Technical report writing

This manual covers the fundamentals of organizing, writing, and reviewing NASA technical reports. It was written to improve the writing skills of LeRC technical authors and the overall quality of their reports

Report Writing (or a few useful things about writing)

Lecture Slides on the topic of report writing which incorporate a few in class activities. These slides deal with IEEE format referencing.Also briefly discusses academic integrity

ELEC6021 Research Methods: Report Writing

Slides and Handouts for this part of the modul

PREP Workshop Report: Expository Writing

A significant part of the job of a mathematician involves writing - between research papers, expository writing, grant applications, letters of recommendation, and materials for our teaching, I know that I spend much of my days writing something or other. Yet most of us are never really trained to write mathematics, and even in our jobs we rarely find time to talk about the actual writing of the mathematics which has taken place. With this in mind, I chose to attend a PREP workshop held by the Mathematical Association of America at their headquarters in Washington, DC dedicated to the art of mathematical exposition. [excerpt

Building an application for the writing process

The idea that writing is a process and not a product is now generally accepted in writing education, but discussions of digital scholarly communication often neglect the idea, in theory and in practice. This thesis report introduces a Mac OS X software package to support the early stages of the writing process, called Brouillon. Brouillon’s features include: the concatenation of discrete note files into notebooks; notes appearing in multiple notebooks; note intake from mobile devices via Dropbox; and an open standard file format. The report also provides a model of the organization of products of the writing process, with a focus on Brouillon’s most unusual feature, multi-notebook notes. It discusses difficulties in implementation and identifies possibilities for future improvement

Shadow writing and participant observation : a study of criminal justice social work around sentencing

The study of decision-making by public officials in administrative settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda are well understood: how can socio-legal researchers get inside the heads of legal decision-makers in order to understand the uses of official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision-making practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre-sentence reports for the courts. This technique, called `shadow writing', involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the social workers. By comparing these `shadow reports' with the real reports in a training-like setting, the social workers revealed in detail the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally

Using peer review to enhance the quality of engineering laboratory reports

Peer review of third year bioprocess engineering laboratory reports was introduced in an attempt to improve the standard of report writing in the BSc in Biotechnology degree programme at DCU. Preliminary results suggest that the review process leads to improved report writing skills. The student response to the initiative was very positive but it was strongly felt that the process should be anonymous. On average, marks awarded by students were higher than those awarded by the lecturer but there was a slight tendency to award more extreme marks

As Effective as Aspirin or Dark Chocolate: The Writing Center as Preventative Medicine

In the fight against heart disease, the popular media regularly report that an ounce of prevention— an aspirin a day, for example, or a piece of dark chocolate—goes a long way. The preventative approach applies equally well in the fight against underdeveloped writing skills among college students: the earlier inexperienced writers seek help, the better off they are likely to be. However, the medicinal value of a visit to the Writing Center is woefully underreported.University Writing Cente