Technical Writing: A Practical Guide for Engineers, Scientists, and Nontechnical Professionals

Technical Writing: A Practical Guide for Engineers, Scientists, and Nontechnical Professionals enables readers to write, edit, and publish materials of a technical nature, including books, articles, reports, and electronic media. Written by experienced practicing engineers, this guide complements traditional technical writing manuals through the presentation of firsthand examples that help readers understand practical considerations in writing and producing technical content. These examples illustrate how a publication originates as well as explain various challenges and solutions.

The third edition features the following:

• New and updated exercises, examples, and case studies
• New content on software/systems documentation
• Treatment of plagiarism to incorporate issues in generative artificial intelligence (AI), open-access archiving, and more
• Coverage of popular writing and collaboration tools such as Grammarly, Overleaf, and Google Docs
• Increased conversation of writing for non-native English speakers
• Latest standards and research

Written in an informal, conversational style, unlike traditional writing texts, this book contains many interesting vignettes and personal stories to add interest to otherwise stodgy lessons. It is aimed at students and professionals in the science and engineering domains.

Phil Laplante is a Professor Emeritus of Software and Systems Engineering at Penn State with more than 40 years of experience as a professor, practitioner, academic administrator, and consultant. He has worked in avionics, CAD, and software testing systems and he has published 40+ books and more than 300 scholarly papers. He is a licensed professional engineer in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and a Fellow of IEEE, SPIE and the Washington Academy of Sciences. From 2010 to 2017 he led the effort to develop a national licensing exam for software engineers. He received his B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. from Stevens Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of Colorado.

Chris Laplante is a software engineer at Agilent Technologies where he works on embedded systems for gas chromatographs and automated liquid samplers. He is the author of many technical documents and reports and has published articles in technical forums, newsletters, and magazines. He is the co-author (with Phil Laplante) of Introduction to Chaos, Fractals and Dynamical Systems, World Scientific Publishing, 2023. He received his B.S. in Computer Science (with a minor in Mathematics) from The Pennsylvania State University. His professional interests include Linux, real-time operating systems (RTOSs), Rust, C++, and digital electronics.