Engineering Writing by Design

To the Reader

This is a book on technical writing for engineers. There are numerous books on technical writing — some new, some very old. Many take hundreds of pages to cover grammar, page layout, the forms of various types of technical documents (letters, memos, reports, abstracts, papers, book chapters, laboratory notebooks), conventions for composing visual aids (figures, tables, graphs, charts), avoidance of plagiarism, correspondence with editors and publishers, and so on. We haven’t tried to write such a book. In fact, nothing about this book is comprehensive.

We have two goals for this book. The first is to convince you that to write like an engineer, you must think like an engineer. The second is to provide you with a book that is easy, ...