Five Steps of Technical Report Writing in Computer Science, Lecture notes of Network Design

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Technical Report

Writing in Computer

Science (CoSc 4161)

Chapter 2: The five steps of technical report writing

Contents

• Steps of technical report writing
• (^) Preparation

Research

Organization

• (^) Writing
• (^) Revision

1. Preparation

 Establish your primary purpose.

 Assess your audience (or readers) and the context.

• (^) Formal analysis
  • (^) Interviews
  • (^) Questionnaires.
• (^) Informal analysis
  • (^) Talking with persons who have access to research results and

customers.

• (^) Reading notes and reports.
• (^) Talking informally with people who will read the final document

Preparation continues

• (^) Informal analysis
  • (^) Identify audiences’ characteristics (Language ability, Knowledge

& experience )

Assessing audience objectives and needs

• (^) What the they should perform after reading the report
• (^) What kind of questions the report should answer for

the audiences.

Determining the Scope.

Selecting the appropriate communication medium(email,

telephone, websites, face to face meeting)

Research Continues

• (^) Secondary research: refers to gathering information that has

been analyzed, assessed, evaluated, compiled, or otherwise

organized into accessible form.

• (^) Books

Articles

• (^) Reports

Web documents

• (^) e-mail discussions

Brainstorming questions

• (^) How to search and gather relevant data from the

internet?

List out the search engines you know.

• (^) How can we evaluate data gathered from the internet,

articles, and books?

• (^) Do you know any kind of special methods for writing

search queries in search engines?

4. Writing

• (^) The process of writing has three main stages
  • Pre-writing
    • (^) You should invest some time planning what to write and how to transmit the information
    • (^) In order to do this you should consider
      • (a) Audience and purpose
      • (b) Tone and style of writing
      • (^) (d) Organization of information
  • (^) Writing
  • (^) Post-writing
    • (^) (a) Revising content and organization,
    • (^) (b) Checking for grammatical accuracy
    • (^) (c) Editing for style
    • (^) (d) Proofreading and peer review

5. Revision

• (^) Check your draft for accuracy, completeness, and effectiveness in

achieving your purpose and main goal

• (^) Then write a conclusion that ties the main ideas together and

emphatically makes a final significant point.

• (^) The final point may be to write a recommendation and future works.