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

This guide complements traditional technical writing manuals through first-hand examples that help readers understand practical considerations in writing technical content. The new edition includes new exercises and case studies and new content on software/systems documentation, popular writing tools, and technologies like generative AI.

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.