How to write a technical report

A technical report is a formal report designed to convey technical information in a clear and easily accessible format. The main objectives of technical writing are

• Clarity 
• Conciseness 
• Accuracy 
• Organization 
• Ethics

1.Clarity Clarity means to make your documents clear and easy to read. For this you have to

1. Provide specific details. For this purpose you may bulletize your information. This document is a good example of bulleting the information. Try to avoid abstract words/phrases like any, many, few, recently, soon, early etc. 
2. Answer the reporter's questions. You may first ask a reader to question the writing content. This will help you point out the list of questions which a reader can ask. Then make a new draft and add what’s missing. 
3. Use easily understandable words. E.g. use the word ‘wrong’ instead of ‘erroneous’ Just think that you are writing for a lay man. Don’t use abbreviations, acronyms or jargons. 
4. Use verbs in the active voice. 
5. Avoid Obscure words. Words which are not relevant to the content or words which may create ambiguity in reader’s mind. 
6. Don’t follow duplication of words. E.g. I will any way or somehow do it. Here you can use either any way or somehow.

2. Conciseness Your writing should be short precise and to the point. It will help to save your writer as well as reader’s time. To achieve this you have to

1. Limit paragraph length. Long paragraphs may irritate and confuse your readers. 
2. Limit word and sentence length. Short words and sentences are easy to read. 
3. Avoid a high fog index. In linguistics, the fog index measures the readability of English writing. 
4. Use meat cleaver method of revision. In this method you simply cut a long sentence or paragraph in half or thirds, to avoid it being too long where it is difficult for readers to understand it. 
5. Avoid shun words like accommodation, decision, admission, permission, occasion. 
6. Avoid camouflaged words. E.g. ‘It was my duty to make a determination of any damages’. Instead of this you can say, ‘It was my duty to determine any damages’. 
7. Avoid the expletive pattern 
8. Omit redundancies. 
9. Avoid wordy phrases.

3.Accuracy To avoid grammatical errors follow the following tips

1. Let someone else read it. Other may arise questions which may improve your document. 
2. Use gestation approach. 
3. Let a critic to read your stuff. He will always give you a good advice. 
4. Present your document for proofreading. 
5. Read backwards for error not for content. 
6. Read one line at a time. Human eye can’t search out many lines at a time. 
7. Read long words syllable by syllable. 
8. Use computer spell checks. 
9. Check figures, scientific and technical equations, and abbreviations. Figures really matters. It provides your reader facts and you don’t want it to be wrong. 
10. Read it aloud. 
11. Try scattershot proofing. 
12. Use a dictionary. It provides you synonyms, antonyms etc. and increase your vocabulary.

4. Organization To guide your reader, use organizational strategies such as

1. Spatial. 
2. Chronological. Try to arrange your words in order of its happenings. This will develop a sequence and will make the document interesting and easy to read. 
3. Importance. The arrangement may also be in terms of importance. One will like to place important stuff on the page where it can be seen at a first glance. 
4. Comparison/Contrast. 
5. Problem/Solution Identify the problems and suggest suitable solutions.

5. EthicsTo be a responsible technical writer:

1. Check your actions against legal, practical, and ethical concerns. Being a Muslim or a good human being we have to write things which promote goodness in the society. 
2. Follow strategies for making ethical decisions: define the problem, determine your audience, maximize values and minimize problems, consider the big picture, and write your text.