Technical Writing in DMSE- Some Personal Opinions

• Read, reread, and re-re-read your documents, editing for errors, clarity, and brevity.

• It's a good idea to have your paper edited professionally, for instance by the MIT Writing Center .

• Eliminate dumb writing errors, especially technical ones; e.g. principal/principle, strength/stiffness.

• Obtain a grammar guide and browse through it occasionally. There are also a number of guides to technical writing, and several of these are available online.

• Clarity is more important than following rules blindly; e.g. split infinitives, passive construction.

• However, I favor being conservative on "modern" language; e.g. that/which, data/datum, less/fewer, hopefully.

• Read as many similar documents as you can to develop a sense of appropriateness.

• Try to place your work in the general context of materials processing - structure - property - performance relations.