Grammar Guidelines for Reports

Syntax Guidelines for Reports

• Write about your work using the past tense even if the research is ongoing. When you describe your apparatus use the past tense even if the apparatus still exists.
• Use METRIC units consistently. If you use a component that is specified in English units you can optionally list those units in parenthesis. For example, the tubing internal diameter was 6.4 mm (0.25 in).
• Make sure every sentence contributes to your report. Watch out for meaningless fluff!
• Write clearly. Avoid using the words "this" or "these".
• Have someone else proofread your wiki pages critically. The standard of excellence is not "can I guess what the writer probably meant." The standard of excellent is clear, concise, and precise writing that provides all the necessary information describing your project so that an educated reader can understand what you did and how it applies to drinking water treatment.
• Spell check everything.
• Provide the technical details. Show the equations that you used. Provide all the important parameters (dimensions, flow rates, concentrations, etc.) that another researcher would need to duplicate your work
• The biggest mistake of technical writers is to not include enough graphs, pictures, and drawings in their documents. These figures are each worth many words. Use figures that are well labeled to provide information that would be hard to understand if only presented as text.
• Make sure the figures have captions and that you refer to each figure in the text. Don't refer to them as graphs! Refer to them as Figures!
• Make sure your graphs meet the graphing guidelines
• Use Greek letters rather than their English spelling. You can use the Rich text editor to insert symbols or you can type Greek letters by typing &theenglishspelling; in the wiki editor and it will display the Greek letter! Here is our friend θ as well as our viscous friend ν and our dense friend ρ.

Common Errors: