It is critically important to consider the needs of your reader when writing.
If you can do this well, everything else follows naturally.
Although your actual reader is a professor, you will be better off to act as if your reader is your manager or a coworker or someone just like you who needs to check your work 10 years later. Your reader wants your report to be as short as possible. Your reader wants your report to have specific information about the subject and wants to be able to make a decision based on your work. Your reader wants to be able to reproduce your work given the information in the report but she or he does not want to see every intermediate step in the report if it could be repeated later by a competent engineer. Your reader wants to be convinced that you thought of all the important issues. List all assumptions and alternatives.
Your report should be skimmable. You should be able to get the most important information out of the abstract or introduction without looking through the rest of the document. Figures and tables should be self-explanatory, as much as possible. You should combine information from several figures or tables into one figure or table if possible. Students routinely waste hours generating dozens of figures and tables and then provide no summary or explanation of their significance.
Your reader really only wants to see the final result so spend your time accordingly. You should substantiate your results, but your reader is only interested in your results, not in the trials and tribulations of how you got them.
Make the main body as short as possible but make it efficient by connecting it to other work. Include as many citations as possible and make sure they are usable. Refer to other sections in your document whenever related material appears in more than one place. Include raw data or auxiliary information in an appendix.
Be as specific and quantitative as possible when naming things and giving results. Leave out unneeded words; you may be able to improve a document considerably by simply deleting words that don't add any meaning. Do not include explanations of general procedures or results that a competent engineer would already know about or be able to find elsewhere. For example, do not explain how a hardness tester works, that you need to wear safety glasses when handling chemicals, or how to rearrange an equation to solve for a variable.
(Last modified on 4/28/98)