Technical Writing

Writing of Custom Reports:

There are too few people at  Engineering firms that are able to look at a blank white page, and within only a few hours fill it up with pithy, reasoned, accurate and compelling prose.  Most Engineering staff say they don’t know what to write unless they have a previous report that they can edit. All senior staff members should have reasonable writing skills but this expectation is not realized in practice.   It is important to be able to write well and express ourselves. That is worth more than almost any other skill.  The only other skill that we rate higher is the ability to walk into a meeting of 20 hardboiled construction and design professionals and have complete command of the questions and issues at hand, without fearing for the consequences.  Confidence, prior preparation and Chutzpah are key lubricants to getting things agreed to in meetings.  

Often, there isn’t a template for the reports that we need to write, especially for our Low Voltage disciplines.  A design brief or outline spec is useful for general building Telecom or Security networks but they are not useful in many other of our situations.  Often we need to write something that is unique that sparks the clients curiosity as well as illuminating a specific solution to an identified challenge. 

Ward preaches the practice of providing clear and unambiguous recommendations with one preferred solution and perhaps one alternate solution. Occasionally we need a document that has another objective, which is to suggest multiple scenario’s or technology paths, to spark discussion and eventual agreement on the preferred path.  These types of reports usually have no template or structure imposed previously, as the subjects are all rather unique.

Writing of White Papers:

If we are to get work in these differentiated sectors, we must let people know what we know.  Ward does that by writing up articles for publication and presenting at conferences. But he also spends time crafting project descriptions on existing projects that are filled with benefit language and ‘overcoming-challenges’ language.  These are the things that people are looking for us to do – to help them overcome their challenges.  

Partly Ward’s interest in this field is his love of teaching others what he knows.  He’s had three periods of work as a teacher and lecturer in Tertiary education. The first was at City College of the City University of New York, where he taught in the Picker Film Institute and also a Film Animation course in the Art department.  While in Hong Kong, he had two stints of teaching – he taught Building Services Acoustics (and was an examiner) in the Architecture Department at the University of Hong Kong and he also taught Field Sound Recording courses at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing arts.  Fred Shen, Ward’s former boss at SM&W used to say “Ask Ward a question and you get a Novel”.