Professional Writing Memorandum Reports Examples

Overview: This document provides guidance to help ensure that your written work produced for this organization meets professional and corporate standards, relevant to the field of chemical engineering. A study of over 100 major U.S. companies employing a total of 8 million people indicated that it is more important today to be skilled in writing than ever before (Markel, 2012, Ch.1 p.3).
Audience and Purpose: Technical communication (documents such as letters, reports, memos, etc) that you produce in the workplace each have an intended audience. Your audience may be your colleagues and/or management, or people outside of our organization. As regards purpose, your document may be (for example) to help others with their own work, to instigate certain actions or responses, etc. You might be writing a blog for our website, an article for a journal, a press release, or just a straightforward business letter. In each instance, your writing should be structured and designed to be appropriate for the intended audience.
Document Design: It is important to remember that we have a “corporate identity” that includes the design of documentation. Features such as page layouts, headings, fonts, colors, images, line and paragraph settings, etc., etc. will contribute to that identity, designed to make the documents attractive, professional, easy to navigate, and immediately recognizable as having been produced by this organization. Always write with that in mind. In determining the excellence of technical communication, the following eight aspects are important: “honesty, clarity, accuracy, comprehensiveness, accessibility, conciseness, professional appearance, and correctness” (Markel, 2012, Ch.1 p.12).
Ethical and Legal Considerations: As an employee you have certain obligations to your employer which include being competent and diligent, being honest and respecting the confidentiality of matters pertaining to the business. You also have obligations to others outside the organization, including the requirement to ensure that any documentation you produce which is used by customers (e.g. operating instructions for a product) makes the product safe to use and includes any needed warnings or cautions against improper use, for example. Legal obligations include observing copyright laws. If you use material produced by others, you must cite that material properly, according to the appropriate style of citation, in order to avoid plagiarism.
Citation Styles: There are several citation styles used within the chemical engineering field, each with their own particular detailed formats and requirements. Your manager / supervisor should be able to guide you which to use in specific circumstances. According to “Chemical Engineering: Citation Information” (2013), styles include:
- Vancouver: Used in documents for Biomedical journals;
- IEEE: Engineering documentation;
- AMA: (American Medical Association) – used for the AIChE* Journal;
- ACS: American Chemical Society.
* American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Note: The AIChE publishes Chemical Engineering Process (CEP), which has its own specified citation system (“CEP Reference Style” n.d.) for submitted articles.
The Writing Process: Every document should involve a five-stage writing process: “planning, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading” (Markel, 2012, Ch.3 p.41). That is invariably an iterative process; i.e. in order to produce a document of quality, there is more than likely to be backtracking and revising until the document is completed to your satisfaction. In many cases, time (perhaps in the form of a prescribed deadline) is the determining factor in arriving at the completed document. And remember that an important part of the planning process is analyzing your intended audience and defining the specific purpose of the document. For example, an operating manual for a product must include the appropriate level of detail for a typical user, and should contain everything that user needs to properly understand the content of the manual, and therefore to be able to operate the product without difficulty. To produce documents that comply with corporate identity requirements, you might use templates and existing styles where they are available, to save time and to comply with specifications, so long as they match the requirements of your particular document.
Write Clearly and Unambiguously: When you write any document, remember that your intended reader(s) may not read the text and understand it as you intended. That is especially the case if the text includes much technical vocabulary (Gopen and Swan, 1998). However, even with technical words and terminology included in the text, the comprehension level can be improved if the sentence structure is arranged optimally. In part that means whenever possible arranging the sentences so that the important information is located at what is known as the “stress” position; i.e. towards the end of the sentence. Conversely, the sentence topic should be placed at the beginning of the sentence, serving the dual purpose of giving the reader an immediate view of what the sentence is about, and providing a link between this sentence and the previous one (linkage) and the context (looking forward).
Follow these guidelines when producing documentation for this organization. For further detail and information, please consult the cited reference sources.
References
“CEP Reference Style.” (n.d.). American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). Retrieved from http://www.aiche.org/sites/default/files/docs/pages/CEP%20Reference%20Style.pdf
“Chemical Engineering: Citation Information.” (2013). University of Toronto Libraries. Retrieved from http://guides.library.utoronto.ca/content.php?pid=207991&sid=1892066
Gopen, George, D. and Swan, Judith, A. (1998). “The Science of Scientific Writing.” (Originally published in the American Scientist (Nov-Dec 1990), Volume 78, 550-558. Retyped and posted with permission).
Markel, Mike. (2012). Technical Communication, Tenth Edition ISBN-13: 978-0312679484. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s.