Notes on Writing Technical
Documents
Charles Sullivan
- My notes on Common Writing Errors,
including abbreviations I use in editing.
- My notes on Referencing Figures in Technical
Documents.
- Chuck Mullett, "An Engineer's Guide to Technical Writing", written for IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference authors. This guide is excellent, particularly relevant for power electronics papers, and both comprehensive and concise.
- J. A. Bain, "A Checklist for Use in the Preparation of Scientific
Documents (v. 1.2),". Pittsburgh, PA (unpublished), 1998
full
text (pdf)
This is an excellent explanation and checklist for creating a
classic science paper (an experiment and an analysis of that experiment).
For an engineering paper, the structure will typically be different.
A science paper almost always has sections titled as follows: Instroduction,
Experimental, Results, Discussion, and Consclusions. But engineering
papers vary more widely. For example, an engineering paper might have
sections titled: Introduction, Analysis, Design Methodology, Design Example,
Experimental Confirmation, and Conclusions. Nonetheless, what this reference
explains about the differences between what belongs in the abstract, in
the introduction, and in the conclusion still hold.
- IEEE Transactions Information
for Authors booklet