The technical report and proposal are strategic documents that must cogently define, rationalize, and sell their high-technology products in the world of competitive procurement. Because these documents are created by group authorship, there is a need to coordinate the multiple engineer-authors, provide them with strategy information, and help them develop arguments that justify their design approaches. Conventional methods of subject outlining, trial-and-error writing, and post-manuscript reviewing do not cope with these needs. The Stop (Sequential Thematic Organization of Proposals) technique applies five principles to solve this problem: It (1) recognizes the passage unit of discourse to gain expository-descriptive coherence; (2) uses the essay (with thesis sentence) to enhance strategic discussion; (3) restricts outlining to establishing topical architecture and introduces prewriting (via storyboards) to discover and exercise argument, explanation, and visualization; (4) uses pre-reviewing (via real-time, walk-through group dynamics) to permit team/corporate review of the story plan prior to manuscript drafting; and (5) stresses group writing to infuse both the marketing and the technical strategy and design approach into the document. Twenty years of applying STOP has shown it to be a thoroughly practical system, even though intellectually demanding and unforgiving of lazy writing. This paper reviews the principles, practices (including misconceptions), and lessons of STOP as developed, refined, and learned during those years.

Active expressions like “the table lists” and “the figure shows” are preferable to passive sentences beginning “data are listed” and “results are displayed.” Convening information clearly and vigorously is often more important than rigorous adherence to semantics. However, data and results shouldn't “argue” or “proclaim” those activities are the responsibility of the author. This point of view is also applied to detached participlesing words that don't have a noun to belong to.

Instead of just recording thoughts, printing itself can be used as a means of communicating ideas. Writer and publisher should collaborate to produce an article or a book in such a way as to make its organization and meaning more clear. `Discourse punctuation' encompasses the inclusion of an outline; underlining, both thick and thin; boldface words, phrases, and sentences; brackets or boxes around important sections; marginal markers and notes; various printing styles, type fonts and sizes; and the use of color. The intent of these effects is to increase the reader's immediate understanding and thereby to increase the speed and efficiency of reading. The author demonstrates some of these suggestions.

THE spectrum of public speaking ranges from dialog to formal, staged presentations. Although we may engage easily in casual conversation, almost any discourse that is scheduled or that involves more than a few people seems to give most of us cause for concern. Why?