No worries friend, no hard feelings and appreciate the engagement!
Yeah, agree it is a bit wishy washy in terms of gauging how much explanation to include ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I suppose (in my opinion) the mindset should be: include as much explanation as possible, without it being cumbersome.
I personally err on the side of over-explanation and have had some senior engineers give me feedback that it’s too much. Still learning for myself how much is too much.
Totally agree though, that there are many cases where people leave things out as assumed, when it’s not really reasonable to do so.
A side-thought on specificity: one of my biggest pet peeves is when people list pressure with the units of kPa, when they really mean kPag. In industry, you are rarely talking in absolute pressure (other than for pressure differences) and people then get lazy/don’t know/assume it’s fine to do something like: set point 100 kPa (when they mean 100 kPag). It isn’t fine though, because at lower pressures atmosphere counts for a pretty large percentage of the absolute value.
(Pressure) * (volume) = (# moles) * (gas constant) * (temperature)
The ideal gas law.
In another thread I admit I didn’t explain my position here well enough. I would only not explain this equation given sufficient context (e.g. I’ve shown all those variables in a table, and my intended audience is people familiar with basic chemistry, which I’d expect would be everyone reading the report for this particular example, since this is high school chemistry, and the topic of all reports I work on is chemical engineering.)
People can read the conclusions if they’re not familiar with chemistry, and for the detail, they’re not my intended audience anyway.
Generally I still hold the position that you should define variables as much as possible, unless it’s overly cumbersome, given your intended audience would clearly understand anyway.
In context this simple equation is obvious even if you change the symbols, as long as there is sufficient context to draw from.