Calgary Energy Engineering
Written communication is an ever-present part of engineering: emails, presentations, reports, and specifications, to name a few. The amount of material you generate and need to read in turn can be significant. By writing effectively, you can get your message across to your readers and help reduce the effort required to read your material. Follow […]
Communicating with effective, concise, and clear writing in engineering can’t be taken lightly or haphazardly. In this post, we offer tips to help you with your next writing task.
When you write, choosing your words carefully is important, but how you arrange those words can also clarify or muddle what you say. “Parallelism” is the practice of using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same importance. Because people recognize repetition even when we aren’t looking for […]
Most engineers (and everyone else!) use Microsoft Word at work. It remains the standard tool for writing reports, memos and other documents. But most of us under-utilize Word because we don’t understand all of its features. Below you’ll find three Microsoft Word tips for engineers you might not have known how—or why—to use! Experiment with […]
Clearly written reports contain a minimum of repetition and unnecessary words. It’s often easier to spot these in someone else’s writing than it is to find them in your own. Asking yourself whether every word says something useful and unique is a good place to start. Search for Similar Words in Written Reports To avoid […]
Approach Writing Like Engineering Every engineer understands how important it is to carefully plan a structure before you build it. Nobody would just show up at site and start placing equipment and running pipelines without a detailed, thoroughly reviewed model and execution strategy. Yet that’s just how most of us write our reports. Before you […]
When you’ve written a document, it can be hard to assess its quality objectively. This is because the creative process is very different from the evaluative process. It’s tough to step back from your writing and look at the document with fresh eyes. Additionally, it’s difficult to “see the forest for the trees” because you, […]
Jargon is the enemy of clear communication. What is it? The dictionary defines jargon as “the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group,” but it can also mean “unnecessarily complicated, technical language used to impress, rather than to inform, your audience”. It’s this second category of jargon that you should avoid. […]
It’s tough to remember what we did before email. It’s a fantastic tool for communication, but it comes with problems too. Most of us have experienced email overload, written a message that was received the wrong way, or read a message we couldn’t understand! The tips below will help you to ensure your message is […]
The executive summary is arguably the most important section of a report, but most people find it challenging. A common misconception is that it’s the same thing as an introduction, but that’s just part of it. So what is it, and how can you write a great one? An executive summary is a brief outline […]