ABSTRACT
Engineer’s goal as a technical author is to communicate information to an appropriate target audience. There are obviously two main issues here: how does the information reside in engineer's mind? and who is the target audience? Many engineers seem to compose their formal documents in precisely that fashion. Engineers effectively pile up what they hope will be “enough” pages of words, figures, equations, headings, and stock phrases, and send the result out the door to an unknown readership. Engineering information takes many forms. A given fact may reside in engineer’s mind in the form of a visual image such as a specific electrical schematic or a mental impression of intermeshing gears. The chapter offers a few suggestions that engineer may have occasion to work into a document. One engineering analogy for convention and consistency in writing is the familiar notion of user interface.
