Deciphering Technical Readings – aka, what the heck does all this mean Deciphering Technical Readings – aka, what the heck does all this mean? Objective: Read, comprehend and interpret technical materials and publications. By: Mrs. J. Pressett

Understanding Technical Readings Techniques for Understanding Ask and answer – in general what is this talking about? Replace hard words with synonyms Look for graphs and pictures to help illustrate difficult and wordy passages

Scientific Reports – A type of technical reading Summarize an experiment and results Peer Reviewed More reliable than a Google Search of Science Fair Experiments Anyone can get published on the internet, but it takes skill and qualifications to have information published in a technical paper. Technical readings and publications have been peer reviewed. This means that professionals within the same field have checked the work before it was published.

Scientific Report Formatting – Section 1 Technical readings have similar sections. The first section is the Abstract which is a summary. This is a nice tool to help you determine if you want to read a long paper.

Section 2 and 3 Introduction Tells potential applications of study results Explains importance of the information Methods Like a recipe card. Explains the materials and steps needed to reproduce the experiment.

Sections 4 and 5 Results Explains the results of the experiment. Often displayed in graphs and charts. Conclusion /Discussion Researchers discuss what may have impacted or changed the results.

Other Sections Literature Review A summary of other studies or related publications