Seven Important Components of a Technical Report

Sometimes, we do a lot of work and get very low marks because of the way we present our work. Below are the seven main components of a Technical report.

1. Title Page 

This component includes the title of the investigation or the work being presented, The name(s) of the investigator (s), the name (s) of the supervisor (s), the institution at or for which the work is being done and the year of completion.

2. Abstract

This is the first component showing the work done, in short, but is written last. It is written last because it should include the introduction, the work done, the results and the conclusions in a concise manner. A report may be taken as good or bad due to the quality of the abstract. Great attention needs to be paid to this component since it tells the reader what to expect in the report.

3. Introduction

The Introduction is basically derived from the proposal where the problem statement and the proposed solution are alluded to. 

The introduction takes the underlying theory, the present technological state and shows why the investigation or study is being done. This will validate the importance of the research and should be given due attention. Effort should be put to fully justify why the project is worth doing. 

4. Literature Review

At first I thought this was where I would put in all the literature about the subject, but experience has taught me that there is a set criteria for the literature to be included. The literature review should be written in funnel style where you move from broad to specific. The literature included should not only be related to the work being presented but also be used to justify why the current investigation is being done. This is done by considering the shortfalls of the previous work and hence justify the relevance of the current work.

5. Methodology/ Design 

This is a presentation of the sequence of doing the study. In some cases time frames are required in the proposal. In the report, the section gives the reader a view of the work and how it was done. This may span many chapters and presented preferably in chronological order.

In Engineering this is the section where the design is fully described. It will also include the selection of design path by referring to the proposal and justifying why a certain component or piece of equipment was used instead of the one previously proposed.

In some cases, simulations are considered as part of the design though the simulation results will have to appear in the results section.

6. Results and Discussions

After presenting how the work was done, the results should be convincingly reported. This section also includes a discussion of results especially where some anomalies are observed. This will help the reader to understand why the results are the way they are. Photos, graphs, figure, tables and descriptions will make the results easier to understand.

7. Conclusions and Recommendations

Every study is done for a purpose and this is the section where the study is evaluated according to the set objectives. The conclusions should be in harmony with the results. If there are any recommendations, especially for further studies of improvements, they may be written in this section

References

When you are writing an essay, report, dissertation or any other form of academic writing, your own thoughts and ideas inevitably build on those of other writers, researchers or teachers. It is essential that you acknowledge your debt to the sources of data, research and ideas on which you have drawn by including references to, and full details of, these sources in your work. Referencing your work allows the reader:

• to distinguish your own ideas and findings from those you have drawn from the work of others;
• to follow up in more detail the ideas or facts that you have referred to. (https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ld/resources/writing/writing-resources/ref-bib)

References are numbered in order of appearance, or presented in alphabetical order, depending on the referencing style use.

The IEEE adopted the IEEE Referencing Style which appears in most Electrical and Electronic Engineering Articles and is a version of the Chicago Referencing Style.