Technical Writing

Dr. Phil Laplante is Professor of Software and Systems Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. He received his B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. from Stevens Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of Colorado. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and SPIE and has won international awards for his teaching, research and service. Since 2010 he has led the effort to develop a national licensing exam for software engineers.He has worked in avionics, CAD, and software testing systems and he has published more than 33 books and 250 scholarly papers. He is a licensed professional engineer in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He is also a frequent technology advisor to senior executives, investors, entrepreneurs and attorneys and actively serves on corporate technology advisory boards. His research interests are in software testing, requirements engineering and software quality and management. Prior to his appointment at Penn State he was a software development professional, technology executive, college president and entrepreneur.

"Overall the book provides practical, actionable, information that can be used to improve anyone’s writing skills – technical or nontechnical. The author covers a wide variety of media used to convey technical information not only including books and journals, but also magazines, conference proceedings, newsletters, websites, and blogs. Rather than a boring cookbook style of writing, the author uses many stories, personal examples of his own writing, and visuals (graphs, tables, drawings) to convey good writing styles and practical information that will improve your writing.There are references and sample exercises at the end of each chapter for further study. The appendix also contains a list of templates for various types of documents Anyone interested in improving their writing skills and technical communication skills in general will find this book to be an invaluable and practical reference guide."—IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine June 2019 Issue

• 1. The Nature of Technical Writing. 2. Technical Writing Basics. 3. The Writing Process. 4. Scientific Writing. 5. Business Communications. 6. Technical Reporting. 7. Using Graphical Elements. 8. Publishing Your Work. 9. Writing For E-Media. 10: Writing with Collaborators. Appendix A: Writing Checklist. Appendix B: Writing Samples.