Reports

"Sort of Set My Goal to Come to Class": Evoking Expressive Content in Policy Reports

This article documents a novel yet theory-informed process of preparing research reports designed for government officials who are concerned with creating adult-literacy policy. The authors use cartoons that include verbatim dialogue from the transcripts of interviews with research participants with low functional literacy. This dialogue, which depicts positive messages about the participants’ moral character, strengths, and resilience, is set against photographic backdrops of the participants’ lived environment to give a sense of real people in a real place. Inclusion of such images is an attempt to change policy-report readers’ thinking about adult literacy because creative visual communication offers ways to approach this challenge that text alone cannot.

Crossing National and Corporate Cultures: Stages in Localizing a Pre-Production Meeting Report

Localization includes translating, explaining, and adapting a document for use in a specific culture. This article presents the case of a form for reporting the findings and decisions of pre-production meetings held during development of electronic products. The need to localize such a document may seem less obvious or critical than the need for sales documents like manuals, but this case demonstrates the same cultural requirements and, furthermore, the requirements of corporate differences. To meet local needs, the comprehensive preparation that localization requires should follow specific methods in each step of a process corresponding to the general writing process, like the stages defined in common technical writing texts. The deliberate use of an effective writing process to localize documents will improve results.

Comments on Lab Reports by Mechanical Engineering Teaching Assistants: Typical Practices and Effects of Using a Grading Rubric

Many engineering undergraduates receive their first and perhaps most intensive exposure to engineering communication through writing lab reports in lab courses taught by graduate teaching assistants (TAs). Most of the TAs' teaching of writing happens through their comments on students' lab reports. Technical writing faculty need to be aware of TAs' response practices so they can build on or counteract that instruction as needed. This study examines the response practices of two TAs and the ways the practices shifted after the TAs began using a grading rubric. The analysis reveals distinct patterns in focus and mode, some reflecting best practices and some not. It also indicates encouraging changes after the TAs started using the grading rubric. The TAs' marginalia became more content focused and specific and, perhaps most important, less authoritative and more likely to reflect a coaching mode. The article concludes with implications for technical writing courses.

Crossing National and Corporate Cultures: Stages in Localizing a Pre-Production Meeting Report

Designing a Successful Group-Report Experience

Report assignments and collaborative assignments can both be fraught with risk. Report projects, if notstration) and/or can leave students wondering what they are supposed to have learned—all while creating a major grading burden for the instructor. Poorly planned group projects can cause similar difficulties, with the added danger of creating interpersonal stress in the student groups. Yet for many reasons, the report assignment is the perfect choice for the collaborative project. Because of its extra length and complexity, the report enables several students to contribute meaningful research, writing, and document design decisions to one product or a related set of products. If the project goes well, each student will learn important lessons both about report writing and about teamwork. To maximize the likelihood that the project will go well, the instructor must think through a wide range of variables and decide, based upon his or her learning objectives, what the features of the project will be.

How to Write a Technical Report

This presentation describes the standard structure of a lab report and provides a methodology for successfully producing such a report. It includes a description of the generic structure of a report and variations on this theme.

Programmatically Creating SSRS Report in Microsoft SQL Server 2008

The process of programmatically creating the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) tabular report is described. You will be creating a very simple report using the provided code. The approach is to introduce the programming by creating the three parts of a report: connection, dataset, and layout. Excerpt from the book, "Learning SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services.'

Linguistic Bias in Personnel Selection

The present research examines how hiring committees strategically use language abstraction to collectively account for their decision to hire a job applicant over the others. In addition, the authors investigate how work interdependence between single members of hiring committees and applicants and common affiliation to the same work organization affect the language used to write individual reports on job candidates. Results of the first study show that selected applicants were described with positive terms at a higher level of abstraction and negative terms at a lower level of abstraction. The second study supports the selection linguistic bias in individually written reports and demonstrates that members of hiring committees describe interdependent applicants and those belonging to their group with negative terms at a lower level of abstraction than other applicants. The implications of the findings for the wider personnel selection context are discussed.

Considering Bias in Government Audit Reports: Factors That Influence the Judgments of Internal Government Auditors

Government auditors collect data and assess, via written reports, the operations of a government; however, little is known about what can affect and govern their representations of those operations. This analysis examines research studies about author bias and government audit manuals in order to understand how government auditors' neutrality is threatened. While bias may be an overt function of preferential or prejudicial thoughts, most sources of bias that influence auditors derive from less explicit sources including prior expectations, media coverage, nondiagnostic information, and other significantly less direct channels. To determine how government guidelines address this issue for their auditors, the principle audit manuals for Canada and the United States were reviewed for their references to bias, impartiality, and objectivity. Neither manual provides a significant amount of guidance to assist auditors in addressing the problems of bias in data collection, interpretation, and representation. If bias is to be reduced in audit reports, more must be done.

Toward a Taxonomy of Corporate Reporting Strategies

Studies of corporate reporting that focus on information disclosure do so primarily from a mandatory, financial perspective owing the decision to the rationality of corporate actors. Yet, social and environmental disclosures"often reported voluntarily"are increasing in importance because of their impact on a firm's performance and perceived value. Likewise, disclosure decisions are made based on managerial choice, often being communicated for a specific strategic purpose. The aim of this article is to illuminate the importance of voluntary disclosures as an aspect of corporate reporting and to integrate the deterministic and behavioral elements of disclosure decisions. A taxonomy of the disclosure process, activities, tasks, forms, types, and strategies is provided to add to our understanding of the additive and corrective nature of proactively disclosing information either to provide context to existing disclosures or to use information in a preventive manner.

Integrating Business Core Knowledge Through Upper Division Report Composition

The most ambitious project of many undergraduate business communication courses is the formal report. This assignment typically requires the use of many writing skills nurtured throughout the course. Skills such as proper style, tone, organization, flow, and mechanics are enhanced through the writing of memos and various types of letters (persuasive, bad news, etc.). While these skills are all evident in a report, it is a much different kind of document. This synthesis of writing skills can be complemented by the integration of fundamental business subject knowledge. Both skill sets can be concurrently developed through business simulation report assignments, particularly in upper division business communication courses. Such courses are often required in business programs where students have already completed courses in business law, management, basic business statistics, and computer applications. Choosing an appropriate topic and scope for such a report writing assignment can be challenging. As offered in Business Communication Quarterly, many good assignments lend themselves to adoption, each with varying degrees of flexibility, coverage of current topics, and data analysis requirements. The following formal report assignment provides the opportunity to present a wide enough scope to integrate several business disciplines.

A Structured Process for Transforming Usability Data into Usability Information

Much research has been devoted to developing usability evaluation methods that are used in evaluating interaction designs. More recently, however, research has shifted away from evaluation methods and comparisons of evaluation methods to issues of how to use the raw usability data generated by these methods. Associated with this focus is the assumption that the transformation of the raw usability data into usability information is relatively straightforward. We would argue that this assumption is incorrect, especially for novice usability practitioners. In this article, we present a structured process for transforming raw usability data into usability information that is based on a new way of thinking about usability problem data. The results of a study of this structured process indicate that it helps improve the effectiveness of novice usability practitioners.

Applying the Elaboration Likelihood Model to Technical Recommendation Reports

Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) can help proposal writers identify effective document design techniques and parts of arguments that are critical to persuasion. In addition, ELM has implications for other types of technical communication, including recommendation or feasibility reports. While one would anticipate that decision-makers would be willing and able to evaluate critically all arguments presented in a recommendation report, ELM explains why this is rarely so. Therefore, technical communicators can profit by understanding and using the two routes to persuasion or attitude shift, the central and peripheral routes, explained by ELM.

Communicating the Results of Field Studies to Support Usable Design

When you have completed the study, analyzed the data, and organized the interpretations and conclusions along with supporting data, you have to communicate the results to the people who need to know about them. How you communicate the results depends upon who the intended audience is, content needs of the audience, and the scope of the content. Increasing the odds of this information being used in the design process requires an understanding of the company's culture and the barriers limiting its use in the development process. Various strategies such as computer-slide presentations, reference notebooks, bound reports, and memos have been shown to be very effective in various circumstances.

Report of the STC Education Task Force: Considering the Current and Future Role of STC in its Mission to Educate its Members

To date, STC has not been very aggressive or innovative in terms of electronic delivery of educational content to our members or others in the profession. Aside from telephone seminars/Webinars and the online availability of articles from Intercom and the journal, the Society has largely ignored the methods that its members, their companies, and other professional organizations are using to deliver content to stakeholders. Because only a fraction of the membership attends the annual conference and regional/chapter conferences, and because the Society is attempting to reach out to members of the profession outside North America, it is imperative that STC pursue other means of offering educational opportunities. By truly leveraging the power of the Web and other emerging technologies, STC can address a worldwide audience and provide significant educational offerings to members and prospective members alike.

Writing in the Presence of Disaster: A Case Study of an Aviation Investigation Report

The investigation of fatal aircraft incidents has gained in importance and in the attention of the public. This paper presents the experience of one documentation company in working on a major aircraft accident investigation report. The paper covers the general approach the company took, the challenges it encountered, the standards it applied, the strategies it developed, and the lessons it learned.

Making Usability Recommendations Useful and Usable

This paper evaluates the quality of recommendations for improving a user interface resulting from a usability evaluation. The study compares usability comments written by different authors, but describing similar usability issues. The usability comments were provided by 17 professional teams who independently evaluated the usability of the website for the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. The study finds that only 14 of the 84 studied comments (17%) addressing six usability problems contained recommendations that were both useful and usable. Fourteen recommendations were not useful at all. Sixteen recommendations were not usable at all. Quality problems include recommendations that are vague or not actionable, and ones that may not improve the overall usability of the application. The paper suggests characteristics for "useful and usable recommendations," that is, recommendations for solving usability problems that lead to changes that efficiently improve the usability of a product.

Technical Reports for Quick Reader Comprehension

A technique to conserve the time of scientists and engineers in report preparation, assure prompt reporting, and provide reports that meet user needs.

Lessons Learned the Hard Way in an Architectural Document Disaster

Delivering project reports in radically different formats gave the client a bad impression of this consulting firm. Here's how the staff remedied the situation and learned from their mistake.

Figures of Speech as Persuasive Strategies in Early Commercial Communication: The Use of Dominant Figures in the Raleigh Reports About Virginia in the 1580s

During the mid-1580s Sir Walter Raleigh, operating under letters patent of Queen Elizabeth, supported two major voyages to establish an initial colony in Virginia. These two voyages produced three major commercial reports that evaluated the economic potential of the region for English colonists and merchants. The reports, written by Arthur Barlowe, Ralph Lane, and Thomas Hariot, represent the beginnings of American commercial communication in English. Using Kenneth Burke's idea of the four major tropes, this article develops the notion of the 'dominant figure'--a figure of speech that serves to focus a report's rhetorical power--to analyze the persuasive effects of these reports.

Toward an Expanded Concept of Rhetorical Delivery: The Uses of Reports in Public Policy Debates

Preparing students for civic engagement requires new knowledge about the uses of documents for advocacy and social change. Substantial social change results from repeated rather than from single rhetorical acts. Reconsideration of the rhetorical canon of delivery suggests expanding the concept beyond its present connection to publication (visual design, medium) to a rhetorical situation comprehensively defined. Delivery may take place over time and embrace a web of activities including field work, updates, and interconnections with other publications.

Writing in the Presence of Disaster: A Case Study of an Aviation Investigation Report

The experience of a documentation company in working on a major aircraft accident investigation report.

Annual Reports: A Literature Review (1989-2001)

Since the collapse of Enron Corporation in November 2001, annual reports and corporate financial disclosures have been the focus of government, corporate, and public attention. This article examines the literature written about annual reports between 1989 and 2001 to identify trends in research and determine areas of future study. Articles were categorized as related to SEC regulations and guidelines, summary annual reports, online annual reports, rhetorical analysis of annual reports, readability and accessibility of annual reports, methods of conveying negative information in annual reports, effective annual report writing, use and importance of annual reports, or use of annual reports in business writing classes. Post-Enron, it is likely that the number of articles in this area will dramatically increase over the next five to ten years.

The Two Shuttle Accident Reports: Context and Culture in Technical Communication

English 3301: Principles of Professional and Report Writing

The main objective of this class is to help you gain the skills needed to think through writing tasks, analyze the audience(s) involved, secure various types of resources, generate documents, and present those documents in an effective manner.

An Outline for a Course in Report Writing for Company Executives

A case study about a continuing education course in Report Writing for company executives.

Webに関連する統計データの可視化：対数グラフと垂れ下がるテール

ウェブサイトへのアクセスログを線形グラフにするだけでは、データの大切な部分を見落とすことになりかねない。ときには、一歩進んだグラフ化にもやってみる価値があるものだ。

Towards the Design of Effective Formative Test Reports

Many usability practitioners conduct most of their usability evaluations to improve a product during its design and development. We call these 'formative' evaluations to distinguish them from 'summative' (validation) usability tests at the end of development. A standard for reporting summative usability test results has been adopted by international standards organizations. But that standard is not intended for the broader range of techniques and business contexts in formative work. This paper reports on a new industry project to identify best practices in reports of formative usability evaluations. The initial work focused on gathering examples of reports used in a variety of business contexts. We define elements in these reports and present some early guidelines on making design decisions for a formative report. These guidelines are based on considerations of the business context, the relationship between author and audience, the questions that the evaluation is trying to answer, and the techniques used in the evaluation. Future work will continue to investigate industry practice and conduct evaluations of proposed guidelines or templates.

Lack of Annual Report Analysis on a Social, Political and Historical Basis

One area of rhetorical analysis of business writing that seems to be neglected is the analysis of annual reports on the social, political, and historical level. An admittedly-brief four hour review of on-line technical journals and academic articles on the subject of annual report analysis failed to produce a single article directly related to this subject. The only articles that I did find dealt with the analysis of contemporary annual reports on a financial basis. However, my research did uncover an article on the teaching of the conventions of business writing, such as annual reports, and an article on reconstructing the image and narrative in distressed organizations.

Better Reports: How to Communicate the Results of Usability Testing

You've spent several days setting up a usability test, recruiting the participants and running it. Then you've pored over the data. What next? If you are doing usability testing as part of user-centred design within a business setting, then there are many ways that you can communicate the results. This paper looks at reports and then considers presentation and observation as alternatives to reports.

Formal Usability Reports vs. Quick Findings

Formal reports are the most common way of documenting usability studies, but informal reports are faster to produce and are often a better choice.

Mythmaking in Annual Reports

Annual reports produced today increasingly include elaborate photographs and graphics in the narrative section. Financial analysts and many scholars have judged these reports on their clarity, accuracy, and honesty. Because the narrative invites interpretations, such criteria are not sufficient, and additional standards need to be constructed. A semiological analysis of the textual and visual elements allows for the discovery of the techniques used by document designers to promote their companies' values. Artistic images may encourage positive readings of annual reports, which, combined with similar messages in other media and repeated over time, invoke cultural myths. By definition, myths are broadly accepted commonplaces that conceal details of their subject, and communicators must expose the missing details and judge the myth within a specific context. This kind of analysis, acknowledging the constraints of the rhetorical situation of a single report, can identify effective criteria for judging the narrative's ethics.

Technical Report Overview

This outline is provided to help introduce the Technical Report and to clarify the acceptable format and level of achievement that is considered essential for successful completion of the Technical Report.

Professional Report Writing

Instruction covers primary and secondary research techniques, analysis and interpretation of information, audience analysis, report design, format and graphics, and oral reporting. Instruction also covers writing in its social context and the management of complex research and writing projects.

Hiding Humanity: Verbal and Visual Ethics in Accident Reports

Located at the critical intersection of technology and humanity, technical communicators must always try to avoid human injury and promote sensitivity to the needs of human beings. The reporting of human injuries and fatalities in accident reports, however, often strips victims of their humanity and hides the tragic human consequences of technological failures from individuals trying to devise appropriate public policy, establish effective safety regulations, and modify or abolish dangerous industrial processes—government officials, company executives, labor representatives, community activists, and ordinary citizens. Technical communicators have the rhetorical ability, the requisite editorial and graphic skills, and the moral responsibility to bring humanity to the verbal and visual display of information.

Technical Report Writing Resources

Provides links to online resources such as directories, web sites, chat forums, journals, associations, and conferences. It also has 18 tips for technical writers.

Some Advice on Writing a Technical Report

The Technical Report (TR) is a common written form through which computer scientist communicate their findings. Each TR should have a focused topic that is developed logically along some clearly identified perspective. The major components of a TR are title, author information, date, keywords, informative abstract, body, acknowledgments, references, and appendices. Typically, the body is organized into four sections: motivation, methods, results, and discussion. This document offers advice and specifications for writing TRs.

Guide to Effective Formatting

This guide supplements work instruction PR2-W3 - Document Formatting. It gives a detailed outline of the recommended document formatting standards for reports. You should use the standard Word template, which has been configured to conform with these guidelines.

Guide to Effective Report Writing

The Guide to Effective Report Writing outlines a practical method for IT professionals to develop and maintain reports which address the needs of the reader and which are expressed in language easily understood by the reader.

Editing Reports and Proposals

Businesses, non-profit organizations, government departments, and other groups produce a lot of proposals and reports. This article summarizes some features of reports and proposals that are not the same as books, news items, manuals, magazine articles, memos and many other documents.

Reporting Technical Information

When I first picked up Reporting Technical Information, I thought from the title it was going to be a primer on writing technical reports. Instead, this book turned out to be a basic, though somewhat better than average, textbook on technical writing.

Special Topics of Argument in Engineering Reports

As a discussion of writing-across-the-curriculum programs in universities, his essay focuses on disciplinary discourse within academic settings. Nonacademic discourse also occurs with particular conventions, purposes and institutions; such discourse can be subjected to similar study.

Some Advice on Writing a Technical Report

How to Write a Report Without Getting Lynched

You put forth your best effort to explain to the stupid sods exactly how and where they screwed up, then they have the temerity to not appreciate your fine efforts. Here's how to write a report that will cause change, instead of uproar.

Industry Usability Reporting

In October of 1997, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initiated an effort to increase the visibility of software usability. Cooperating in the IUSR project are prominent suppliers of software and representatives from large consumer organizations.

Industry Usability Reporting and the Common Industry Format (ANSI-NCITS 354-2001)

The Common Industry Format (CIF) is a standard method for reporting usability test findings. The format is primarily for reporting results of formal usability tests in which quantitative measurements were collected and is particularly appropriate for summative/comparative testing. The CIF targets two audiences: usability professionals and stakeholders in an organization. Stakeholders can use the usability data to help make informed decisions concerning the release of software products or the procurement of such products. While the CIF is formally aimed for software products, it can be used for hardware usability as well.

The IUSR Project: Industry USability Report

This document is an overview of the Industry USability Report (IUSR)) Project. The IUSR Project is designed to help potential purchasers of software obtain information about the usability of supplier products.

Technical Reports

The assignment in this unit is to learn about technical reports, their different types, their typical audiences and situations, and then to plan one of your own. Specifically, your task in this unit is to pick a report topic, report audience and situation, report purpose, and report type.

Short Reports: How To Write Routine Technical Documents

This document introduces two basic principles of technical communication -- meeting the reader's needs and using the inverted pyramid. It also describes the section headings typically found in a technical report.

Standards Update: Usability Test Reporting

It’s a truism that even a bad usability test will help improve your software. But the findings from different usability tests are notoriously difficult to compare. This makes it difficult to track usability improvements or to see how you compare against an earlier product. An emerging international standard looks set to solve this problem.

Looking into the Future: The Role of the Technical Communicator in On-Line Report Design

Corporations are rapidly moving vast quantities of information onto intranets. In order for that information to be usable by corporate decision makers the format of traditional reports needs to change. Corporate reports must reflect information needs and not just provide a dump of available data. Their design must change from static dumps of information to an on-line highly adaptable format that connects relevant information into an integrated whole. Part of making the change means careful audience and task analysis to determine what reader¡¯s information needs. Technical communicators are uniquely skilled to handle this phase of on-line report design.

Cherryleaf Survey: Use of Single-Sourcing Solutions

During March and April 2003, Cherryleaf carried out an online survey into the current trends in technical communication. One of the questions we asked was: Do the people directly involved with user assistance development at your organization use a single sourcing authoring solution? Our findings are summarised in the article

Academic Writing: Scientific Reports

This handout describes an organizational structure commonly used to report experimental research in many scientific disciplines, the IMRAD format: Introduction, Methods, Results, And Discussion. (This format is usually not used in reports describing other kinds of research, such as field or case studies, in which headings are more likely to differ according to discipline.) Although the main headings are standard for many scientific fields, details may vary; check with your instructor, or, if submitting an article to a journal, refer to the instructions to authors.

Annual Reports That Work

Offers suggestions for creating excellent annual reports.

Business Reports that Demand Attention

Walinskas offers tips for improving business reports.

Developing Business Plans for High-tech Companies

Illustrates how technical communicators can add value to business plan projects.

Ten Tips on Writing White Papers

Offers ten suggestions for technical writers wanting to improve the quality of their companies' white papers.

UsabilityNet: Usability Report Formats

It is advantageous to use a standard format for writing up usability reports. The reasons for this include: your clients will be familiar with the layout of information in your reports; the structure acts as a checklist in case you've missed something out; reports from different labs are comparable; there is a common consensus as to what should appear in a report.

Manager's Toolkit: How to Report the Status of a Project

As you develop the communication product, your client and the team of people working with you will be interested in the progress of your work. To inform them, regularly publish a progress report. The progress report offers many benfits. It anticipates your client’s need for information about an in-progress project, makes the team aware of changes to the original plans and situations that could cause problems before those situations become problems, and maintains the common vision for the project that you painstakingly created when you developed plans of the information design. Most likely, you will publish the the report weekly or bi-weekly. Let your client determine the exact frequency; when your client approves your information designs, ask how frequently the client would prefer a progress report.

Going On-Line: Bringing Technical Reports To The Desktop

Information management is moving quickly toward archiving and retrieving documents electronically, so Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is taking steps to help its research staff create electronic documents. Declining budgets frequently dictate that authors handle the technicalities of getting published as well as the scientific and technical information that they publish. To help the Laboratory benefit from being the leader in this area, ORNL’s Information Management Section formed a multidisciplinary team to develop, pilot, and implement a Webbased process to register and clear technical documents and to add the full text of these documents to the Laboratory’s Comprehensive Publications and Presentations Registry (CPPR). Making this happen required implementing policy changes to address the new performance measure, acquiring software needed for file conversion, developing Web guidance, and providing training and consulting for ORNL staff.

Professional Report Writing

This course is designed to teach specialists in a wide variety of disciplines to write clearly and effectively on their subject for both specialist and non-specialist audiences. You will work intensively in the study and practice of the communication activities that will ordinarily be expected of you in your professional career. This will include: * composing letters, memos, proposals, and reports * reviewing and editing the writing of others * researching information in the library, interviewing subject specialists, organizing research, and preparing a formal report * giving oral presentations summarizing research

Feminizing the Professional: The Government Reports of Flora Annie Steel

Despite being raised in a culture that denied her access to formal education and employment, Flora Annie Steel became an Inspector of Female Schools in the Punjab, India, in 1884. Her inspection reports for the occupying British government of India are the focus of this study, which examines texts within the context of British imperialism and late-nineteenth century report conventions. The study concludes 1) that cultural expectations for women in imperialism influenced Steel's response to the genre and 2) that the report genre may have been fluid within imperialism, crossing boundaries between professional and government writing pertaining today. The study suggests that, historically, we need to study these genres of writing from the perspective of economic and political expansion as genres of imperialism.

Writers and Their Maps: The Construction of a GAO Report on Sexual Harassment

This article examines a 1994 General Accounting Office (GAO) report on sexual harassment at U.S. service academies to determine how power structures affected the report writers’ rhetorical choices. Employing postmodern mapping theories, the article identifies what is valued and devalued in the report’s contents. Then it describes Congress’s reaction to the report and speculates on the report’s impact on public discourse and subsequent social action. It offers postmapping theory as a way of understanding the relationship between discourse and power in policy reports.

The Writing Consultant as Cultural Interpreter: Bridging Cultural Perspectives on the Genre of the Periodic Engineering Report

The periodic engineering report can become a source of conflict and frustration when North American engineers collaborate with colleagues abroad. To overcome such difficulties, technical companies may hire writing consultants, who then take on the additional role of cultural interpreters, helping the partners bridge differences in both the practice of engineering and the language and culture of each country. As such a writing consultant, I worked with a Canadian engineering company, its Russian contractors, and a Russian translator to analyze the sources of difficulties in their reports. The language of the reports was English, but differences in tone as well as reader expectations about organization, format, and appropriate content caused misunderstandings among the collaborators. Contrastive rhetorical analysis helped to identify problems in both the conception of the report as a document and the translation of particular text.

Scientific and Technical Reports: Elements, Organization, and Design

This revision brings the standard on report writing into the electronic age by including de facto document type definitions (DTDs) to describe the structure of reports so the document can be electronically processed using document imaging, OCR, compression/decompression, and optical media storage of full text. Z39.18 also provides explicit guidance on the preparation of reports in the traditional print environment. Included are directions on the bibliographic data elements that should appear on the cover and title page of a report, a description of the scope of each section of a report and instruction on the most effective communication of textual and visual information and tabular materials. Recommendations on publication formats, the use of figures and tables, the presentation of numbers and units, formulas and equations, and symbols, abbreviations and acronyms are also given. Z39.18 supersedes MIL-STD-847B and is approved for use by the Department of Defense (DoD).

User-Friendly Usability Reports: The Effect of Praise on Product-Improvement Efforts By Teams

A largely uncharted issue in usability is the effect that a particular style of usability report has on the motivation of the team whose work the report addresses. Recent work in cognitive science and social psychology offers evidence of an intimate interconnection among thought, emotion and motivation, with implications for usability reports as well as other forms of technical communication. In this preliminary study, fifteen triads of adult workers arranged materials on a prototype Web site for forty-five minutes. They were then subjected to negative, positive-and-negative, or neutral feedback conditions. Measures for motivation were post-treatment time on task, as well as individual self-reports on attitudes.

Technical Writing Course

There's no reason why technical writing shouldn't be lively and interesting. Too often technical writing has a flat style making documents difficult and tedious to read. As in all good writing, you should put across your message in clear English and avoid complex words, acronyms, jargon and passive verbs. Visit my site and follow my guidelines to help improve your technical reports.

Analyzing and Reporting Usability Data

The Just-In-Time (JIT) method of data analysis has the virtue of immediacy, rapid turn-around, and team involvement; however there are several disadvantages. First, this type of analysis is problem-focused, rather than goal-focused. Long lists of problems are generated, but there is no clear relation to specific usability goals. Second, developers may not be able to fix things immediately so the context of the problem may be lost when it is time to fix the problem. Third, the JIT analysis requires that the entire development team observe the testing sessions since problems may occur that are the responsibility of different developers.

Usability Report Tips

Have you ever wondered about reports of usability tests? How much time does it take to write one? What should you keep in mind when designing and writing the report? Here are some rules of thumb that I use.

Computer-Assisted Grading of Essays and Reports

Someday computers may grade our students' essays and reports, but until then they can assist human graders in this onerous task. I wrote a program composed of three major sections: the first is a simple test editor for writing original comments; the second section consists of pre-written commentaries on common writing errors, principally in mechanics and organization; section three keeps track of bookkeeping. Questionnaire results show that students prefer this type of grading over traditional hand-written methods because it doesn't involve marks on their papers, and it produces more extensively detailed comments.