the reader in understanding the procedure.

Results and Discussion

Present the results of the work performed, within the context of the problem statement, using neatly organized and completely labeled tables and/or graphs whenever possible. When comparative data is available, present the data in a way that facilitates the comparison. For example, if theoretical and experimental values are available, present the values alongside one another accompanied by percent error. If it would help the reader understand the results, include a few sample calculations but put lengthy calculations in an appendix.

ALWAYS accompany results with a meaningful discussion. The discussion explains what the results mean and points out trends. In some cases, the results speak mostly for themselves and the discussion may be brief, i.e., “Table 2 shows that the designed variable modulus counter works as expected” along with a sentence or two stating how a variable modulus counter works and referring to parts of the table that verify/justify the statement. In other cases, the meaning of the results may not be as clear requiring more detailed discussion. In most cases, the results include data from more than one source to be compared to establish validity. Meaningful discussion immediately follows presentation of results and include:

commenting on percent difference making sure it is clear to the reader which values are being compared and establishing comparative size of the difference in relation to expectations (negligible, small, large),
cause for the difference (error sources are discussed further in the next paragraph), and
how the results inform the reader as framed by the work’s objectives.

All three of the points are important to a meaningful discussion but the third one is most often overlooked. Discussion related to (3) may provide a statement about the theory used to predict the measured data. That statement often includes the theoretical assumptions made to predict the results and what the measured results indicate about the applicability of those theoretical assumptions to the experimental setting.

ALWAYS discuss the possible significant sources of error and how accurate the results need to be in order to be meaningful. Do not include a discussion of possible sources of error that would not add significantly to the observed error. What counts as significant depends on the situation. For example, if the components used have a tolerance of 5% and the accuracy of the equipment is within 0.5% of the measured value, then the equipment does not add significant error. However, if the components used have only a 1% tolerance then equipment with 0.5% accuracy is problematic. In general, it is impossible to obtain error-free results, therefore when there is 0% error there is still cause for discussion to comment on the situation that may result in error-free results or meaningful justification for expectation of error-free results. Expecting some error is not an excuse for lack of attention to detail when conducting procedures that minimize the error. Errors are different from mistakes. It is unacceptable to report mistakes. If a mistake was made, the work must be repeated until acceptable tolerances are achieved before submitting a report. Please find more on discussing percent error or percent difference in Appendix C.

When working in industry, it is imperative to know required level of accuracy for results. Your supervisor or client will expect results within specifications. If that means repetitive measurements to check for accuracy within tolerance, then do it. If it means performing a detailed analysis prior to making measurements, then do it. In an academic setting, the result of laziness or lack of effort may only be a bad grade. In a workplace, you may get fired!

Other information pertaining to writing Results and Discussion section can be found in Appendix C. This information includes

How to calculate percent difference/error.
Typical magnitudes of percent error for courses where circuits are constructed.
What to consider writing about based on questions posed by the person assigning you to write the report.
Guidelines for graphs provided in a report.

In this final section of the body of the report, the author should briefly bring everything together. It is similar to the abstract except that now specific results are concluded upon in a quantitative way. Therefore, the conclusion should be a concise description of the report including its purpose and most important results providing specific quantitative information. The conclusion should not contain figures or refer to them. As with the abstract, the reader should be able to read this section on its own which means that there should be no specific technical jargon, abbreviations, or acronyms used.

Anywhere within your writing that you have either copied or paraphrased another source, you must cite that source. This entails two steps. One is to provide a parenthetical citation at the location in the report where the material that is not your own resides and the other is to provide the complete bibliographic information in a References page following the Conclusion section of the report. If an annotated bibliography is required, include an annotation for ALL sources describing what the source was used for within the report and establishes the source’s credibility.

Using the APA style, the parenthetical citation at the location in the document where the copied or paraphrased material exists includes: author, publication date, and page number(s). For sources with no author, the name of the reference material is used. All this information is included within parentheses thus being referred to as a “parenthetical citation”.

The full bibliographic information for all reference material cited within your writing is collected on the References page. In technical papers, the referenced sources are usually listed in the order they are referred to in the body of the report and, in fact, many published engineering papers will simply number the references and then use that number in square brackets to replace the parenthetical citation within the body of the report. Those new to this form of technical writing, often ask about how and where to list references used but not explicitly cited in the body of the report. However, if the reference is important enough to list, that generally means that there is an appropriate place to cite it in the body of the report, perhaps in the introduction or background theory. In Appendix A you can find further information about creating citations using citation generators available on the internet that will create a properly formatted citation for you when provided with the relevant information. Although citation generators are readily available, the one I recommend is from Calvin College called KnightCite due to the minimum sponsored advertisements and can be found at http://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/ .

The References section begins on a new page; not on the same page with the conclusion. Refer to Appendix A for detailed information on preparing the References section. Also, there is a wealth of information about citation styles, including lengthy guides and short handouts, at https://sunydutchess.libguides.com/citations .

One final note on references and providing bibliographic information concerns use of sources that may appear to be questionable. There is no doubt that information from a wiki is questionable since, by definition, it can be changed by users including unqualified users. Although most wikis are reviewed and erroneous or misleading information corrected, at any given time there could be erroneous and misleading information. However, depending on report content, internet sources, including .com sites that have industry bias and .org sites that have policy bias, may have valuable information. Even .edu sites can be problematic if site is by an individual rather than an educational group within the institution since the former is likely not to have any editors and the latter is likely to be monitored and curated by the group. In order to establish credibility or usefulness of a source, especially a questionable one, provide an annotation to the bibliographic information that provides further information as to why the source was included and perspective on its application to the work reported. Information about annotated bibliographies is provided in Appendix A.

This section may not always be present. Materials included in an appendix may include lab sheets, parts list, diagrams, extensive calculations, error analyses, and lengthy computer programs. Introduce numbered or lettered appendices rather than putting different items in one appendix.

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Engineering Technical Reports

Technical reports include various types of "technical" information. For example, if you need to report why a design or piece of equipment failed, you'd write a forensic report. Or, you might have to write about a design you created. Then, you'd produce a design report or, you may need to combine these two. Many report types are classified as technical reports. You should always determine what information you need to convey and who your audience is before you start writing.

Technical reports present facts and conclusions about your designs and other projects. Typically, a technical report includes research about technical concepts as well as graphical depictions of designs and data. A technical report also follows a strict organization. This way, when other engineers read what you write, they can quickly locate the information that interests them the most.

As a student, you might assume that your technical report's audience is your instructor, however, this may not always be the case. Your instructor may ask you to produce a report for your peers or for other engineers. However, you shouldn't always assume that your audience has a strong engineering background or is familiar with the engineering terminology you use. Always check with your instructor to know who your audience is.

As an engineer in the field, the most likely audience for the technical reports you produce is other engineers with a background similar to yours. This audience is more likely to understand the terminology you use. However, you should always evaluate who your readers will be before assuming they will understand your jargon. Consider how your readers will use your report. For instance, you might submit a technical report to a publication or your technical report may present a specific design. The audiences in each situation have different needs. Audiences may read the publication for information and insight while audiences reading about your specific design may critique your design or make decisions based on its content.

General Format

Technical Reports have an organized format because a majority of your audience may not read the entire report in one reading. This specific format allows readers to quickly locate the information they need.

Most technical reports include the parts listed below. However, you may be required to include or exclude specific sections. Be sure to check with your instructor before using the format outlined here.

Transmittal Letter

Transmittal letters often accompany reports and inform readers of a report's context. Typically, the letter includes information not found in the report. For example, the letter contains information about the particular project and/or due dates. A Transmittal Letter is a business letter and should be formatted accordingly; that is, you should include the recipient's address, your address, a salutation and closing. Depending on the project, you may also need to include contact information. Always check with your instructor to determine whether or not you should attach a transmittal letter to your report.

A technical report should always include a title clearly identifying the report. A title should be descriptive and accurate, but not wordy, verbose or too terse.

The Abstract is extremely important because it helps readers decide what to read and what to pass over. The idea of the Abstract is to give readers an honest evaluation of the report's content, so they can quickly judge whether they should spend their valuable time reading the entire report. This section should give a true, brief description of the report's content. The most important purpose of the Abstract is to allow somebody to get a quick picture of the report's content and make a judgment.

Since an Abstract is a brief summary of your report, its length corresponds with the report's length. So, for example, if your report is eight pages long, you shouldn't use more than 150 words in the Abstract. Generally, Abstracts define the report's purpose and content.

Executive Summary

Typically, Executive Summaries are written for readers who do not have time to read the entire technical report. An executive summary is usually no longer than 10% of the report. It can be anywhere from 1-10 pages long, depending on the report's length. In the executive summary, you should summarize the key points and conclusions from your report. You might include anexecutive summary with your report, or the summary can be a separate document.

Some reports only include an abstract while others include an executive summary. Always check with your instructor to determine which to include or if you should include both.

Table of Contents

A Table of Contents includes all the headings and subheadings in your report and the page numbers where each of these begins. When you create a Table of Contents, one of the most important decisions you have to make involves design. A good Table of Contents distinguishes headings from subheadings and aligns these with the appropriate page numbers. This also means you should pay attention to capitalization, spacing, and indentation.

List of Figures & List of Tables

These two separate lists assist readers in locating your photos, drawings, tables, graphs and charts. Like the Table of Contents, you need to present both of these in an organized, appealing format. Typically, you can shorten a figure or table's title when you create these lists.

Report Body

In a technical report, the body typically presents an Introduction, various other sections, depending on your topic, and a Conclusion. Throughout the body, you should include text (both your own and research from other sources), graphics, and lists. Whenever you cite information or use graphics from another source, you must credit these sources within your text. Check with your instructor to know which reference style to use.

Whenever you cite information (this includes graphics) from another source, you must credit the source in your References. Always check with your instructor to determine which reference style to use.

Appendices include information that is too large to fit within your report, yet information necessary to your report. For example, large graphics, computer print-outs, maps, or sample codes are best placed in Appendices. When making decisions about what to place in an Appendix, consider whether or not the material interrupts the reading flow. For instance, six pages of calculations would obviously cause readers to loose their train of thought. Appendices always appear at the end of a report.

Example Technical Report

As you read the example, keep in mind that this technical report was a requirement for CE208 at Colorado State University. The course instructor, Dr. Tom Siller, commented on this document. Other instructors or job situations may have different opinions or require a different format.

December 12, 1996

Dr. Tom Siller Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80524

Dear Mr. Siller:

We are submitting to you the report, due December 13, 1996, that you requested. The report is entitled CSU Performing Arts Center. The purpose of the report is to inform you of our design decisions for the center. The content of this report concentrates on the structural and acoustical aspects of the CSU Performing Arts Center. This report also discusses cable-stayed technology. If you should have any questions concerning our project and paper please feel free to contact Mike Bridge at 491-5048.

Sincerely, Mike Bridge Lead Engineer

Instructor Comments

This is not a very good business letter. In a business letter, you typically present your own address in addition to the receiver's address. Also, my address is incomplete. They need to include "Department of Civil Engineering." And what about a logo? Letterhead? Typically, businesses have letterhead.

Another problem is that the contact phone number is buried in the text. This makes it easy to miss. A good idea is to list the contact phone number under your title at the bottom. This letter should also provide a context for the project, "This final project was completed for CE 208…" In other words, this project represents your last say; no more is coming.

Project Engineers: Mike Bridge

Alice Lake Simon Civil Karen Nuclear

The title page here is missing key information. There should be date and client name (That'd be me!). A client in this environment is the class. For instance, you might say, "submitted for" or "to," something of that nature.

The format looks good. I like the use of bold in spots. It highlights the text.

It's also good that they identified themselves with the group.

MASK Engineering has designed a performing arts center for the CSU campus in order to provide a complex that will better serve the campus and the community. This facility will not only improve the performing arts programs on campus, but will encourage students and community members to attend more cultural events in Fort Collins. The capacity of the new facility will exceed that of existing structures on campus, and the quality of sound and aesthetics will be improved. Some of the features included are a large performing hall, a coffee shop, a banquet hall, and a recording studio. The total area of the complex is 56,500 square feet split into three levels.

This abstract summarizes the accomplishments of the project and what it will do. It also summarizes some of the actual design and indicates that it's going to include a performing hall, coffee shop, banquet hall, and recording studio.

The writing, however, could be a little tighter in my opinion. The first sentence looks like it's around 20 words long. First of all, that whole expression "will better service the Campus and the Community" doesn't mean anything. What does "better serve" mean? And so, I look at something like that and say, "Mask Engineering has designed a new Performing Arts Center that will meet the needs of the theater community," or something more specific.

And then the second sentence is typical. It gives the particular vehicle for doing the programs. It implies the facility improves programs, and I'm not sure that's quite the right subject in a sentence like that. There's no point in a "but" here. It will do this and this; it's not a contrast. They're not contrasting anything. And so, there are some grammatical problems here. I think these kinds of grammatical problems come up because students don't read carefully. They write it. To avoid this construction, read it sentence by sentence and say, "What does this sentence accomplish for me?" And you can see that this sentence structure doesn't accomplish; it implies there's a contrast, well, there is no contrast.

Then the abstract gets stronger. "The capacity of the new facility will exceed that," so they get very specific. "The quality, sound and ascetics will be improved. Some of the features included are this." They're very good at being descriptive and saying this, this and this. The struggle I think engineering students have is the motivational lead-in to their material. They're more comfortable at the descriptive aspect of their material.

Acknowledgments

MASK Engineering would like to thank Dr. Michael Schaff of the CSU Music Department and Ms. Annie Cleveland from the CSU Theater Department for their expertise and input for the CSU Performing Arts Center. We would also like to thank Dr. Tom Siller for his aid in our research and use of his research materials.

Excecutive Summary

Introduction

Our main goal was to design a Performing Arts Center for the CSU campus that would blend well with the rest of the campus. To achieve this goal, our group split into two smaller groups; Alice in one and Simon, Mike, and Karen in the other. Alice concentrated on acoustical aspects of the complex. Simon, Mike, and Karen concentrated on the structural plans.

In this section, we specify the exact location of the structure and why we believe it is a prime location.

Cable-stayed Technology

Here, we present our rationale for using cable-stayed technology. We base this technology on several other existing structures.

Main Hall Acoustics

One of the key characteristics of a concert hall that greatly influences sound quality, is its reverberation time (the time before the decay of the reflected sound ). In the construction of the main hall for the CSU Performing Arts Center a balance will be determined that will create a reverberation time of two seconds, as independent of audience size as possible.

In this section, we discuss the materials to be used. Retractable banners will be built into the ceiling, and can be lowered to create this effect. Cloth seats will be used as they best assimilate an occupied audience area ( Beranek 1962 ). This allows sound within the hall to be independent of audience size. The low sound absorbency of plaster also makes it ideal for the creation of the desired reverberation time of two seconds.

The intensity of the direct sound should not be too weak, but at the same time, it must not become uncomfortably loud. This problem will be dealt with by limiting the length of the room, and by designing the surfaces above and around the stage to project the sound evenly throughout the concert hall. Another problem arises with the seats placed under a balcony. To prevent a muddiness within the sound, the depth under the balcony should not exceed the height of the opening beneath the balcony.

The Colorado State University Performing Arts Center consists of three levels. The total area of the complex is 56,500 square feet. The basement and ground floors consist of 20,500 square feet apiece. The second floor has a square footage of 15,500.

During the duration of the project, we accomplished our goal of designing a Performing Arts Center for the CSU campus that would blend well with the rest of the campus. A cable-stayed support system for the roof will allow for a compact facility and an unobstructed view for patrons. In order to achieve the best acoustical results in the main performance hall, we have designed a rectangular hall made of plaster. We have also designed the hall so that the depth under the balcony does not exceed the height of the opening beneath the balcony. The total area of the complex will be 56,500 square feet split into three levels. The main hall will have a seating capacity of 1,200.

Introduction: You don't need to summarize the paper's introduction since the introduction is generally an overview to the whole report. In other words, don't summarize what you're going to summarize.

Executive Summary: This summary is too short compared to the report's length.

Location: This information doesn't tell me squat. They should have said something like, "This report presents the location at the northwest corner of the Oval as being the ideal location. The motivation for this decision is documented in this section." This is a summary. Summaries should inform me; they shouldn't tell me what I'm being told.

Main Hall Acoustics: This section is more informative. Here, they tell me the key characteristics influencing sound quality. As for the phrase "It will be determined," well, hasn't it already been determined? They should have written, "In the construction of the main hall for the CSU Performing Arts Center, a balance of x was defined. This creates a reverberation time of two seconds." You need to positively say what's been done. In other words, you did this, you designed it.

Conclusion: You should only summarize the conclusion if it's really a conclusion and not a summary. By this I mean have you come to a conclusion? Based on everything you've done, have you made conclusions or recommendations and not summarized what you've covered in the report?

Acknowledgments................................i

Abstract..............................................ii

Executive Summary.............................iii

List of Figures..................................iv

List of Tables....................................v

Introduction.........................................1

Location..............................................3

Cable-Stayed Technology.....................5

Acoustics............................................8

Floor Plans........................................12

Conclusion........................................16

References.......................................17

First of all, I like the dots that make the visual connection. This report does not go into much in the way of subsections, and so from that standpoint, it is probably appropriate not to number the sections. This table of contents doesn't use subsections, which is adequate for the length of this project. I'm expecting a more detailed table of contents this year. I'd like to see further subsections on ideas. That helps writing be more organized.

Example of Table of Contents with Subsections:

1.0 Introduction..........

Here, the main topics are at one level, then indented to the next level. And they're just great visual clues. One of the purposes of the table of contents is to give readers a visual map of the document. They can look at this before they start reading and know where things fit. Writers need to think of a table of contents as providing a mental map for readers.

List of Figures

The captions on this list are weak, and this is obvious because of the phrases, "Map of Campus," "Bridge Diagram." There's no use of capitalization because they're just phrases. This is a balancing act. You don't want to write long sentences, but you don't want to write something that's so vague readers aren't certain what it means. For example, a reader might ask "What campus?" The students are obviously thinking in their own minds of one campus, CSU. They need to think beyond that. One of the things I try to impress on students in figures and tables too, is that sometimes these will be pulled out of your report. And so now, they're out of context. You've got to balance giving enough information, so someone can interpret it when it's out of the context of the existing report. Captions should not be so overly verbose that you've got a paragraph. I think a figure caption should be about one line at the most. At times captions may get a little longer, but I find those distracting.

The purpose of designing a performing arts center on the CSU campus is to provide adequate capacity and higher quality of sound and aesthetics as compared to the existing structures in the region. Factors that MASK Engineering considered included accessibility, cost effectiveness, location, and an efficient use of space. Our intent was to preserve the open space of the CSU campus and to design the complex in such a manner that it will blend well with its surrounding environment.

We at MASK Engineering believe that this project will greatly benefit both the CSU campus and the surrounding Fort Collins community. Such a facility will lead to the improvement of the performing arts programs on campus. It will directly affect the students and professors in the music, theater. and dance programs at the university, eventually increasing enrollment in these disciplines. There are approximately 230 students in the performing arts programs at CSU right now. The amount of space that is available to these students is inadequate for their performances. The construction of this complex will not only provide them with the space they need, but will also continue the growth of these programs, making CSU a leader in the education of the performing arts.

These changes at the university will result in a heightened cultural awareness in the community. Currently, community events are held at the Lincoln Center, while CSU sponsored events are held at the Lory Student Center theater. A new facility will bring community and university events together and will allow a greater variety of outside events to be brought to Fort Collins. The location of this complex on campus will bring a greater number of students to these events due to the elimination of transportation problems.

MASK Engineering has focused on the structural and acoustical aspects of the CSU Performing Arts Center, while hiring other firms to handle the parking, mechanical and electrical operation, and utilities. A cable-stayed support system has been chosen, and a floor plan has been drawn up that will produce the best acoustical results. A. L. handled the acoustical aspects of the complex, while S.C., K.N., and M.B. concentrated on the structural plans. We are planning for the construction of this complex to begin within the next few years.

The site chosen for the Colorado State University Performing Arts Center is the plot of land upon which Green Hall now stands (Figure 1). This area was chosen primarily for its location on the CSU campus and its proximity to the downtown area. Green Hall is a condemned building and is not currently used for anything beyond university storage. Some office space has been granted to the branch of the CSUPD dealing with parking violations, but this department could easily move back to its old location at Aylesworth Hall. Our firm believes that this space would be better used as a home for the performing arts than as the site of a crumbling warehouse.

We have considered possible disturbances that the construction of the performing arts center on this plot might cause. Due to the close proximity of Green Hall to Allison Hall and Parmelee Hall, we have decided to begin construction early in the summer, after classes have ended. Green Hall will be torn down first, and construction of the performing arts center will begin immediately. This will allow us a good start on the project while students are not living in the nearby residence halls. According to the front desk at Braiden Hall,, which is located near the Morgan Library construction site, residents do not have a problem with noise and there have been no complaints of disturbances. MASK Engineering believes that this will be the case for the residents in Allison and Parmelee when they return in the fall as the performing arts center is finished.

A cable-stayed support system was chosen for the design of the CSU Performing Arts Center. One reason for choosing this system was to allow for a more compact facility because the space available on campus was limited. Another reason was to give patrons an unobstructed view of events by eliminating the need for columns.

The original use of cable-stayed technology was seen in bridges. German engineers established the design of cable-stayed bridges in the 1950's and 1960's. This technology was eventually adapted to buildings, using cables to support the roof. Each tower is buttressed by two sets of cables, transferring the load into the ground. Without a roof load to support, columns are not needed in the complex and the space can be used in more ways.

The concept behind cable-stayed technology is to have the supporting reactions to the load directed in only vertical directions as opposed to vertical and horizontal. It also eliminates any tension and/or compression force (Figures 3.1 and 3.2) . For a building, the load of the roof is directed through the cables, to the towers, and down to the ground. The walls do not support the roof as they normally would; only the cables are used to hold up the roof. An example of a cable-stayed building is the Alamodome, a multipurpose stadium in San Antonio, Texas (Figure 3.3). Our model is based on this design.

Background One of the key characteristics of a concert hall that greatly influences sound quality, is its reverberation time (the time before the decay of the reflected sound ). For orchestral or band music, the ideal reverberation time is approximately two seconds. Any times approaching 1.6 seconds will lead toward a dry, dead sound ( Beranek 1962 ). The other extreme is a time that is too long. This causes the music to lose its clarity, an excessive loudness, and the blending of incompatible chords ( Beranek 1962 ). A hall's reverberation time can be affected by such things as the volume of the room or the number of people in the audience. In the construction of the main hall for the CSU Performing Arts Center a balance will be determined that will create a reverberation time of two seconds, as independent of audience size as possible.

Sound quality is also greatly determined by the warmth of the sound. Warmth is determined by the fullness of the bass tones. If the middle frequencies of a sound have longer reverberation times than the low tones, then the sound will become brittle (Beranek 1962 1).

Materials Table 4.1 gives the absorption coefficients of different frequencies for common surfaces. It shows that materials such as heavy curtains or thick carpet absorb are the ideal choice for decreasing the intensity of higher frequencies. This leads to the production of a more full, warm sound. Retractable banners will be built into the ceiling, and can be lowered to create this effect. Cloth seats will be used as they best assimilate an occupied audience area ( Beranek 1962 ). This allows sound within the hall to be independent of audience size. The low sound absorbance of plaster also makes it ideal for the creation of the desired reverberation time of two seconds.

Design considerations The intensity of the direct sound should not be too weak, but at the same time, it must not become uncomfortably loud. This problem will be dealt with by limiting the length of the room, and by designing the surfaces above and around the stage to project the sound evenly throughout the concert hall. Another problem arises with the seats placed under a balcony. To prevent a muddiness within the sound, the depth under the balcony should not exceed the height of the opening beneath the balcony, as shown in figure 4.1 ( Beranek 1962 ).

Table 4.1 Absorption coefficients of different frequencies for main hall surfaces

	Frequency ( Hz )
Surface	125	250	500	1000	2000	4000
heavy fabric	0.14	0.36	0.57	0.72	0.70	0.62
heavy carpet on concrete	0.02	0.06	0.16	0.37	0.59	0.64
cloth seats	0.44	0.60	0.76	0.87	0.80	0.70
plaster on brick	0.01	0.01	0.01	0.02	0.04	0.06

Table based on: Beranek, L. 1966. Music, Acoustics, & Architecture. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York.

Figure based on: Beranek, L. 1966. Music, Acoustics, & Architecture. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., New York.

Floor Plans

The basement level of this center (Figure 5.1 ) includes two main dressing rooms with shower facilities as well as four private dressing rooms with individual restrooms for guest performers. The mechanical room for the building will be in the basement, housing such devices as the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning equipment as well as the mechanics for the elevator. A spacious performers' lounge has also been added in to the basement to provide a relaxing environment for the center's performers.

The building's main floor (Figure 5.2 ) includes the main performance hall as well as a small rehearsal hall. The main hall is 5,000 square feet and has a seating capacity of 1,200. A coffee shop and art lounge have been included in this plan for the enjoyment and convenience of the patrons. A large classroom is provided for dance classes as well as rehearsals. Sufficient office space is included adjacent to the center's box office.

The top floor of the CSU Performing Arts Center (Figure 5.3 ) includes a walk- around balcony overlooking the main lobby as well as a balcony for the main performance hall. An elevator is provided for travel between the first and second floors. A recording studio is also located on this floor as an added bonus.

In conclusion, MASK Engineering has carefully planned out the details of the proposed CSU Performing Arts Center. This facility will be a benefit to the performing arts programs at CSU, the students and faculty of CSU, as well as the members of the community. It will allow for the improvement of programs in the area and growth of interest in cultural events. The site of Green Hall will be accessible to both students and the community, and will use the space on campus most efficiently, preserving the green areas. A cable-stayed support system for the roof will allow for a compact facility and an unobstructed view for patrons. In order to achieve the best acoustical results in the main performance hall, we have designed a rectangular hall made of plaster. We have also designed the hall so that the depth under the balcony does not exceed the height of the opening beneath the balcony. The total area of the complex will be 56,500 square feet split into three levels. The main hall will have a seating capacity of 1,200. The facility contains necessary rooms to accommodate the performers, and several rooms to make the visit of the patrons more enjoyable.

Introducton: The one thing lacking in this introduction is a good, brief description of their design. The discussion about the benefits, etc. are not clear to me without first hearing what their solution is.

They do a good job of discussing the motivation for their project.

I personally like the introduction to end with a brief description of what the remaining portions of the report contain.

A little more background and possibly a map would help this discussion. DO NOT assume your reader is as familiar with this as you are.

Figure 2.1: With this figure, I'm not certain whether or not this is the caption or part of the title of the figure. This says, "Map of Campus, circle area represents the site where Green Hall currently stands." That mixes what it is. A revised caption would read something like "Map of CSU Campus Indicating Proposed Site Location."

The map also borders on plagiarism. When you take a figure from someone else's work, you put in the caption "from" and you list the document and that document better be in the references. And it's not "based on," it's "from." And that's a subtlety you need to learn. There's a distinction between something that is "from." To get permission to use this map, the writers would have to get copyright approval from the source. If they based it on, if they've redrawn the figure and they've used this map as a source, then they should, even at that point say, "based on," or "the CSU Map is from such and such source, page such and such, dated such and such." It needs to be a complete reference.

Another problem is that by looking at this map, I can't read a darn thing from it. I know that's the Oval. And I know the Weber building because I live in it. But the scale is so off, and the reproduction is so bad that they should have made the decision to either find a better original or not used it at all.

They should also include an arrow to Green Hall. The circle's not quite sufficient. The Oval isn't that different from the circle. Part of the problem is that the scale is wrong. I shouldn't have to look at a figure and guess what writers want me to see. It should be blatant.

In terms of the placement of this figure, I have several thoughts. The writers put their figures on separate pages within the body of the text. That's an acceptable style. I have no problem with that. It comes after its first reference in the text, which is important. The inappropriate thing is referring to it in the text as "figure 1," and referring it on the paper as figure "2.1."

Figures 3.1 and 3.2: These figures are labeled "Figures 3.1 and 3.2." Which one's which? They should not be put together. What I mean by this is they can be on the same page, but Figure 3.1 needs to be where Figure 3.1 is and Figure 3.2 need to be where Figure 3.2 is. The figure numbers should not both be up at the top. The reader shouldn't have to guess "is there a dividing line between the figures or does it divide some where else?" If they had captions associated with those figures' numbers, that would not have occurred. I actually like figure numbers underneath the figure, not above the figure.

With these figures I again wonder if they were taken from some source not referenced. And so, I'm not sure these are originally hand drawn by the students. Now if they are, they could have done a better job because the legends don't fully tell me what it means. The dark square means compressive force, and I don't know what that means. I understand "load" and I understand "supporting reactions," but I don't understand "Building diagram?" That's a building?

I'm not convinced these were meant to be two figures. I think they should be one. They're talking "cable stay" technology which would of been nice to have in the title. I think they're trying to draw an analogy between "here's how a bridge is done, and here's how it's also now being done in buildings." But it's not coming through.

This figure is placed at the right location. The key thing with placement in text is to put the figure as close as possible after it is first referenced. Never put it before you reference it and don't bury it deeply in the text. This is one of the clues that leads you decide whether you do an appendix or not. If you find you're having so many figures that when you try to put them in text they're turning out to be five pages straight of figures, that's a clue that you have so many figures, they're probably better handled in the back.

Figure 3.3: I know the writers didn't take this photograph! And I want to know who did take the photograph because that person needs to be credited. This figure's location in the text is fine. I'm happy with their style of one figure per page.

The quality of this reproduction is not very good. But that's always hard with photographs. It does make their point, which is the tall columns with the cables coming off. However, the fine details have been wiped away, so it's a bad photograph for their purposes.

This visual also works off the previous two visuals since it represents another way of looking at the particular structure. Whenever you can, especially when you're dealing with new technology, you've got to give people good visual images. And anyway you can do that is useful. Schematics allow you to do certain things like add arrows and show load paths. So this had a different function. The other two depicted load paths. This one was trying to give the viewer a big picture of what this looks like. After all, a bridge is difficult to imagine.

Table 4.1: This table accurately sites its source, "Table based on such and such." However, it gives too much information. All that is needed is the author's name, so readers could then look it up in the references.

Some suggestions are to put "Based on Byronic L 1966." all within the caption. Then the table would physically separate the title if I felt there was a title too, separate from the caption. It would then be clear, spatially, that there's a caption up here. And below is the title on the table.

Another alternative would be to "footnote" the table. Not a real footnote, but a footnote within the table. This can be done by using an identifier like a "star." So I might say, "Table," if it's the whole table, and put, "Table 4.1*" showing that there's a clue to come, down at the bottom. If there were particular pieces of information in here, a particular column or something, such as just the surface frequency or heavy fabric, or it was two of these, I could then put stars on there and indicate, "This was based on this person's work, as opposed to my original work.

Figure 4.1: When a figure like this needs to be drawn, you should follow normal conventions for drafting, including dimension lines with arrowheads. I'm assuming the "D" and "H" represent "depth" and "height."

A figure is for clarification, and this one raises many questions. I don't know what the point of this figure is. I'm assuming there's a value here. If this was to be a conceptual diagram representing, "We now can do a sensitivity D over H," then you might do that. But I think they were trying to show us how big is was. It's not a very good figure because it leaves too much to my imagination. This is not worth a thousand words.

Figure 5.1: A scale should be included here. Also, these should be numbered. Students should indicate how each one works (e.g. doors, etc.).

Figure 5.2: A scale should be included here. Also, is that the Performance Hall in the middle?

Figures 5.1, 5.2, & 5.3: These were done with AutoCAD, so it's hard to criticize the quality of them because this is what AutoCAD produces.

"M" and "W" should be explained; I am assuming these stand for a Mens' Room and a Women's Room. There are better visual ways of doing that more explicitly, as with international symbols, etc. Also, "E" for "exit" is a little short.

These are meant to be schematic floor plans. And they are. It'd be nice to have a "north arrow" here. Students will always think of a "north arrow" on a map, but they won't necessarily think of it on a building. It's important because it helps readers tie back to the orientation of the building on the site.

These serve very well as schematics. They do not serve well as details. They don't show doors; they don't show windows. But this design is more at the conceptual level, so I understand why they did it. The detail fits the purpose. The problem is, when readers look at this example, they don't necessarily know that whole context.

It really would have been nice to have put these visuals in the front. A neat way to have done that would have used this as a figure on the title page to introduce the concept right up front.

The captions on these are all right. If you put to much lettering on a figure, it gets busy. This is actually a pretty good balance. They're descriptive enough. I understand just about what everything is. I'm not sure what the basketball-like part is since it's not labeled. But overall, these are pretty good, typical, schematic drawings.

Using a different font is a stylistic mistake. If you have an area that you want to label and the font you're using doesn't fit in there, don't just use a real small font because it fits. Move the label out and put an arrow to it.

This is a fairly low number of references. Three is minor. Sometimes, you might not have references because much of your text is original work on your part, but then you should include appendices on calculations and such.

Appendices: When deciding to place information in an appendix, ask yourself, "Are there reams and reams of figures that are best put in an appendix or will using a small number of figures integrate better throughout the text?" and "Do I have a source document that’s very critical to the report I want to attach to it, a data report or letter that is secondary to the actual writing, but not secondary to the major issue of the report?" Much of this depends upon your interpretation. A likely source for appendices is computational results. I like to think you’re doing work, so it’s logical to do screen dumps or spreadsheet dumps of tables and calculations. The best place for these is in appendices.

Perspectives on Technical Reports

Dave alciatore, mechanical engineering.

Writing Technical Design Reports as a Group

"Often, technical design reports require that multiple experts help write them. This is called "concurrent engineering." This way, everyone involved with a project contributes. More ground gets covered this way. The report is also a good way to document a design. Then, if problems arise later, everyone can refer to the document. This helps determine where changes were made, etc."

Report Content

"Every company has different means of documentation. Typically, in industry, you won't have to provide as much history in a technical report. This is because in academia, we want you to document your thought processes and project evolution. In industry, you will concentrate more on the initial problem, requirements, and solutions. "

Neil Grigg, Civil Engineering

Multiple Reports for a Project

"Suppose your engineering task is to build a retaining wall. As the main engineer, you've got to consider many aspects: the load, the height, the structural design. You'll write a report where you state the goals and how they will be accomplished. This includes input parameters, the conditions in which you have to work, alternatives, recommendations. Next, soil engineers may actually test the soils at the location. They would then produce a report about what they found. Every project generates multiple reports. "

"Many designs begin with identifying the problem, determining the goals, and creating a list of alternatives. The next part is the evaluation. This includes the technical, legal, economic, financial, environmental, and social evaluations. Then you make recommendations based on these evaluations. Most reports, especially design reports include this information. "

Tom Siller, Civil Engineering

An Example Technical Report

"I once helped produce a report about rock fracturing for a whip site. In that report, we stated the situation, how we would analyze the situation, (because we wanted to be hired as the engineers for the project), the analytical tools we would develop, and our results based on those analytical tools. We did not present a shaft design. Overall, the report presented our way of understanding the issues that would help design a shaft."

Your Report's Purpose

"If your report's purpose is to create an artifact, then you have to present all the technical aspects of the design. This way, someone can read the report and build your artifact. You have to be aware of very fine details whenever you write a report. For instance, will your designs receive public approval? Are you in compliance with regulatory agencies? And so why you are writing the report helps you determine what details to include and exclude."

Citation Information

Dawn Kowalski. (1994-2024). Engineering Technical Reports. The WAC Clearinghouse. Colorado State University. Available at https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/writing/guides/.

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Guide to technical report writing

Libraries | Research Guides

Technical reports, technical reports: a definition, search engines & databases, technical report repositories - multi-disciplinary, technical report repositories - topical.

"A technical report is a document that describes the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research or the state of a technical or scientific research problem. It might also include recommendations and conclusions of the research." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_report

Technical reports are produced by corporations, academic institutions, and government agencies at all levels of government, e.g. state, federal, and international. Technical reports are not included in formal publication and distribution channels and therefore fall into the category of grey literature .

Science.gov Searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites hosted by U.S. federal government agencies. Not limited to tech reports.
WorldWideScience.org A global science gateway comprised of national and international scientific databases and portals, providing real-time searching and translation of globally-dispersed multilingual scientific literature.
Open Grey System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe, is your open access to 700.000 bibliographical references. more... less... OpenGrey covers Science, Technology, Biomedical Science, Economics, Social Science and Humanities.
National Technical Reports Library (NTRL) This link opens in a new window The National Technical Reports Library provides indexing and access to a collection of more than two million historical and current government technical reports of U.S. government-sponsored research. Full-text available for 700,000 of the 2.2 million items described. Dates covered include 1900-present.
Argonne National Lab: Scientific Publications While sponsored by the US Dept of Energy, research at Argonne National Laboratory is wide ranging (see Research Index )
Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC®) has served the information needs of the Defense community for more than 65 years. It provides technical research, development, testing & evaluation information; including but not limited to: journal articles, conference proceedings, test results, theses and dissertations, studies & analyses, and technical reports & memos.
HathiTrust This repository of books digitized by member libraries includes a large number of technical reports. Search by keywords, specific report title, or identifiers.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) LBNL a multiprogram science lab in the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) NIST is one of the nation's oldest physical science laboratories.
RAND Corporation RAND's research and analysis address issues that impact people around the world including security, health, education, sustainability, growth, and development. Much of this research is carried out on behalf of public and private grantors and clients.
TRAIL Technical Report Archive & Image Library Identifies, acquires, catalogs, digitizes and provides unrestricted access to U.S. government agency technical reports. TRAIL is a membership organization . more... less... Majority of content is pre-1976, but some reports after that date are included.

Aerospace / Aviation

Contrails 20th century aerospace research, hosted at the Illinois Institute of Technology
Jet Propulsion Laboratory Technical Reports Server repository for digital copies of technical publications authored by JPL employees. It includes preprints, meeting papers, conference presentations, some articles, and other publications cleared for external distribution from 1992 to the present.
NTRS - NASA Technical Reports Server The NASA STI Repository (also known as the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)) provides access to NASA metadata records, full-text online documents, images, and videos. The types of information included are conference papers, journal articles, meeting papers, patents, research reports, images, movies, and technical videos – scientific and technical information (STI) created or funded by NASA. Includes NTIS reports.

Computing Research

Computing Research Repository
IBM Technical Paper Archive
Microsoft Research
INIS International Nuclear Information System One of the world's largest collections of published information on the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Research Library Primary subject areas covered include chemistry, physics, materials science, biological and environmental sciences, computer science, mathematics, engineering, nuclear technology, and homeland security.
OSTI.gov The primary search tool for DOE science, technology, and engineering research and development results more... less... over 70 years of research results from DOE and its predecessor agencies. Research results include journal articles/accepted manuscripts and related metadata; technical reports; scientific research datasets and collections; scientific software; patents; conference and workshop papers; books and theses; and multimedia
OSTI Open Net Provides access to over 495,000 bibliographic references and 147,000 recently declassified documents, including information declassified in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. In addition to these documents, OpenNet references older document collections from several DOE sources.

Environment

National Service Center for Environmental Publications From the Environmental Protection Agency
US Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) Digital Library See in particular the option to search technical reports by the Waterways Experiment Station, Engineering Research and Development Center, and districts .
National Clearinghouse for Science, Technology and the Law (NCSTL) Forensic research at the intersection of science, technology and law.

Transportation

ROSA-P National Transportation Library Full-text digital publications, datasets, and other resources. Legacy print materials that have been digitized are collected if they have historic, technical, or national significance.
Last Updated: Aug 29, 2024 12:10 PM
URL: https://libguides.northwestern.edu/techreports

10. Technical Reports: Components and Design

Technical reports (including handbooks and guides) have various designs depending on the industry, profession, or organization. This chapter shows you one traditional design. If you are taking a technical writing course, ask your instructor for any design specifications she has for your documents. The same is true if you are writing a technical report in a science, business, or government context. Organizations very often have their own “stylesheets” on which all organizational document designs are based, so make sure the design presented in this chapter is acceptable.

Technical reports have specifications as do any other kind of project. Specifications for reports involve layout, organization and content, format of headings and lists, the design of the graphics, and so on. The advantage of a required structure and format for reports is that you or anyone else can expect them to be designed in a familiar way—you know what to look for and where to look for it. Reports are usually read in a hurry—people are in a hurry to get to the information they need, the key facts, the conclusions, and other essentials. A standard report format is like a familiar neighborhood.

When you analyze the design of a technical report, notice how repetitive some sections are. This duplication has to do with how people read reports. They don’t read reports straight through: they may start with the executive summary, skip around, and probably not read every page. Your challenge is to design reports so that these readers encounter your key facts and conclusions, no matter how much of the report they read or in what order they read it.

Be sure and see the example reports .

The standard components of the typical technical report are discussed in this chapter. The following sections guide you through each of these components, pointing out the key features. As you read and use these guidelines, remember that these are guidelines, not commandments. Different companies, professions, and organizations have their own varied guidelines for reports—you’ll need to adapt your practice to those as well the ones presented here.

Chapter Attribution Information

This chapter was derived by Annemarie Hamlin, Chris Rubio, and Michele DeSilva, Central Oregon Community College, from Online Technical Writing by David McMurrey – CC: BY 4.0

Technical Writing Copyright © 2017 by Allison Gross, Annemarie Hamlin, Billy Merck, Chris Rubio, Jodi Naas, Megan Savage, and Michele DeSilva is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Technical Report Examples

50 professional technical report examples (+format samples).

A technical report example is a written document made by a researcher which contains the details about a project’s results . After creating the technical report, the researcher submits it to the project’s sponsor. Such a report may contain procedures, design criteria, research history, images or illustrations, and other data relevant to the project.

Table of Contents

1 Technical Report Examples
2 Elements of a technical report example
3 Technical Reports Format
4 Language, formatting, and design tips for your technical report example
5 Technical Report Samples
6 Technical Report Templates
7 Avoid these common mistakes when making your technical report example

Elements of a technical report example

When you’re tasked to write a technical report example, you must take note of the technical report format because this is very important. The format of such a report makes it unique from other types of written reports because it contains technical information thus, you need to plan it well.

When writing this report, you must understand its structure so that you can achieve your objective. Make sure the document contains the following elements:

Title page This page must come first in any technical report sample. It contains the title of your report, the date, the details of the institution, and the supervisor. This page is also known as a cover page . Any content you place here isn’t included on your report’s word count. This page is a separate entity in terms of word count so keep this in mind.
Introduction Here, you highlight the main objectives of your technical report example for the reader. This helps your reader understand why you wrote the report in the first place. You can also include a comment about the report’s flow to give the reader an idea of what to expect.
Summary For this part of the technical report format, come up with an overview of the entire report including any results or conclusions you’ve made. It’s best to write this part after you’ve finished the rest of the content.
Details of the experiment Here, include each of the details about the experiment you’ve conducted starting from the materials and equipment you used then the procedure or the steps you took. If you didn’t perform any experiment, then you may omit this part from the technical report format.
Results and discussions If you performed any kind of experiment for the technical report, you would have to provide all of the results along with an explanation of the results you obtained. This gives the reader a better idea of the results you’ve provided.
Body This is the most important part of your technical report sample since it contains the “meat” of your document. Here, create subheadings to emphasize the most important points. Also, adding subheadings makes the report easier to reads your readers can use the subheadings to guide them. Also, placing your points in a bulleted or numbered list makes it easier for the readers to understand the points you’re trying to convey. To make it even better, separate the points under their individual subtopics to avoid confusion.
Conclusions When writing your conclusions, create a summary of all the main points of your report’s body. This serves as a wrap-up of the main content of your document. Also, use words which indicate that you’re concluding the report so the reader is psychologically prepared that the report is now coming to an end.
Recommendations Here, you can give your suggested solutions for any of the challenges you’ve stated in the body of the report. This is the best place to write your opinions for the readers to know about them.
References In this section, make a list of all the materials you used throughout your research. If you have quoted any text, list those references here to ensure that your report isn’t considered plagiarism. When writing the references, you’re acknowledging that you’ve obtained your content from certain sources.
Acknowledgments Make a list of everyone who helped you come up with the report. From the people who proofread your report to those who helped you with the experiments and more, mention them in this section.
Appendices If you used other materials like diagrams and graphs to emphasize the information in your report, include them in this section. If you didn’t use any such materials or information, you don’t have to include this section.

Technical Reports Format

Language, formatting, and design tips for your technical report example

If you have a message that’s extremely important, you can communicate it right away even when you present it in an unorganized way. Generally though, technical report examples don’t contain any findings which you may consider “groundbreaking.” Still, you must pay attention to the contents of your report along with how you make it.

Technical Report Samples

Here are some tips for you regarding the language, formatting, and design of technical report samples:

Spelling and grammar Since technical reports are more academic in nature, you must be very careful with your spelling and grammar. If your report contains these mistakes, it might decrease the credibility of the document and your own credibility too. This is why proofreading is an extremely important step for this type of report and for other academic reports you plan to make. Ask more than just one person to proofread your report to ensure that there are no spelling and grammar errors on it.
Style Technical reports follow a specific style. You must follow a formal style for this type of report so as not to confuse or irritate your readers. Informal writing isn’t appropriate for technical reports so you must keep this in mind. In some cases, you may inject humor in your report. Make sure that the type of humor you use isn’t inappropriate and you include it in a proper manner. For instance, it’s probably not a good idea if the subject of your report is something sensitive or taboo. In such a case, injecting humor might reflect badly on you or on the message you want to convey. Of course, there are times when this works and it’s up to you to determine whether or not to include humor as part of your document’s style. Also, try not to write the content of your document the same way you speak. One reason for this is that you may use a lot of ungrammatical or colloquial expressions when you speak which might confuse your readers. Keep in mind that your readers can’t ask you questions while they read your report, especially if you’re not around. Another reason is that when it comes to writing, you can’t have the same tone or emphasis to explain what you want to say unlike when you’re speaking. For written documents, you the reader only relies on the words on the page so you must choose these carefully.
Presentation Although the presentation of your document isn’t as important as the technical content, you should still place some emphasis on it. After all, no matter how well-written your document is, if it’s presented poorly, your readers won’t appreciate it. How you present your report gives the first impression to the readers so you must make sure it’s a good one.
Graphic material Most technical report examples contain more than just text. They typically include images, graphics, charts, and more to illustrate or explain the content more effectively. Here are some tips when it comes to graphic material: Make sure to label everything. Use captions, titles, and other kinds of text to tell the reader about the graphic material you’ve inserted. Think about whether you plan to print your report in color or grayscale. If you choose the latter, make sure that the images you use are either in grayscale too or your readers can still understand them even when printed without colors. Only include relevant graphic material. Adding too many images might make your report look cluttered so choose these elements wisely.

Technical Report Templates

Avoid these common mistakes when making your technical report example

Apart from being very careful when writing the format of your technical report example, there are some common mistakes you must avoid too. These are:

Using too stock phrases or clichés Although these are very common, you may want to avoid using such phrases because they’re so over-used. When your readers keep encountering these phrases in your report, they might feel annoyed. It’s better to use direct sentences to make the information simpler and easier to comprehend.
Providing too much data Yes, the technical report should contain a lot of information. But you don’t have to provide data which isn’t directly relevant to the report or the project you’re reporting on. Stick to the facts and only include the important information so your readers don’t get confused.
Using non-technical content or material Such content may be quite annoying when it’s not related to the subject. But even if the content relates to the subject, including such material may come off as offensive to your readers.
Using long mathematical equations or computer program listings Although you may understand such information, it’s unlikely that other people will understand this too. Unless you think that such content is extremely essential to your report, avoid adding it.
Stating how challenging it was to create the report Including such statements isn’t professional. No matter how difficult a time you had, never state this in the report. Again, stick to the facts and only include information that’s relevant to the subject of your report.

More Templates

Gap Analysis Templates

5 Whys Templates

Project Summary Templates

Industry Analysis Examples

Stakeholder Analysis Templates

Feasibility Study Examples

Writing and Creating the Technical Report

First Online: 30 December 2018

Cite this chapter

Heike Hering 2

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In this chapter you will get many tips and see many examples for the appropriate creation of the Technical Report. Hints for working with word processor systems are mainly collected in Sect. 3.7 . However, before showing the details of this chapter, we want to present some general and summarizing thoughts.

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Here is an example of a footnote, like it is usual in the humanities.

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Chapter 9-3: The Technical Report

Introduction

Technical reports are formal reports that inform and describe technical or scientific information. Professionals in any field can use them.

The format for a technical report can vary depending on the detail, but here is a general outline of what should be included when writing one. It is important to be organized and concise with your information.

Abstract / Summary

An overview of the main idea of the report without giving specific evidence or findings.

Outline or highlights of the report and the importance of the information given.

This section describes the procedures used to collect and analyze data to allow for study replication.

This is the most important part of the report since this is where all the evidence and information that supports the thesis will be.

Separate the information into different paragraphs and provide different headings for each paragraph.

A summary of the main ideas of the report.

Technical Report Outline

This technical report outline should help you with the content of your report.

Title: Choose a title that gives the reader the main idea of the report

Abstract : If you have enough word count available, give an overview of the main idea of the report so readers will know what to expect. Avoid details. Make this about 2-3 sentences. Do this paragraph last.

Introduction: Explain the objective of the report, the topic or background information. Can include methods of approach, statement of the problem, why the survey was done, identification of surveyors & respondents, and initial hypothesis. Add a thesis at the end of your introduction.

Methods : You have a choice. Describe your methods in the introduction, or create a "Methods" paragraph. The "method" describes when / where / how the information was collected. Consider your study design, including the participants, materials & apparatus, and procedures you used.

Body 1 Results :

Address the first idea of your report. Support all ideas with examples and evidence.

Body 2 Results :

Address the second idea of your report. Support all ideas with examples and evidence.

Body 3 Results :

Address the third idea of your report. Support all ideas with examples and evidence. This is just a suggestion on how many paragraphs to use. Feel free to use fewer or add more if necessary.

Discussion (Synthesis, Recommendations, Problems & Limitations, Future Directions, Opinions): You can discuss many things in the discussion paragraph(s). Optionally, you can use subheadings (e.g. Synthesis, Recommendations, Problems & Limitations, Future Directions). For the discussion, synthesize your results with other research you did to provide context. Optionally, formulate logical recommendations. If applicable, s tate any problems that arose when collecting information. Optionally, discuss how future research could close knowledge gaps. On rare occasions, it is appropriate to include personal opinions. Identify opinions as such and base them on your evidence—present them professionally and respectfully.

Conclusion : Summarize the information given in the body paragraphs. Compare the initial hypothesis to the actual results of your survey. Address any questions. If one wasn't offered in the discussion, suggest solutions to problems.

Sample Report

The following report offers a sample miniature technical report designed to fit on one page of a workbook. Text length, level of language, documentation, and formatting style requirements for your course are probably different than those in the sample report. See your assignment instructions for further details.

The objective of this sample report is to offer you an opportunity to analyze the structure of a technical report. The structure remains the same regardless of text length, level of language, documentation, and formatting style.

NOTES: this is a sample report designed to fit on one page. As such, this report may be missing things that you must do in your report. Consult your assignment instructions for this information.

1. The number of words you are required to write, the number of ideas you are required to express, and the formatting rules you must follow may differ for your assignment.

2. This sample report did not offer much in syntheses other than a brief reference to a study by Jones. You may be required to synthesize your results with external information in a Discussion section .

Sample Outline

A wise author prepares an outline before writing. Here is what the outline for the above sample technical report may have looked like:

1. Abstract

2. Introduction: Description of social media

• Two types of groups surveyed, quantities (r)

• Survey length and topics

• Method survey was distributed (absent from example report)

Thesis: We hypothesized that women would use social media more than men and that most people would know how to keep themselves safe from online threats by using online security features.

3. Results - social media use

Most people know about and use social media (paragraph topic)

• Most popular service

• Women use social media more than men

• Women enjoy using social media more than men

4. Results - online security knowledge

Most people don't fully understand online security (paragraph topic)

• Few respondents enforce strict security settings on their accounts

• Most people feel they don't know enough about online security

5. Discussion

There were issues with the sample focus, the sample profile, and questions that were confusing

• Too many groups were polled

• Topic was less applicable to one group (older people)

• Some questions confused respondents

6. Conclusion: Overall, women use and enjoy social media more than men, and most people do not understand the security features available on social media.

• Security features should be conspicuous to people when they use social media.

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NTRS - NASA Technical Reports Server

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Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone

We introduce phi-3-mini , a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone. The innovation lies entirely in our dataset for training, a scaled-up version of the one used for phi-2 , composed of heavily filtered web data and synthetic data. The model is also further aligned for robustness, safety, and chat format. We also provide some initial parameter-scaling results with a 7B and 14B models trained for 4.8T tokens, called phi-3-small and phi-3-medium , both significantly more capable than phi-3-mini (e.g., respectively 75% and 78% on MMLU, and 8.7 and 8.9 on MT-bench).

1 Introduction

The striking progress of AI in the last few years can be largely attributed to major efforts throughout the world towards scaling-up to ever-larger models and datasets. Large Language Models (LLMs) have steadily increased in size from a mere billion parameters just five years ago (GPT-2 had 1.5 billion parameters [ RWC + 19 ] ) to trillion parameters today. The impetus for this effort originates in the seemingly predictable improvement one obtains by training large models, the so-called scaling laws [ KMH + 20 , HBM + 22 , MRB + 23 ] . However these laws assume a “fixed” data source. This assumption is now significantly disrupted by the existence of frontier LLMs themselves, which allow us to interact with data in novel ways. In our previous works on the phi models [ GZA + 23 , LBE + 23 , JBA + 23 ] it was shown that a combination of LLM-based filtering of web data, and LLM-created synthetic data, enable performance in smaller language models that were typically seen only in much larger models. For example our previous model trained on this data recipe, phi-2 (2.7B parameters), matched the performance of models 25 25 25 times larger trained on regular data. In this report we present a new model, phi-3-mini (3.8B parameters), trained for 3.3T tokens on larger and more advanced versions of the datasets used in phi-2 . With its small size, phi-3-mini can easily be inferenced locally on a modern phone (see Figure 1 ), yet it achieves a quality that seems on-par with models such as Mixtral 8x7B [ JSR + 24 ] and GPT-3.5.

2 Technical Specifications

The phi-3-mini model is a transformer decoder architecture [ VSP + 17 ] , with default context length 4 K 4 𝐾 4K . We also introduce a long context version via LongRope [ DZZ + 24 ] that extends the context length to 128 K 128 𝐾 128K , called phi-3-mini-128K .

To best benefit the open source community, phi-3-mini is built upon a similar block structure as Llama-2 [ TLI + 23 ] and uses the same tokenizer with vocabulary size of 32064 1 1 1 We remove BoS tokens and add some additional tokens for chat template. . This means that all packages developed for Llama-2 family of models can be directly adapted to phi-3-mini . The model uses 3072 3072 3072 hidden dimension, 32 32 32 heads and 32 32 32 layers. We trained using bfloat16 for a total of 3.3T tokens. The model is already chat-finetuned, and the chat template is as follows:

The phi-3-small model (7B parameters) leverages the tiktoken tokenizer (for better multilingual tokenization) with a vocabulary size of 100352 and has default context length 8 K 8 𝐾 8K . It follows the standard decoder architecture of a 7B model class, having 32 32 32 layers and a hidden size of 4096 4096 4096 . To minimize KV cache footprint, the model also leverages a grouped-query attention, with 4 4 4 queries sharing 1 1 1 key. Moreover phi-3-small uses alternative layers of dense attention and a novel blocksparse attention to further optimize on KV cache savings while maintaining long context retrieval performance. An additional 10% multilingual data was also used for this model.

Highly capable language model running locally on a cell-phone.

Thanks to its small size, phi-3-mini can be quantized to 4-bits so that it only occupies ≈ \approx 1.8GB of memory. We tested the quantized model by deploying phi-3-mini on iPhone 14 with A16 Bionic chip running natively on-device and fully offline achieving more than 12 12 12 tokens per second.

Training Methodology.

We follow the sequence of works initiated in “Textbooks Are All You Need” [ GZA + 23 ] , which utilize high quality training data to improve the performance of small language models and deviate from the standard scaling-laws . In this work we show that such method allows to reach the level of highly capable models such as GPT-3.5 or Mixtral with only 3.8B total parameters (while Mixtral has 45B total parameters for example). Our training data of consists of heavily filtered web data (according to the “educational level”) from various open internet sources, as well as synthetic LLM-generated data. Pre-training is performed in two disjoint and sequential phases; phase-1 comprises mostly of web sources aimed at teaching the model general knowledge and language understanding. Phase-2 merges even more heavily filtered webdata (a subset used in Phase-1) with some synthetic data that teach the model logical reasoning and various niche skills.

Data Optimal Regime.

Unlike prior works that train language models in either “compute optimal regime” [ HBM + 22 ] or “over-train regime”, we mainly focus on the quality of data for a given scale . 2 2 2 Just like for “compute optimal regime”, we use the term “optimal” in an aspirational sense for “data optimal regime”. We are not implying that we actually found the provably “optimal” data mixture for a given scale. We try to calibrate the training data to be closer to the “data optimal” regime for small models. In particular, we filter the web data to contain the correct level of “knowledge” and keep more web pages that could potentially improve the “reasoning ability” for the model. As an example, the result of a game in premier league in a particular day might be good training data for frontier models, but we need to remove such information to leave more model capacity for “reasoning” for the mini size models. We compare our approach with Llama-2 in Figure 2 .

To test our data on larger size of models, we also trained phi-3-medium , a model with 14B parameters using the same tokenizer and architecture of phi-3-mini , and trained on the same data for slightly more epochs (4.8T tokens total as for phi-3-small ). The model has 40 heads and 40 layers, with embedding dimension 5120. We observe that some benchmarks improve much less from 7B to 14B than they do from 3.8B to 7B, perhaps indicating that our data mixture needs further work to be in the “data optimal regime” for 14B parameters model. We are still actively investigating some of those benchmarks (including a regression on HumanEval), hence the numbers for phi-3-medium should be considered as a “preview”.

Post-training.

Post-training of phi-3-mini went through two stages, including supervised finetuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO). SFT leverages highly curated high-quality data across diverse domains, e.g., math, coding, reasoning, conversation, model identity, and safety. The SFT data mix starts with using English-only examples. DPO data covers chat format data, reasoning, and responsible AI (RAI) efforts. We use DPO to steer the model away from unwanted behavior, by using those outputs as “rejected” responses. Besides improvement in math, coding, reasoning, robustness, and safety, post-training transforms a language model to an AI assistant that users can efficiently and safely interact with.

As part of the post-training process, we developed a long context version of phi-3-mini with context length limit enlarged to 128K instead of 4K. Across the board, the 128K model quality is on par with the 4K length version, while being able to handle long context tasks. Long context extension has been done in two stages, including long context mid-training and long-short mixed post-training with both SFT and DPO.

3 Academic benchmarks

On the next page we report the results for phi-3-mini on standard open-source benchmarks measuring the model’s reasoning ability (both common sense reasoning and logical reasoning). We compare to phi-2 [ JBA + 23 ] , Mistral-7b-v0.1 [ JSM + 23 ] , Mixtral-8x7b [ JSR + 24 ] , Gemma 7B [ TMH + 24 ] , Llama-3-instruct-8b [ AI23 ] , and GPT-3.5. All the reported numbers are produced with the exact same pipeline to ensure that the numbers are comparable. These numbers might differ from other published numbers due to slightly different choices in the evaluation. As is now standard, we use few-shot prompts to evaluate the models, at temperature 0 0 . The prompts and number of shots are part of a Microsoft internal tool to evaluate language models, and in particular we did no optimization to the pipeline for the phi-3 models. 3 3 3 For example, we found that using ## before the Question can lead to a noticeable improvement to phi-3-mini ’s results across many benchmarks, but we did not do such changes in the prompts. The number of k 𝑘 k –shot examples is listed per-benchmark. An example of a 2-shot prompt is described in Appendix A .

Phi-3-mini 3.8b Phi-3-small 7b (preview) Phi-3-medium 14b (preview) Phi-2 2.7b Mistral 7b Gemma 7b Llama-3-In 8b Mixtral 8x7b GPT-3.5 version 1106 MMLU (5-Shot) [ HBK + 21 ] 68.8 75.3 78.2 56.3 61.7 63.6 66.0 68.4 71.4 HellaSwag (5-Shot) [ ZHB + 19 ] 76.7 78.7 83.0 53.6 58.5 49.8 69.5 70.4 78.8 ANLI (7-Shot) [ NWD + 20 ] 52.8 55.0 58.7 42.5 47.1 48.7 54.8 55.2 58.1 GSM-8K (0-Shot; CoT) [ CKB + 21 ] 82.5 88.9 90.3 61.1 46.4 59.8 77.4 64.7 78.1 MedQA (2-Shot) [ JPO + 20 ] 53.8 58.2 69.4 40.9 49.6 50.0 58.9 62.2 63.4 AGIEval (0-Shot) [ ZCG + 23 ] 37.5 45.0 48.4 29.8 35.1 42.1 42.0 45.2 48.4 TriviaQA (5-Shot) [ JCWZ17 ] 64.0 59.1 75.6 45.2 72.3 75.2 73.6 82.2 85.8 Arc-C (10-Shot) [ CCE + 18 ] 84.9 90.7 91.0 75.9 78.6 78.3 80.5 87.3 87.4 Arc-E (10-Shot) [ CCE + 18 ] 94.6 97.1 97.8 88.5 90.6 91.4 92.3 95.6 96.3 PIQA (5-Shot) [ BZGC19 ] 84.2 87.8 87.7 60.2 77.7 78.1 77.1 86.0 86.6 SociQA (5-Shot) [ BZGC19 ] 76.6 79.0 80.2 68.3 74.6 65.5 73.2 75.9 68.3 BigBench-Hard (0-Shot) [ SRR + 22 , SSS + 22 ] 71.7 75.0 81.3 59.4 57.3 59.6 68.9 69.7 68.32 WinoGrande (5-Shot) [ SLBBC19 ] 70.8 82.5 81.4 54.7 54.2 55.6 58.0 62.0 68.8 OpenBookQA (10-Shot) [ MCKS18 ] 83.2 88.4 87.2 73.6 79.8 78.6 81.6 85.8 86.0 BoolQ (0-Shot) [ CLC + 19 ] 77.2 82.9 86.6 – 72.2 66.0 78.3 77.6 79.1 CommonSenseQA (10-Shot) [ THLB19 ] 80.2 80.3 82.6 69.3 72.6 76.2 73.6 78.1 79.6 TruthfulQA (10-Shot) [ LHE22 ] 65.0 68.7 75.7 – 52.1 53.0 62.0 60.1 85.8 HumanEval (0-Shot) [ CTJ + 21 ] 59.1 59.1 55.5 47.0 28.0 34.1 60.4 37.8 62.2 MBPP (3-Shot) [ AON + 21 ] 70.0 71.4 74.5 60.6 50.8 51.5 65.3 60.2 77.8 Average 71.2 74.9 78.2 – 61.0 62.0 68.0 69.9 75.3 GPQA (2-Shot; CoT) [ RHS + 23 ] 32.8 34.3 – – – – – – 29.0 MT Bench (2 round ave.) [ ZCS + 23 ] 8.38 8.70 8.91 – – – – – 8.35

Phi-3-mini was developed in accordance with Microsoft’s responsible AI principles. The overall approach consisted of safety alignment in post-training, red-teaming, automated testing and evaluations across dozens of RAI harm categories. Helpfulness and harmlessness preference datasets [ BJN + 22 , JLD + 23 ] with modifications inspired by [ BSA + 24 ] and multiple in-house generated datasets were leveraged to address the RAI harm categories in safety post-training. An independent red team at Microsoft iteratively examined phi-3-mini to further identify areas of improvement during the post-training process. Based on their feedback, we curated additional datasets tailored to address their insights, thereby refining the post-training dataset. This process resulted in significant decrease of harmful response rates, as shown in Figure 3 .

Table 1 shows the results of in-house RAI benchmarks for phi-3-mini-4k and phi-3-mini-128k compared to phi-2 [ JBA + 23 ] , Mistral-7b-v0.1 [ JSM + 23 ] , Gemma 7b [ TMH + 24 ] , and Llama-3-instruct-8b [ AI23 ] . This benchmark utilized GPT-4 to simulate multi-turn conversations in five different categories and to evaluate the model responses. Ungroundedness between 0 (fully grounded) and 4 (not grounded) measures if the information in a response is based on a given prompt. In other categories, responses were evaluated in terms of the severity of harmfulness from 0 (no harm) to 7 (extreme harm) and the defect rates (DR- x 𝑥 x ) were computed as the percentage of samples with the severity score being greater than or equal to x 𝑥 x .

Phi-3-Mini-4k 3.8b Phi-3-Mini-128k 3.8b Phi-2 2.7b Mistral 7b Gemma 7b Llama-3-In 8b Ungroundedness 0.603 0.637 1.481 0.935 0.679 0.328 Intellectual Property (DR-1) 23.95% 21.50% 24.00% 56.20% 38.33% 37.30% Harmful Content Continuation (DR-3) 0.75% 1.08% 2.93% 2.58% 1.28% 1.30% Harmful Content Summarization (DR-3) 10.00% 10.20% 14.35% 22.33% 10.33% 8.20% Jailbreak (DR-1) 12.29% 12.57% 15.00% 15.57% 11.43% 13.00%

In terms of LLM capabilities, while phi-3-mini model achieves similar level of language understanding and reasoning ability as much larger models, it is still fundamentally limited by its size for certain tasks. The model simply does not have the capacity to store too much “factual knowledge”, which can be seen for example with low performance on TriviaQA. However, we believe such weakness can be resolved by augmentation with a search engine. We show an example using the HuggingFace default Chat-UI with phi-3-mini in Figure 4 . Another weakness related to model’s capacity is that we mostly restricted the language to English. Exploring multilingual capabilities for Small Language Models is an important next step, with some initial promising results on phi-3-small by including more multilingual data.

Despite our diligent RAI efforts, as with most LLMs, there remains challenges around factual inaccuracies (or hallucinations), reproduction or amplification of biases, inappropriate content generation, and safety issues. The use of carefully curated training data, and targeted post-training, and improvements from red-teaming insights significantly mitigates these issues across all dimensions. However, there is significant work ahead to fully address these challenges.

[AI23] Meta AI. Introducing meta llama 3: The most capable openly available llm to date, 2023.
[AON + 21] Jacob Austin, Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Maarten Bosma, Henryk Michalewski, David Dohan, Ellen Jiang, Carrie Cai, Michael Terry, Quoc Le, and Charles Sutton. Program synthesis with large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07732 , 2021.
[BJN + 22] Yuntao Bai, Andy Jones, Kamal Ndousse, Amanda Askell, Anna Chen, Nova DasSarma, Dawn Drain, Stanislav Fort, Deep Ganguli, Tom Henighan, Nicholas Joseph, Saurav Kadavath, Jackson Kernion, Tom Conerly, Sheer El-Showk, Nelson Elhage, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Danny Hernandez, Tristan Hume, Scott Johnston, Shauna Kravec, Liane Lovitt, Neel Nanda, Catherine Olsson, Dario Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Chris Olah, Ben Mann, and Jared Kaplan. Training a helpful and harmless assistant with reinforcement learning from human feedback, 2022.
[BSA + 24] Federico Bianchi, Mirac Suzgun, Giuseppe Attanasio, Paul Röttger, Dan Jurafsky, Tatsunori Hashimoto, and James Zou. Safety-tuned llamas: Lessons from improving the safety of large language models that follow instructions, 2024.
[BZGC19] Yonatan Bisk, Rowan Zellers, Jianfeng Gao, and Yejin Choi. Piqa: Reasoning about physical commonsense in natural language. arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.11641 , 2019.
[CCE + 18] Peter Clark, Isaac Cowhey, Oren Etzioni, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Carissa Schoenick, and Oyvind Tafjord. Think you have solved question answering? try arc, the ai2 reasoning challenge, 2018.
[CKB + 21] Karl Cobbe, Vineet Kosaraju, Mohammad Bavarian, Mark Chen, Heewoo Jun, Lukasz Kaiser, Matthias Plappert, Jerry Tworek, Jacob Hilton, Reiichiro Nakano, Christopher Hesse, and John Schulman. Training verifiers to solve math word problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.14168 , 2021.
[CLC + 19] Christopher Clark, Kenton Lee, Ming-Wei Chang, Tom Kwiatkowski, Michael Collins, and Kristina Toutanova. Boolq: Exploring the surprising difficulty of natural yes/no questions. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) , pages 2924–2936, 2019.
[CTJ + 21] Mark Chen, Jerry Tworek, Heewoo Jun, Qiming Yuan, Henrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto, Jared Kaplan, Harri Edwards, Yuri Burda, Nicholas Joseph, Greg Brockman, Alex Ray, Raul Puri, Gretchen Krueger, Michael Petrov, Heidy Khlaaf, Girish Sastry, Pamela Mishkin, Brooke Chan, Scott Gray, Nick Ryder, Mikhail Pavlov, Alethea Power, Lukasz Kaiser, Mohammad Bavarian, Clemens Winter, Philippe Tillet, Felipe Petroski Such, Dave Cummings, Matthias Plappert, Fotios Chantzis, Elizabeth Barnes, Ariel Herbert-Voss, William Hebgen Guss, Alex Nichol, Alex Paino, Nikolas Tezak, Jie Tang, Igor Babuschkin, Suchir Balaji, Shantanu Jain, William Saunders, Christopher Hesse, Andrew N. Carr, Jan Leike, Josh Achiam, Vedant Misra, Evan Morikawa, Alec Radford, Matthew Knight, Miles Brundage, Mira Murati, Katie Mayer, Peter Welinder, Bob McGrew, Dario Amodei, Sam McCandlish, Ilya Sutskever, and Wojciech Zaremba. Evaluating large language models trained on code, 2021.
[DZZ + 24] Yiran Ding, Li Lyna Zhang, Chengruidong Zhang, Yuanyuan Xu, Ning Shang, Jiahang Xu, Fan Yang, and Mao Yang. Longrope: Extending llm context window beyond 2 million tokens, 2024.
[GZA + 23] Suriya Gunasekar, Yi Zhang, Jyoti Aneja, Caio César Teodoro Mendes, Allie Del Giorno, Sivakanth Gopi, Mojan Javaheripi, Gustavo de Rosa Piero Kauffmann, Olli Saarikivia, Adil Salim, Shital Shah, Harkirat Singh Behl, Xin Wang, Sébastien Bubeck, Ronen Eldan, Adam Tauman Kalai, Yin Tat Lee, and Yuanzhi Li. Textbooks are all you need. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.11644 , 2023.
[HBK + 21] Dan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Saurav Kadavath, Akul Arora, Steven Basart, Eric Tang, Dawn Song, and Jacob Steinhardt. Measuring mathematical problem solving with the MATH dataset, 2021.
[HBM + 22] Jordan Hoffmann, Sebastian Borgeaud, Arthur Mensch, Elena Buchatskaya, Eliza Rutherford Trevor Cai, Diego de Las Casas, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Johannes Welbl, Aidan Clark, Tom Hennigan, Eric Noland, Katie Millican, George van den Driessche, Bogdan Damoc, Aurelia Guy, Simon Osindero, Karen Simonyan, Erich Elsen, Jack W. Rae, Oriol Vinyals, and Laurent Sifre. Training compute-optimal large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.15556 , 2022.
[JBA + 23] Mojan Javaheripi, Sébastien Bubeck, Marah Abdin, Jyoti Aneja, Caio César Teodoro Mendes, Weizhu Chen, Allie Del Giorno, Ronen Eldan, Sivakanth Gopi, Suriya Gunasekar, Piero Kauffmann, Yin Tat Lee, Yuanzhi Li, Anh Nguyen, Gustavo de Rosa, Olli Saarikivi, Adil Salim, Shital Shah, Michael Santacroce, Harkirat Singh Behl, Adam Taumann Kalai, Xin Wang, Rachel Ward, Philipp Witte, Cyril Zhang, and Yi Zhang. Phi-2: The surprising power of small language models. Microsoft Research Blog , 2023.
[JCWZ17] Mandar Joshi, Eunsol Choi, Daniel S. Weld, and Luke Zettlemoyer. Triviaqa: A large scale distantly supervised challenge dataset for reading comprehension, 2017.
[JLD + 23] Jiaming Ji, Mickel Liu, Juntao Dai, Xuehai Pan, Chi Zhang, Ce Bian, Chi Zhang, Ruiyang Sun, Yizhou Wang, and Yaodong Yang. Beavertails: Towards improved safety alignment of llm via a human-preference dataset, 2023.
[JPO + 20] Di Jin, Eileen Pan, Nassim Oufattole, Wei-Hung Weng, Hanyi Fang, and Peter Szolovits. What disease does this patient have? a large-scale open domain question answering dataset from medical exams, 2020.
[JSM + 23] Albert Q. Jiang, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Arthur Mensch, Chris Bamford, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Diego de las Casas, Florian Bressand, Gianna Lengyel, Guillaume Lample, Lucile Saulnier, Lélio Renard Lavaud, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Pierre Stock, Teven Le Scao, Thibaut Lavril, Thomas Wang, Timothée Lacroix, and William El Sayed. Mistral 7b, 2023.
[JSR + 24] Albert Q. Jiang, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Antoine Roux, Arthur Mensch, Blanche Savary, Chris Bamford, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Diego de las Casas, Emma Bou Hanna, Florian Bressand, Gianna Lengyel, Guillaume Bour, Guillaume Lample, Lélio Renard Lavaud, Lucile Saulnier, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Pierre Stock, Sandeep Subramanian, Sophia Yang, Szymon Antoniak, Teven Le Scao, Théophile Gervet, Thibaut Lavril, Thomas Wang, Timothée Lacroix, and William El Sayed. Mixtral of experts, 2024.
[KMH + 20] Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Tom Henighan, Tom B Brown, Benjamin Chess, Rewon Child, Scott Gray, Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, and Dario Amodei. Scaling laws for neural language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.08361 , 2020.
[LBE + 23] Yuanzhi Li, Sébastien Bubeck, Ronen Eldan, Allie Del Giorno, Suriya Gunasekar, and Yin Tat Lee. Textbooks are all you need ii: phi-1.5 technical report. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.05463 , 2023.
[LHE22] Stephanie Lin, Jacob Hilton, and Owain Evans. Truthfulqa: Measuring how models mimic human falsehoods, 2022.
[MCKS18] Todor Mihaylov, Peter Clark, Tushar Khot, and Ashish Sabharwal. Can a suit of armor conduct electricity? a new dataset for open book question answering, 2018.
[MRB + 23] Niklas Muennighoff, Alexander M Rush, Boaz Barak, Teven Le Scao, Aleksandra Piktus, Nouamane Tazi, Sampo Pyysalo, Thomas Wolf, and Colin Raffel. Scaling data-constrained language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.16264 , 2023.
[NWD + 20] Yixin Nie, Adina Williams, Emily Dinan, Mohit Bansal, Jason Weston, and Douwe Kiela. Adversarial nli: A new benchmark for natural language understanding, 2020.
[RHS + 23] David Rein, Betty Li Hou, Asa Cooper Stickland, Jackson Petty, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Julien Dirani, Julian Michael, and Samuel R. Bowman. Gpqa: A graduate-level google-proof q&a benchmark, 2023.
[RWC + 19] Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever. Language models are unsupervised multitask learners. OpenAI blog , 1(8):9, 2019.
[SLBBC19] Keisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, and Yejin Choi. Winogrande: An adversarial winograd schema challenge at scale. arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.10641 , 2019.
[SRR + 22] Aarohi Srivastava, Abhinav Rastogi, Abhishek Rao, Abu Awal Md Shoeb, Abubakar Abid, Adam Fisch, Adam R Brown, Adam Santoro, Aditya Gupta, Adrià Garriga-Alonso, et al. Beyond the imitation game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.04615 , 2022.
[SSS + 22] Mirac Suzgun, Nathan Scales, Nathanael Schärli, Sebastian Gehrmann, Yi Tay, Hyung Won Chung, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Quoc V. Le, Ed H. Chi, Denny Zhou, and Jason Wei. Challenging big-bench tasks and whether chain-of-thought can solve them, 2022.
[THLB19] Alon Talmor, Jonathan Herzig, Nicholas Lourie, and Jonathan Berant. Commonsenseqa: A question answering challenge targeting commonsense knowledge, 2019.
[TLI + 23] Hugo Touvron, Thibaut Lavril, Gautier Izacard, Xavier Martinet, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Timothée Lacroix, Baptiste Rozière, Naman Goyal, Eric Hambro, Faisal Azhar, Aurelien Rodriguez, Armand Joulin, Edouard Grave, and Guillaume Lample. Llama: Open and efficient foundation language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.13971 , 2023.
[TMH + 24] Gemma Team, Thomas Mesnard, Cassidy Hardin, Robert Dadashi, Surya Bhupatiraju, Shreya Pathak, Laurent Sifre, Morgane Rivière, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Juliette Love, et al. Gemma: Open models based on gemini research and technology, 2024.
[VSP + 17] Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N Gomez, Ł ukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. Attention is all you need. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , volume 30, 2017.
[ZCG + 23] Wanjun Zhong, Ruixiang Cui, Yiduo Guo, Yaobo Liang, Shuai Lu, Yanlin Wang, Amin Saied, Weizhu Chen, and Nan Duan. Agieval: A human-centric benchmark for evaluating foundation models, 2023.
[ZCS + 23] Lianmin Zheng, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ying Sheng, Siyuan Zhuang, Zhanghao Wu, Yonghao Zhuang, Zi Lin, Zhuohan Li, Dacheng Li, Eric Xing, et al. Judging llm-as-a-judge with mt-bench and chatbot arena. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.05685 , 2023.
[ZHB + 19] Rowan Zellers, Ari Holtzman, Yonatan Bisk, Ali Farhadi, and Yejin Choi. Hellaswag: Can a machine really finish your sentence? In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics , pages 4791–4800, 2019.

Appendix A Example prompt for benchmarks

Appendix b authors.

Marah Abdin	Russell J. Hewett	Olatunji Ruwase
Sam Ade Jacobs	Jamie Huynh	Olli Saarikivi
Ammar Ahmad Awan	Mojan Javaheripi	Amin Saied
Jyoti Aneja	Xin Jin	Adil Salim
Ahmed Awadallah	Piero Kauffmann	Michael Santacroce
Hany Awadalla	Nikos Karampatziakis	Shital Shah
Nguyen Bach	Dongwoo Kim	Ning Shang
Amit Bahree	Mahmoud Khademi	Hiteshi Sharma
Arash Bakhtiari	Lev Kurilenko	Xia Song
Harkirat Behl	James R. Lee	Masahiro Tanaka
Alon Benhaim	Yin Tat Lee	Xin Wang
Misha Bilenko	Yuanzhi Li	Rachel Ward
Johan Bjorck	Chen Liang	Guanhua Wang
Sébastien Bubeck	Weishung Liu	Philipp Witte
Martin Cai	Eric Lin	Michael Wyatt
Caio César Teodoro Mendes	Zeqi Lin	Jiahang Xu
Weizhu Chen	Piyush Madan	Can Xu
Vishrav Chaudhary	Arindam Mitra	Sonali Yadav
Parul Chopra	Hardik Modi	Fan Yang
Allie Del Giorno	Brandon Norick	Ziyi Yang
Gustavo de Rosa	Anh Nguyen	Donghan Yu
Matthew Dixon	Barun Patra	Chengruidong Zhang
Ronen Eldan	Daniel Perez-Becker	Cyril Zhang
Dan Iter	Heyang Qin	Jianwen Zhang
Amit Garg	Thomas Portet	Li Lyna Zhang
Abhishek Goswami	Reid Pryzant	Yi Zhang
Suriya Gunasekar	Sambuddha Roy	Yue Zhang
Emman Haider	Marko Radmilac	Yunan Zhang
Junheng Hao	Corby Rosset	Xiren Zhou

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PDF A guide to technical report writing
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Reports are often written for multiple readers, for example, technical and financial managers. Writing two separate reports would be time-consuming and risk offending people who are not party to all of the information. One solution to this problem is strategic use of appendices (see page 5). A guide to technical report writing - Objectives 04 2.
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Technical Report: What is it & How to Write it? (Steps & Structure Included)

What is a Technical Report? (Definition)

Importance of Writing a Technical Report

2. Evidence for your work

3. Organizes the data

4. Tool for evaluation of your work

How to Write a Technical Report?

Step 1: Understand the Purpose and Audience

Step 2: Gather and Organize Information

Step 3: Write the Introduction

1. Begin with a Hook

2. Provide Background Information

3. State the Purpose and Objectives

4. Define the Scope

Step 4: Describe the Methodology

1. Outline Your Research Design

2. Describe Your Procedures

3. Explain Data Collection Methods

4. Detail Data Analysis Procedures

5. Address Limitations

Step 5: Present the Results

1. Structure Your Results Section

2. Present Data Effectively

3. Highlight Key Findings

4. Discuss Trends and Patterns

5. Ensure Clarity and Precision

6. Use Visual Aids Appropriately

Step 6: Discuss the Findings

Step 7: Conclude and Recommend

Final Tips:

Bit.ai : The Ultimate Tool for Writing Technical Reports

Few technical documents templates you might be interested in:

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Guide to Technical Report Writing

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1 Introduction

A Guide to Technical Writing (With Examples)

What Is Technical Writing?

Instructions for Carrying Out a Task

Operating Manuals for Machinery, Appliances, or Systems

Specialized Topics

So How Do I Produce a Great Piece of Technical Writing?

Who Is It For?

What Do They Need?

How Should Technical Writing Be Composed?

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Examples of Technical Writing

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