Writing Technical Documents

So this time I'm going to talk a bit about writing technical documents, because as a future engineer, I guess I will have to do many of them.

On Thursday we started this topic by reading an introduction to writing technical documents. We were divided in groups, and each group was assigned a specific chapter (or chapters) from a guideline about how to write technical documents.

According to our chapters, I realize the most important task when writing any document (as it constantly said throughout the chapter) is to define its purpose and identify the audience, because what we actually want is to explain our objectives and we want our readers to understand them! Once we know the purpose/objective and the audience of the document, the rest will simply come (more or less...). 

In order to make the readers understand easily what is written, in my opinion, the most important requirements are to have a vocabulary adapted to the audience's level of knowledge and to have it well structured and organized. And regarding the content, obviously, we can't forget to be objective!

I realize this is a really important task, and moreover, really valuable for the future, because as engineers what we want is to bring our ideas to life by sharing them with other people which will help us do so, and therefore, we have to tell them (usually with a written document) what we want in a way that they can understand. In my opinion, the problem with this is that we normally have multiple audiences with several levels of knowledge, and we have to make them ALL understand our document, so we have to make a big effort.