[HN Gopher] A guide to technical report writing [pdf]
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       A guide to technical report writing [pdf]
        
       Author : smartmic
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2023-12-16 21:14 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ias.ieee.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ias.ieee.org)
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | The first tip I'd give is don't publish your technical report
       | exclusively as a PDF, because those are bad for linking to, bad
       | for searching, bad for copying-and-pasting out of, bad for
       | reading on mobile phones, harder to crawl and index, and harder
       | to update in the future.
       | 
       | If you really must have a PDF at least make a proper web page
       | version first and then link to the PDF as an alternative format
       | for people who really, really want it.
       | 
       | (This pet peeve aside, this is a good document with some
       | excellent advice in it.)
       | 
       | Another problem with PDFs: since they don't particularly
       | encourage having a single, unambiguous URL you can end up with
       | confusing multiple copies of them floating around.
       | 
       | This post links to https://ias.ieee.org/wp-
       | content/uploads/2023/06/2020-01-16_I... - which has 2023 in the
       | file path, 2020 in the filename and declares it to be copyright
       | 2015 in the actual document.
       | 
       | A search for "A guide to technical report writing iet" lead me
       | instead to this document:
       | https://www.theiet.org/media/5182/technical-report-writing.p... -
       | same organization, similar content, different document design. Is
       | this the updated version of that 2015 one? Hard to tell, because
       | it doesn't have a date anywhere.
        
       | redcap wrote:
       | The guide has a section on accuracy but doesn't talk about having
       | punctuation outside of quotation marks. There's a work of
       | difference between
       | 
       | 1. Please enter the text "foo bar."
       | 
       | and
       | 
       | 2. Please enter the text "foo bar".
       | 
       | The first is normal American practice, but suggests incorrectly
       | that the period (.) should be input.
       | 
       | Technical writing should be accurate - meaning all quotes should
       | be a true representation that is not subject to style whimsy.
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-16 23:00 UTC)