I have spent a great deal of time talking about perfecting your writing skills. That being said, you cannot practice mechanical engineering writing, without knowing the subject matter. This is why taking English classes is important. Specifically, get yourself into a technical communications class. I am taking a class at Salt Lake Community College that has given me much insight into the world of technical writing. This section aims to discuss some of the tips for writing, presented in the book, "Technical Communication Today: Third Custom Edition". This book, written by Richard Johnson-Sheehan (2009), gives great insight into communication in scientific and other professional industries.

I want to tell you now, I am not going to focus at all on the fact that your spelling needs to be correct, grammar needs to be precise, and punctuation proper. If you haven't figured out that these things are important in everything you write, you need to reevaluate how you want to be seen in your professional career. Quite frankly, if you believe that spelling, grammar, and punctuation are not important in the professional world, you may want to reevaluate spending money on a college education. It is that important.

Back to the original subject at hand. This book covers so many aspects of technical writing improvement, that I will only cover a few. These aspects should improve your document writing the fastest, in the least amount of time. First, when writing, start with a solid plan. "Technical Communication Today" lays out a great plan, to give you the best documents:

• plan and research
• organize and draft the work
• improve the style of the work
• design the document
• revise and edit
• and complete the document
  

By following a set plan, you know what you should be focusing on, rather than trying to make your draft documents the nicest they can be. In fact, when you first begin to write your documents or reports, assume right off the bat, that you will have to do at least two revisions, and give yourself enough time to do so. By accepting the fact that you will have to revise your work, you allow yourself room for improvement, whereas turning in the first things that comes out of your brain, and onto the computer screen, may result in a hodgepodge of words that scarcely make sense to you, let alone your readers.

Another thing that can help improve your writing, is when you are organizing your thought for your first draft, begin with a methodology map. Start with your subject in the center of a piece of paper, and begin to make logical connecting subjects to your main subject. Then, connect those sub-subjects, with other subjects. Ask the important questions of your subject: who, what, where, when, why, and how. By doing more brainstorming in the beginning of any project, you will find that the final product is more refined, and the refinement process was easier to come by.

My final point I wanted to bring out from "Technical Communication Today", that will aide you in the writing process, it to try and use layman English as much as possible. By keeping your wording simple, but precise, you will find it much easier for you to write the document; and your reader will find it easier to read. Depending on who your audience is, you may want to consider keeping the document on about a high school reading level, excluding technical terms, that are required to be in the document (Johnson-Sheehan 2009).