BSI 313 TRW &Presentation Skills

(6th Semester)
Name: Syed Tahir Hussain Reg No: 17ABELT0781

Salient Features Of Technical Report Writing

Some of the salient features of technical report writing are as follows :

a. Technical Report Writing – Audience

b. Technical Report Writing - Process
c. Technical Report Writing – Style

Technical Report Writing-Audience:

Audience Importance:

While in the process of writing a technical report, it’s easy to forget that you are actually writing to
someone. Whether you’ve thought about it or not, you always write to an audience: sometimes your
audience is a very generalized group of readers. Keeping your audience in mind while you write can help
you make good decisions about what material to include, how to organize your ideas, and how best to
support your argument.

Example:

To illustrate the impact of audience, imagine you’re writing a letter to your father to tell him about your
first week of work. What details and stories might you include or consider? What might you leave? Now
imagine that you’re writing on the same topic but your audience is your best friend. Unless you have an
extremely cool grandfather to whom you’re very close, it’s likely that your two letters would look quite
different in terms of content, structure, and even tone.

Levels Of Audience:

Audience may consist of several persons. Persons in an audience may involve initial, primary, secondary,
or external readers.

 Initial.
 Primary.
 Secondary.
 External or Hidden.
BSI 313 TRW &Presentation Skills
(6th Semester)
Name: Syed Tahir Hussain Reg No: 17ABELT0781

Initial Audience:

The person or persons that may see a message for the first time before a message is sent to primary
readers.

For example: Colleagues are an initial audience when a writer gives them a document to provide
feedback.

Primary Audience:

Consists of persons to whom a message is being directed.

For example: a letter or memo is addressed to a specific person or persons. The persons that are directly
addressed make up the primary audience.

Secondary Audience:

Secondary audience consists of persons who may not be direct recipients of communication, but may
have some interest in the message for record-keeping or other main reasons.

External Or Audience:

External audience consists of those who may have distant interest in a report, and often these persons
might be outside of a workplace community.

When a technical report is being represented to a group of audience then that audience can comprise of
following type of professionals. The common division of audiences into categories is as follows:

Types Of Audiences:

1. Experts.
2. Technicians.
3. Executives.
4. Non-specialists.

Experts:

These are the people who know the business or organization and possibly the theory and the product
being presented. They are the one who have designed it, and know almost everything about it. Often,
they have degrees and operate in academic settings. They have experience in research and development
sectors of the government.
BSI 313 TRW &Presentation Skills
(6th Semester)
Name: Syed Tahir Hussain Reg No: 17ABELT0781

Technicians:

These are the people who build, maintain, operate and repair the stuff that the experts design and
theorize about. They have a highly technical knowledge , but they are of more a practical persona.

Executives: 

These are the people who make economic, business, governmental, administrative, legal, political
decisions about the products of the experts and technicians. Executives are likely to have a same
technical knowledge about the subject as non-specialists. This will be the “primary audience”.

Non-specialists:

These readers are having the least technical knowledge of all. Their primary interest is ‘technicians'.
They want to use the new product to complete their tasks; they want to understand the new
technology. Or, they may just be curious about a specific technical matter and want to learn about it,
but for no specific, practical reason.

Audience Analysis

It's important to determine which of the four categories just discussed and mentioned are the potential
readers of our document belong to. Audiences, regardless of category, must also be analyzed in terms of
characteristics such as the following:

 Back-knowledge, Experience, Training:

One of our most important concerns is just how much knowledge, experience, or training you
can expect in your readers. If you expect some of your readers to lack that amount of
knowledge, then do you automatically supply it in your document?

Example:

You're writing a guide to using a software product that runs under Windows 10. How much can
you expect your readers to know about Windows 10? If some are likely to know little about
Windows, should you provide that information? If you say ‘no’, then you might run the risk of
customers' getting ambiguous with your product. If you say ‘yes’ to adding background
information on Windows, you increase your work effort and add to the page count of the
document .

 Needs and interests: 

BSI 313 TRW &Presentation Skills
th
(6 Semester)
Name: Syed Tahir Hussain Reg No: 17ABELT0781
To plan your document, you need to know what your audience is going to expect from that
technical report document. Imagine how readers will want to use your document; what will they
demand from it.

Example:

You are writing a manual on how to use a new microwave oven what are your readers going to
expect to find in it? You're under contract to write a background report on global warming for a
national real estate association what do they want to read about; and, equally important, what
do they not want to read about?

 Other demographic characteristics: 

There are many other characteristics about your readers that might have an influence on how
you should design and write your document.

Example:

Age groups, type of residence, area of residence, sex, political preferences.

More than one audience:

You're likely to find that your report is for more than one audience. For example, it may be seen by
technical people (experts and technicians) and administrative people (executives). What to do? You can
either write all the sections so that all the audiences can understand them. Or you can write each
section strictly for the audience that would be interested in it, then use headings and section
introductions to alert your audience about where to go and what to stay out of in your report.

Technical Report Writing – Process

According to report writing experts, the report writing topics create the foundation of a report.
However, writing report-assignments is a difficult task. The basic report writing processes are as
following:

Understand The Topic: 

First read the report’s instructions, required references, and any other information given about the
report. The report writer needs to understand the purpose of the report. The objective for a writer that
report helps one to find answers to 5 ‘W’s’ and one ‘H’ of the topic of a report. This helps one to draft
the ‘Terms of Reference’.

Plan the procedure:

BSI 313 TRW &Presentation Skills
th
(6 Semester)
Name: Syed Tahir Hussain Reg No: 17ABELT0781
 One needs to strategize the entire report writing. This step can be carried out through proper time
management and comprehension ability of the report writer. The time and resources required for
interview, observations, physical analysis, and similar activities also need to be taken into account.

Use the right resources: 

Through the right means, one needs to gather as much as relevant information to support his or her
report. Check the report assignment’s requirements. If specified, the research process gets somewhat
sorted. However, one still needs to do intensive research of extensive sources for the best report
presentation.

Draft the structure:

 The type of report, writing style and length decide the structure of the report. Depending on the type of
report, be it Laboratory report, research report, investigative report, business report or any other report
writing, one has to include relevant-

Draft the initial part of the report: 

After the structure, start filling the information into terms of reference/reference terms, procedure,
findings and appendix. A well-written report helps to ensure that findings involve the outcome of all the
collected resources. One can also add photos, tables and/or graphs for better readability of the report.

 Use more or different graphics.

For non-specialist audiences, you may want to use more graphics and simpler ones at that.
Writing for specialists and experts tends to be less illustrated, less graphically attractive even
boring to the eye. Graphics for specialists tend to be more detailed, more technical. In technical
documents for non-specialists, there also tend to be more "decorative" graphics ones that serve
no strict informative or persuasive purpose at all.

Drawing Conclusions:
 When finally done with interpreting and analyzing the resources, you can finally draft the conclusion,
and how the information you collected can be used to point to a situation. Moreover, you can provide
recommendations for the same.

Executive Summary And Table of Contents: 

The executive summary of a report must tell the readers what the topic is all about, and summarize the
recommendations, all under the entire report’s 12% word limit.

Revise the Draft report:

The final touch required by amount of your efforts, should never exclude the emphasis on making a
flawless report, without any grammatical error.
BSI 313 TRW &Presentation Skills
(6th Semester)
Name: Syed Tahir Hussain Reg No: 17ABELT0781

Technical Report Writing - Style :

There are some strategies that should taken in account while writing a document. By applying these
strategies one can make his idea clear to the audience.

These strategies are as follows:

1. Use Active Voice.

2. Use Parallelism.
3. Sentence Length Problems.
4. Use Weak be-verbs.
5. Use Strengthen transitions.
6. Use Noun Stacks.
7. Use Redundant Phrasing.
8. Use Weak Expletives
9. Use Subject-Verb Mismatches.

Use Active Voice:

An important aspect in technical writing is making prominent who or what is performing a particular
action. When active voice is used, the subject acts. The verb action of the sentence creates Active voice.
BSI 313 TRW &Presentation Skills
(6th Semester)
Name: Syed Tahir Hussain Reg No: 17ABELT0781

Active Example:

1. Tahir wrote the technical report.

2. The google app includes a new programming language.

Use Parallelism:

Parallel structure, also called parallelism . Parallel structure in writing means that sentences or elements
within sentences have a similar grammar pattern. Such repetition serves several purposes. In literature,
it is often a means to draw a reader's attention to a particular situation, certain ideas.

Sentence length Problems:

Sentence length matters as well. An average of somewhere between 15 and 25 words per sentence is
about right; sentences over 30 words are to be mistrusted.

Use Weak Be Verbs:

One of the big problem that cause weak, indirect writing is the use of the  be verb as the main verb.
The be verb should never be used as the main verb, just that there are cases where doing so makes for
weak writing.

Example:

Problem: The contribution of Quality Circles is mostly to areas of training and motivating people to
produce higher quality work.

Revision: Quality Circles contribute to the training and the motivating of people to produce high quality
work.

Strengthens Transitions:

It may be difficult for readers, non-specialists, to see the connections between the main sections of your
report, between individual paragraphs, and sometimes even between individual sentences. You can
make these connections much clearer by adding ‘transition words’ and by ‘echoing key words’ more
accurately. Words like "thereby," "for example," "however" are transition words they indicate the logic
connecting the previous thought to the upcoming thought. You can also strengthen transitions by
carefully echoing the same key words.
BSI 313 TRW &Presentation Skills
(6th Semester)
Name: Syed Tahir Hussain Reg No: 17ABELT0781
Revise Noun Stacks:

Another common sentence-style problem involves piling up nouns in a phrase. The effect is similar being
hit in the head with a large object.

Example:

Problem: Proper VLSI integrated circuit packaging type applications are crucial to electrical system
design and repair.
Revision: Identifying the proper type of packaging for VLSI integrated circuits is crucial to the design and
repair of electrical systems.

Revising Redundant Phrasing:

Redundancy in writing can come about from these three sources (but there are probably plenty more):

 Wordy set phrases: (where a 3- to 5-word phrase and be chopped to a 1- to 3-word phrase with
no loss of meaning): for example, "in view of the fact that"it can be reduced to "since" or
"because."
 Obvious qualifiers :(where a word is implicit in the word it modifies): phrases like "anticipate in
advance," "completely finish," or "important essentials" are examples of obvious qualifiers we
know that already!
 Scattershot phrasing:(where two or more synonyms are compounded): compounds like
"thoughts and ideas" (what's the difference?) or "actions and behavior" (if there is a difference
between these two, does the writer mean to use it?)

Revise Subject-Verb Mismatches:

In dense technical writing, it's easy to lose track of the real subject and pick a verb that just does not
make a proper sense. The result is a noun physically not able to do what the verb says it is doing, or
some abstract thing performing something nitty-gritty real-world action. Here are some examples and
their revision:

Example:

Problem: The causes of the disappearance of electric automobiles were devastating to the future of
energy conservation in the U.K.

Revision: The disappearance of early electric automobiles destroyed the future of energy conservation.