Use diagrams, charts, and tables when useful. Always provide labels and legends.
Follow all the rules of good writing explained by Strunk and White (see below).
If you refer to sources such as the textbooks for the course, do not just give a general bibliography. Instead, cite the sources you use in the body of your report at each location where a source is relevant. Give full bibliographic information in a "List of References" at the end of the report, not in footnotes.
Reports should not include long printouts of code, and should not repeat
general information about PHP, MySQL, etc.
"The Writing Center offers the UCSD community FREE one-to-one conferences on any kind of writing project ... Various workshops are offered, including ... essay writing ... The OASIS writing test assesses your strengths and weaknesses in writing and editing academic papers. ... Individual tutorial services are available to students whose first language is not English."The OASIS Writing Center is located in Center Hall. Call 534-3760 to make an appointment.
The best book on the basics of good writing is The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, Macmillan, New York, third edition, 1979. The full text of the 1918 edition is out of copyright and available online.
The following report contains everything that a computer scientist needs to know about technical writing. Although the report is protected by copyright law, it is available for viewing on the web.
Technical Writing for Computer Engineers and Computer Scientists by Kevin Karplus and Dan Scripture.
From the report: "This document contains course notes and exercises for a course in technical writing. The course is intended for third-year computer engineering majors, and emphasizes technical documentation directed to engineers, engineering managers, technical writers, and other specialized audiences. Exercises include job applications and résumés, memos, electronic correspondence, algorithm description, in-program documentation, naive-user documentation, survey articles, recommendation letters, proposal writing, document specification, progress reports, formal technical reports, and an oral presentation."After you have mastered the mechanics of writing, the next challenge is to develop a sense of style. The book Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner is a wonderful treatise on the topic of writing style. Be sure to explore the authors' online guide to good writing.
Most recently updated on October 22, 2001 by Charles Elkan, elkan@cs.ucsd.edu.