These guidelines are provided to assist you with preparing professional reports for any of the mechanical engineering courses. Many of the suggestions in these guidelines are based on the experiences of different professors and their preferences. You should be prepared to adapt these suggestions to your specific project, make improvements and develop your own style of report writing.
Why do you have to write reports, anyhow? The trivial answer is because they are a course requirement and you would like to get a good mark in the course. However, in your career you will be faced with the same scenario, in different contexts, time and time again. The ability to write clear, concise, effective reports will greatly enhance your credibility and increase your chances for career advancement. Reports also provide permanent, legal documentation of work completed, methods employed, conclusions, recommendations, etc. Effective report writing (and the associated graphical and analytical techniques) requires a great deal of conscientious practice and it is one of the most valuable skills you can acquire. An engineer who cannot communicate effectively in writing is virtually unemployable.
Now that you are convinced (we hope) that reports are a necessary evil, how can you minimize the effort required to produce a good report? The answer to this is to organize. A well-organized report is easy to prepare and easy to read. Different types of reports will require different styles. Most report styles share some common ground. So, to avoid repetition, this document is divided into three parts. The first part describes the overall style of the different types of reports you will be asked to write and specifies in which order you should present the major sections. The second part defines a style in which to present each section. The final part describes techniques to be used to produce proper figures (graphs, equations, tables, illustrations, etc.)
Almost all reports contain an introduction. Hence, both the description of laboratory reports and design reports in Chapter 3 will include an Introduction section. The specifics of how to write a good introduction will, however, be included in Chapter 4. Report writing items common to all sections are described in Chapter 5. How to include photographs, typeset equations, etc. in your introduction, discussion or any other section will be described in the last chapters, namely 6 through 10.
The primary aim of a report is communication. Like any other literary work, this form of communication can, if improperly done, be tedious and dry. In all undertakings which demand skill, one learns by doing. The easiest way to improve your technical writing is to read technical reports. This is somewhat difficult at the undergraduate level due to a lack of material. One underused resource is the library. It is often asked of the engineer that a literature survey of existing knowledge be done when undertaking a new project. This time should be spent not only understanding scientific and technical knowledge, but also studying how it was communicated to you. Once you have absorbed the technical content, reread the document with a purely literary approach. Compare the authors' style to what is proposed in this document. What are their strong points, their weaknesses? Their objective was to communicate their material to you, the reader. Did they achieve the objective and how? Did they fail to some degree? If so, why? Learning from the successes and failures of others will greatly improve your writing.
A brief comment on style. Quality newspapers and publishing houses pay editors large sums of money to ensure that a certain style is maintained in their books, magazines, technical journals and newspapers. The term style here refers not only to the look (choice of font, size of paper, cover art) of the document but also how its contents are presented. This includes proper grammar and syntax, defining standards for the preparation of tables and figures and preparation of indices and tables of content. Think of a style manual as a compilation of all guidelines for the preparation of a document.
The style of a report cannot help but impress the reader. The technical report is the major medium of communication of the engineer and, as in any form of communication, it best achieves its purpose when it is both clear and concise. A poorly prepared document, illogical in its presentation, careless in such details as units and figure identification, unclear in its separation between observed data and calculated results, etc. lacks credibility. A reader attempting to understand a disorganized and confusing document can only assume that the experiment was conducted in like fashion; at best it will be suspect, at worst it will be dismissed as useless.