2
Clearly Understand the Goal
2.1 What Is the Goal?
Whether your aim is to finish an advanced degree, meet a company deadline, or secure research funding, you will eventually have to compose a formal engineering document. Fortunately, the writing task can be made less daunting through an application of the engineering design process. Recall that the first step in that process (Figure 1.1) is to thoroughly understand your goal. As a writer, your fundamental goal is effective communication. Let us therefore state the goal as follows.
Your goal as a technical author is to communicate information to an appropriate target audience.
In other words, some body of information currently resides in your mind and must be made available to the ...
