Technical Communications

1. Technical Communications Reports- • Full Proposal • Professional Self-Assessment • Final project report Oral Presentations • Proposal • Final presentations

2. Oral Presentation for Engineers SUCCESSFUL PRESENTATION = Good Content + Visuals + Practice (lot of hard work & good results)

3. Success Factors • Know your audience • You are the expert -- speak from experience • Think about the level of detail and how much will be remembered? • Think about the logical flow of the presentation: organize slides appropriately • Use good visuals, animations, • Don’t memorize - PRACTICE • Don’t read slides - PRACTICE

4. Preparing Content • Plan what you must cover to communicate ideas • Avoid using too many slides; > 1 slide/1-2 minutes. • Use bullet items as prompts • Don’t write full paragraphs • Use LARGE ENOUGH fonts

5. Preparing Content-Visual Tools • Use simple visuals: block diagrams and flowcharts • Proper use of slide template, photos, text, charts, graphs, animations and movies • Clarity – don’t clutter slides with too much information • Label your axes in plots

6. Lamb Waves Lamb wave equations in terms of the two potentials Material properties Define displacement components Results come from elasticity theory Shear stresses Consider harmonic wave propagation in the direction x

7. Preparing Content – Support slides • Anticipate questions • Have some extra material “in reserve” • Handouts may have more detail

8. Delivery • Speak up, make eye contact • Do you believe what you’re saying? • Ask questions – and wait… • Look at people but beware of the magnet

9. Controlling Nerves • Who knows you’re nervous? • Holding your papers/notes • Use illustrations with which you are familiar • Practice, practice, practice

10. Remember Your Audience • Look at them • Respect them • Excite them • Listen to them • Thank them

11. Assignment -- Prep for Oral Presentation of Proposal • Prepare the PowerPoint material for the oral presentation of your proposal. • Each team will have 25 minutes. • Practice with teammates -- don’t just “discuss” it -- practice it! Give each other suggestions! • Everyone must talk an equal time (as practical). • Dry run for facilitator. Seek his/her critique. • We have 2 classrooms for parallel sessions - Check the time and place for your presentation • Attendance will be taken

12. Template for Proposal Presentation • Slide 1 - Title – Team# Team Members, Facilitator, Sponsor • Slide 2 - Outline • Introduction – Problem Statement • Objectives • Prior work by others • Your Technical Approach – Block diagram • Implementation Details • Technical and non-technical roles for each member

13. Remember & Make Sure • You stay within allocated time – 25 minutes • your presentation should not be too short or long • Font size is large enough to be read by the last row • Plots - axes should be labelled • Practice with your facilitator

14. Template for Final Project Presentation • Title – Team# Team Members, Facilitator, Sponsor • Outline • Introduction – Problem Statement • Objectives • Prior work by others • Your Technical Approach – Block diagram • Implementation Details • Results • Conclusions • Issues, Limitations • Suggestions for future work

15. Pointers on Technical Writing

16. Technical Communications Reports- • Full Proposal • Professional Self-Assessment • Final project report Oral Presentations • Proposal • Final presentations

17. Cures for Common Mistakes in ECE 480 Deliverables • In any document, first describe the context – give the big picture • Use style, level of formality, appropriate to audience

18. Cures forMore Common Mistakes • Do not use contractions in formal writing (don’t can’t, etc.) • Do not end sentences in prepositions. Instead of “Sockets Are Us makes the best platform to put the chip in.” write “The best platform for chip installation is produced by Sockets Are Us.” • Spell out numbers less than 10 unless they are measurements (i.e., unless they have units attached to them)

19. Cures forMore Common Mistakes • Use a consistent format for units. For example, do not randomly use “V,” “Volts,” and “volts” in the document • Never begin a sentence, let alone a paragraph, with a conjunction (and, or, so, etc.) • Avoid the use of first and second person in formal writing. For example, instead of “We then have to read our value from our counter.” Say “The value of the counter must then be read.” (passive voice)

20. Cures forMore Common Mistakes • Do not use colloquial language or slang. Instead of “We’ll just go with the flow and use the 10 kOhm resistor because it won’t break the bank like the fibrillated googlewazer.” say “The 10 kOhm resistor is much less costly than the fibrillated googlewazer, and a negligible change in the cutoff frequency results from its use in the design.”

21. Cures forMore Common Mistakes • Do not include statements with no information or imprecise information. Example: “The XYZ widget is very popular because it’s small and cheap, and we like it a lot.” • Similarly, avoid redundancy. Your boss and the executives who will read your document are busy and do not want to read unnecessarily long documents. Use phrases like “As we discussed in Section 2 above,…” only sparingly.

22. Cures forMore Common Mistakes • Avoid stating “beliefs,” “feelings,” and “predictions” which have no substantiation or basis in fact. Examples: “We believe that this new design will work really well and that the project will be a big success.”, or “I feel that the XYZ widget is the best on the market.” • Do not trivialize your own work. Example: “The task is a very simple matter of making a trivial calculation and popping the chip in the slot.”

23. Cures forMore Common Mistakes • Do not anthropomorphize inanimate objects. Instead of writing “When the capacitor sees 10 mV, it changes the flag bit to high.”, write “When the potential across the capacitor reaches 10 mV, the flag bit is set high.” • Proofread your work! Nothing looks less professional than a document filled with spelling errors, missing words, sentence fragments, missing figures, etc.

24. Cures forMore Common Mistakes Be Quantitative and Precise – do not use qualitative adjectives Example – From the graph in Fig. 1 we see that is error is “very small” or “acceptable” From the graph in Fig. 1 we see that is error is less than 3%

25. Template for Final Project Report • Title – Team# Team Members, Facilitator, Sponsor • Outline • Introduction – Problem Statement • Objectives • Prior work by others • Your Technical Approach – Block diagram • Implementation Details • Results • Conclusions • Issues, Limitations • Suggestions for future work