Slashdot Mirror
Teaching Engineers to Write?
$hecky asks: "I teach several sections of a first-year writing course at a small, private college where most of the students are, or plan to be, some flavor of engineer. Right now, I'm planning next year's courses and wondering what has (and hasn't) helped Slashdot readers become better writers. Also, I'm wondering which writing skills you, in your roles as workers and teachers, would most like to see emphasized in first year writing courses. Put another way, where do you see people who have completed first-year writing courses screwing up their writing, and which experiences, practices, and pressures you think have made you a better writer?"
"First, let's head a couple wagons off at the pass. Let's avoid the vulgar confusion of good writing and good grammar. Horrifying grammar is a common problem, but its not a problem I can fix in a semester-long class. About a century of research tells us that native English speakers aren't rule-based parsers, so teaching grammatical rules (like when to use the subjunctive or where to put commas) doesn't improve compliance. The best strategy on those fronts is a habitual reading of clearly-formatted texts and scrupulous multi-stage review of everything you write, both of which are somewhat outside the scope of a semester-long class.
Second, let's say that the chief virtue of good writing is clarity. While some kinds of writing prize being strategically elliptical, and others prize brisk and clever metaphor, most of my students aren't writing grant applications, patents, or poems. So metaphor, however brisk or clever, is out of place if it obscures its subject.
Third, this course is a cultural studies type, rather than a workshop. This means that the course has a topic of inquiry about which all of the students read and write for a semester and that, while being reasonably complex, the topic should accommodate students who are going to become accountants, math teachers, and advertisers. It's common for engineering students to wash out into the business school, and there's a significant contingent of humanities students as well. Anything other than a general interest topic (like the 1960s, ideas about the American West, or fairy tales) isn't an option.
So think back to your writing. What has made you more comfortable with your writing, or eager to improve what you've written? What inspires you to read outside of a classroom or mandated context? Was has impressed on you the importance of revision, or at least of reviewing your writing at intervals? Which parts of which college (or high school) curricula have helped you write better? Finally, which aspects of your students' or co-workers' writing do you find most troublesome?"
Second, let's say that the chief virtue of good writing is clarity. While some kinds of writing prize being strategically elliptical, and others prize brisk and clever metaphor, most of my students aren't writing grant applications, patents, or poems. So metaphor, however brisk or clever, is out of place if it obscures its subject.
Third, this course is a cultural studies type, rather than a workshop. This means that the course has a topic of inquiry about which all of the students read and write for a semester and that, while being reasonably complex, the topic should accommodate students who are going to become accountants, math teachers, and advertisers. It's common for engineering students to wash out into the business school, and there's a significant contingent of humanities students as well. Anything other than a general interest topic (like the 1960s, ideas about the American West, or fairy tales) isn't an option.
So think back to your writing. What has made you more comfortable with your writing, or eager to improve what you've written? What inspires you to read outside of a classroom or mandated context? Was has impressed on you the importance of revision, or at least of reviewing your writing at intervals? Which parts of which college (or high school) curricula have helped you write better? Finally, which aspects of your students' or co-workers' writing do you find most troublesome?"
comic books, graphic novels, and Bazooka Joe rappers to be a mollifying affect with my written skills.
wuldn't it be ironik if no1 respondid?
The best way to write. May the wind be always at your back, -Tim Ceete Smith
The 5 column system tends to work well for Engineers since it presents some of the trickest parts of English in a logical way.
n hilfe.html
http://www.lbt-languages.de/english/lernhilfe/ler
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I consider writing to be a process where you, by trial and error, complete a pattern words and concepts. By focusing on the structure, I find my writing just flows better. If I were teaching the course, Id try to make it less an art, and more a pattern-based process.
Not to say my writing is any good though.
This is Slashdot, where grammar, punctuation, and subject verb agreement long ago came to die.
I think my biggest problem as a writer has been just learning to get over myself. Adding chiasmus and clever literary trope seems clever to me at the time, but doesn't really do anything for whoever is reading my stuff.
Another weird habit I have is writing everything as if it were going to be read out loud. This makes many of my sentences unreasonably short. Which is good, when read it my voice. But most people on the web don't read in my voice.
(you can see what I'm talking about if you check out the newer writing on my website)
Most ironic "Ask Slashdot" in recent memory. You're new here, right?
What hasn't helped my writing is following the /. style of editing and spelling. Sigh.
Quality. /obscure
heeee heeeee
Learning how to write proficiently is certainly useful. Learning how to make yourself understood is even more useful. We all have different priorities. Agonizing over someone's diction, while it may be useful in necessary in an academic environment, seems akin to an art professor agonizing over someone's brush strokes when they're just trying to paint their house.
Also, less is more. I repeated myself in the post. Writing sober also seems to help.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
The type of writing that garners the most interest from young minds is creative writing rather than the more mundane technical or analytical types. These are engineers. They need to be able to abstract and yet be "technically" correct.
Writing assignments that start with a foundation, akin to how Sean Connery's character in Finding Forrester helped his apprentice stir his creative juices, can be really effective. I remember quite clearly an English teacher I had in eighth grade that would give us assignments like that. He would start us off with a paragraph setting a scene or introducing a character and we would have to take the story forward from there. Obviously, there are some additional parameters that you as the instructor can wrap around the assignment, but the concept is something that works well for a mixed audience of students.
Just a suggestion.
As a person with a degree in Electrical Engineering, who then went to grad school for secondary ed physics and math, I found that the classes that helped my writing the most were those classes that a lot of people dread, the gen-ed classes. I found that my Pscychology, the grad level Education classes, and anthropology type classes really improved my writing. The reason is that I was made to work outside of my comfort level of math and physics, and actually do reasearch, put coherent thoughts together, and think about what I was writing. I never had much of a problem with clarity in my writings, and personally I prefer to write things for clarity. However, in the business world, presenting ideas with "elegance and grace" and a good pitch will often get your proposal more consideration than just pure clarity. Final reccomendation, make them learn to use more colorful word choices, and write on things that they may be interested in, but do not have any great knowledge of.
I'm a first year engineering student. Oddly enough I'm switching to business, though I'm in the top of my engineering class. You say the school is small, but what about the classes? If the classes are small and you have time, I suggest starting off with small papers and slowly progressing to larger papers. Cover different kinds of writing, do a bit of grammar (it does help regardless of studies), and be willing to talk to your students for a bit after class. If you cover multiple areas of writing, you will see where people are struggling and where they're succeeding. Just take a human approach to it... No one is the same, so there is no definite way of teaching them.
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
First, get every student a copy of "The Elements of Style". It's a very small book originally written around WWI. It points out the most frequent mistakes in writing. It's an excellent book, following the tips within will make anyone a better writer.
Second, teach people to write to their audience. Far too often I see engineers write a recomendation to a customer that points out technical merits or problems, but doesn't frame those issues with reguard to the customer's business. A COO probably doesn't care about the problems with an ACL entry in a VPN setup. They do care if their employees can't work while on the road.
Third, while you might not be able to help people with their grammar or spelling, make sure they understand that those things do matter and need to be fixed. One of my co-workers is Jeopardy smart, but his writing is awful. If you were to judge him by his writing you'd think he was a complete idiot. Proofreading is sometimes more important that the initial writing. Students who have severe grammar problems should read their work out loud to themselves. That will help a LOT.
Have them read, and read a lot. That is the best way I've found to improve writing. You can have them name the things they like about their favorite writers and try to emulate them and incorporate them into their own writing.
Also, simple word choice. Not only does this cut down on the number of words that need to be used, it also improves clarity. As Aristotle said: "Style to be good must be clear . . . . Speech which fails to convey a plain meaning will fail to do just what speech has to do . . . . Clearness is secured by using the words . . . that are current and ordinary." (from Rhetoric
That Aristotle quote was taken from a book called Plain English for Lawyers by Richard C. Wydick, and while yes it is geared toward lawyers and law students it has much that is of use toward anyone who needs to write clearly and effectively.
First, do the writing: get all your ideas down as fast as you can without worrying about structure, or complete sentences or anything except putting everything down that you can think of.
Second, do the editing. Now look at your big pile of ideas and think about what the right order for things is, how to start and finish it, what to throw out, what things go best together, and eventually even sentence-level details like grammar.
8 times out of 10 when I have an engineer staring at two sentences on an otherwise blank screen, it's because they think it has to spool out onto the page in linear, perfected form right from the start.
I just got done with a class called History of American Journalism, a "research seminar" as they called it. In the first three weeks, the students had to write one-page papers on what we were reviewing in class (Pamphlets, African-American abolitionist newspapers, Dust bowl reporting), with the goal in mind of the teacher getting to know our writing styles. From there, we'd have class covering different points in the history of journalism, but all our outside efforts were put towards a 15-20 page paper on the topic of our choice. We had to turn in drafts at 3 separate points before handing in the final paper, and each time we got extensive critiquing on our writing.
So if students are able to work on a single goal over the course of the semester, I think that will help them really develop a better writing style, especially since they need to have a good flow for a 15 page paper, otherwise it won't read well
i read technical literature outside of class because it helps me do things. i like to do things more than i like to read.
i dislike writing, but i do enjoy expressing my opinions (see this post). i only write things down if it helps me or when coerced. so it follows that i generally only have bad experiences with writing. recently i wrote a paper for english and when i got it back, one of the only comments on it was to the effect that the teacher missed the basic premise of the paper. i elaborated a bit more to her in person, and she has a different viewpoint on things than i do. it was a paper about "loss and recompense", a personal loss and what you've learned from it. i wrote it on a failed project (i ended up chucking the project because i modified the design too much without proper knowledge or test equipment and didn't want to pay for new parts; it took a lot of time too). she didn't see that as "loss" because i was the one who threw it out, so essentially i learned to not write with english types as my audience.
oh, and putting petty rules on students' writing has frustrated me often in the past, even though i'll admit that it helped my writing. things like "only use this word or type of word N times per page", "don't use this word at all", "this is my pet peeve, i disproportionately downgrade for getting it wrong", and the like do not warm me up toward starting the assignment.
and perhaps finally, "general interest" topics are boring. is it possible to at least let your students pick a topic that fits them best individually? that's helping me with the assignment i'm currently doing in writing.
Each writing task should have an objective which will help guide the organization and content. For example, if you are writing a feature news article, you may want to lead with a story, quote, or surprising fact that will grab the attention of a casual reader. For technical documentation, a different approach is called for. It might be helpful to catalog some of the common situations encountered by technical writers, then illustrate some organizational patterns that have been usefully applied in each case.
Those are both active. I'm pretty sure you meant to write something like this:
Passive: The bike is ridden by the boy to the store.
-Dave
Not only will these courses help them communicate effectively, the female ratio in these classes should be an effect cure for the pandemic spread of virginitis among engineering students.
Classes with more girls = better communication skills, less nerd nurtured ego, and more personal hygiene. It's a win-win-win situation for all of us.
Horrifying grammar is a common problem, but its not a problem I can fix in a semester-long class.
it's
About what am I to write? For conveying technical information accurately and succinctly, I would use K&R's C book as a guide. For scorching hot lesbian erotica, I emulate Elizabeth Oliver's "Pagan Dreams." To date, both approaches work, but only on the appropriate topics.
Lemon curry?
granted, you'll probally get sick of reading about why Kirk is better than Picard, if this truely is an all engineers class.
What you are illustrating is present tense vs. present participle.
:)
Here is an illustration of active vs. passive voice:
Active: The boy rides his bike to the shore.
Passive: The bike is ridden to the shore by the boy.
You are correct in saying that active voice is the more direct and succinct of the two voices, and that technical writers should prefer it over passive voice. But it helps if your example illustrates the correct principle.
(Here comes the grammar nazi moddage...)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
My best teacher by far was my freshmen English professor. One thing he did was meet with us one-at-a-time for every paper we wrote. He'd make us read our papers aloud, and he'd point out ways to re-order paragraphs, remove unneeded words, etc. He had taught for something like 50 years, and he knew every mistake we would make and how to explain why it was a mistake.
Speaking as a recent engineering grad, the thing I found must helpful in solidifying my confidence as a writer was (and, I suppose, still is) reading and correcting the works of other engineering students. By this I mean not only the correction of grammatical errors, but also the clarification of horribly obfuscated passages. Most engineering students can hardly write to save their lives, and being constantly confronted with poor writing sharpens the mind to such pitfalls.
I suppose it also helps though to not only be multi-lingual, but a language nerd as well.
Active: The boy *rides* his bike to the store.
I agree with your suggestion, but your example is a little off. "The bike is ridden to the store by the boy." would be a passive sentence. Notice the subject of the sentence is the bike rather than the boy. In passive sentences, actions are done to things instead of subjects performing actions.
I doubt you'll finid your answer here.
This has good advice in it, for engineers or anyone else: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~ssingh/RaibertGoodWriti ng.html
Brevity. That's the key ... being brief. I used to write paragraphs of bureaucratic balony until I had a boss that helped me distill things down to the essential.
Start with writing a letter ... first, let them flop around for a while writing a wonderfully confusing letter, then teach them the following steps.
A. Figure out who you are writing to and put this at the top of the page.
B. Since you know who you are, put your name at the bottom of the page. Please note that in your career, you WILL write letters for others to sign, so you better get used to asking yourself "who is this from". Remember who the letter is from, because you'll need it later on.
C. Why are you writing this letter. One sentence is cutting it short, three is probably overdoing it. State the reason for the letter.
D. State your desired result to the statement in paragraph C above. Again, keep it short. Remember that if you are writing for your boss, be sure to tell the receiver what your boss wants, not what YOU want.
E. Now for some flowers ... you want to be kind (usually). If the letter is from you to a superior, be nice. If it's a letter from a senior to a subordinate ... you guessed it ... be nice. You want to open simply, with something nice to say (or at the worst, neutral). You want to close the letter the same way ... even if you just ripped the receiver's head off for failing to perform a task, you can always put a good spin on it. Don't go overboard. Pay attention to who the letter is from and to here as well. Don't be the tyrant.
F. Type it out, print it out, and read it out loud. Make you squirm? Re do what hurts. Sound good? Make sure you don't have words ending in -ize ... a terrible thing. Use simple language, and write in active voice.
It worked for me ... got my boss to finally tell me I'd gone too far, and had written too brief a letter. Once I found out what he really liked, writing letters led to writing articles, and writing chapters in standard references.
Also teach your students to write on a conversational level, but not a conversational level they'd have with another engineer, even if the letter IS going to another engineer. Technical stuff is best included as an attachment, but you'll work with them on that later.
Reading the letter BACKWARDS is a great help finding typos, incorrect words, and things that just don't make sense.
Have someone else edit your writing as a matter of course ... and do the same for others. It helps make sure you didn't think faster than you typed.
Regards,
As a professor I've found my students in information technology are superior writers. Engineering and Technology does not mean poor writing. Most of my students write to academic journal publication level standards at the undergraduate level. I'd say the main reason for their success is expectation. It is pretty obvious that the English department is not prepared for a bunch of technical writers to show up demanding help with copy editing.
--- Location Unknown
Passive: The boy *is riding* his bike to the store.
Active: The boy *rides* his bike to the store.
Oh dear. I agree that using the active voice, rather than the passive, is almost always desirable. But your example doesn't use the passive voice. "The boy is riding ..." uses the progressive form rather than the simple present tense, but it's still the active voice. The passive construction would be something like, "The bicycle is being ridden by the boy to the store." (This, incidentally, shows how the passive voice can be clumsy.)
The passive voice is most objectionable [IMHO] when it is used, in effect, to dodge responsibility for one's statements: "Mistakes were made," or "It was decided that ..." It does, however, have good uses. "The injured man was taken away by ambulance" is an excellent use of the passive voice.
See The Elements of Style by W. Strunk and E.B. White for excellent guidance on this and many other topics.
a) Draw a connection to their own fields, or else they'll tune out right from the start. If you want to write good code, you should read a lot of good code. If you want to do good accounting, watch a lot of good accounting. If you need to write clearly, then read a lot of clear writing."
b) Provide said writing. Try to avoid fiction and non-contemporary writing, rather stick with clear essayists, satirists, humorists, and engineers. Give them credit for writing book reports on their own fields, many O'Reilly books are written by people who are decent writers as well as brilliant technologists (Jeremy Friedl and Randall Schwartz come to mind).
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
i'm a student at columbia university in new york. the way i learned how to write is i had teachers who told me what to do and GAVE ME BAD GRADES when i didnt write good papers. be honest. make it hurt when you see bad papers. it's the only way cheers.
One of my junior high-school foreign language teachers said she did not learn English grammar, and learn to view grammar rules in context, until she learned a foreign language. That has held very true for me. Learning a foreign language forces you to separate in your mind what you mean, how you communicate, and how to perfect the two. You look at the English language very differently when heard in the context of another language.
Learning to communicate is a little like solving writers block. The solution is to just do it, and to just use it. If you don't, you can't. Share your notes, type up your notes after you are finished with them, contribute to/create your office/school/group wiki. Even if you are communicating things already known, it helps to hone your ability to communicate.
Sometimes all you need is a theme. Start thinking about your work, and put it into different philosophical themes. This adds depth and perspective to your work, regardless of whether you even take the theme seriously. Even though I am an atheist, being a space geek it is interesting to put problems in the perspective of astrology. Sometimes, medical analogies can be very useful. Sometimes, challenge them to use semi-random words in their communications. Give them a list of terms and make them use them constructively. I knew a sales team which would have a word of the day to keep their pitches from being too dry. "Today's word is 'yellow'."
And yes, the most important thing is to keep reading.
PS, challenge your students to not use indefinite pronouns. One of the best ways to clarify thoughts/documents to do declare war on words like: it, this, these, those, they.... (ala Catch-22); very important in precise documents. Also avoid more complex, but still indefinite phrases like 'that object', or 'those lines'.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
No, the passive form of that is:
The boy is rode
The boy is riding is not passive.
In many of my courses, it was always "you need to write at least x number of pages."
One professor I had, though, severely _limited_ us in the amount we could write. It was the first and only time I had a class where I actually had to think about every sentence's relevance and trim accordingly.
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/la nguage.html
"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? "
"First, let's head a couple wagons off at the pass. Let's avoid the vulgar confusion of good writing and good grammar."
"Vulgar". Right. And let us avoid using proper syntax, structure and rules in our programming too. After all it matters only that it runs without an ABEND; not whether anyone else can comprehend it, learn from it, refine it or improve it.
There are two specific experiences that have improved my writing.
:-\
The first was reading "The Elements of Style", by Strunk and White. This book taught me the building blocks of the English language, and gave me an appreciation for putting together clear and non-ambiguous sentences.
The second experience occurred during a co-op term. I had written a document and given it to the engineer in charge. After a few minutes he handed it back to me, with a big question mark against one of my paragraphs. When I read the paragraph I realized the it made absolutely no sense at all, though at the time I wrote it I thought it made perfect sense. From that experience I learned to power of taking the time to read my own words from another person's point of view. A lot of written communication problems occur because people only write down a portion of what they are thinking. When you look at your words from another person's point of view, you are verifying that your words can stand on their own, without requiring any extra knowledge that resides in the back of your head.
Unfortunately neither of these experiences have taught me how to spell.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
but I've always considered writing skill to be one of those things that you either have or you don't have. In early grade school I realized that I was a much better writer than most my peers, but I also noticed that I fell far short of my favorite authors. By the time I graduated from high school, I was still a much better writer than most of my peers, and I still stil feel far short of my favorite authors. Years of schooling did nothing to change my situation nor that of my peers, so I've come to believe that writing skill is an innate ability. Of course, that may be nothing more than a testemant to the failings of the United States' public schooling system.
I hated English, not because I don't love to write, but because I hate having to write something I know nobody in their right mind would ever want to read. What's the point of that?
Too much English is taught by analyzing writers who have very little to no relevence in most people's minds.
I really wish I'd had more creative writing classes and that being creative, instead of just reading and digesting what other people have written, was emphasized more in our educational system.
D
I am a 3rd year Electrical Engineering student. My on campus job required me to write a policies manual for the 40+ consultants that work under me. I learned real fast that I had to write this very explicity and that everything had to be spelled out, word for word, leaving nothing to interpretation. Another thing that helped is documenting work that I am already doing. For example, writing up worklogs for projects (both work related and class related) for a class that requires a paper, not the class that assigned the project. It may also help to work with publication standards. Passing out the IEEE standards for writing articles and saying that they are going to be graded based on this set of standards will at least give them direction to work towards.
So put that in your pipe and grep it
Being a college engineering student, I felt my writing courses were useless. I would have been a lot more motivated improve my papers if they were reqired to be done in LaTex. Sure the course would be about writing, but it would have an engineering feel to it too. I've taken math courses where our research and papers had to be submitted in TeX source, I don't see any reason why a writing course couldn't do the same.
I find many curricula also waste too much time on things like simple reports and formal letters and resumés---not that a resumé isn't important, but formal letters? When is the last time anybody actually wrote a formal letter?
I probably can think of some other things, but it's late and I have a headache. Will add more thoughts later.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Present writing as an engineering problem. This is an accurate, if somewhat unconventional, way to look at it. When you write, you have a goal (communicate a certain set of ideas), some constraints (target length, assumed audience, etc.) and some criteria for ranking proposed solutions (shorter is better, linking ideas in multiple ways gives a more robust treatment, etc.)
This fits neatly into the mold of classic engineering problems. Presented this way, they should be able to (with only a little guidance) bring their full skill set to bear on the problem. For example:
One of the biggest problems with teaching people to write is getting them to read what they have written, think about it, and rewrite it until it does what they wanted it to. Here, at least, engineers should have a head start over most students, insofar as they are used to the fact that your first stab at a design is almost never viable.
--MarkusQ
Are you a NHV teacher at CSM... please respond yes if you are.
Assuming grammar is out of the question, it is useful to discuss when certain types of writing are appropriate. My own high school curriculum focussed almost entirely on writing "persuasive essays", trying to prove a point about Macbeth and his wife. That class of writing is almost nonexistent in the engineering disciplines, but that is almost all students know how to write. Writing assignments for short memos, research reports, etc would be good.
And tell them how to write good emails. Lord knows that's the most common form of written communication these days.
I generally disagree here. Most technical writing should be written in the passive voice because the actor is indeterminate or irrelevant.
For example, chip design -- electronic design automation (EDA), in industry parlance -- software generally needs a ton of configuration to operate correctly. Where this comes from, however, often cannot be determined beforehand -- it's possible that the end user is writing it directly, but it could just as easily be supplied by an administrator, the foundry making the chip, a translation utility, etc. Writing, "You must supply the transistor size in this field," ends up misdirecting the user to perform an action which is often more appropriate for another person. "You, your CAD administrator, your foundry, or translation software must supply the transistor size in this field," is unwieldy (and mind-numbing after the 30th time). "The transistor size must be supplied in this field," leaves the appropriate amount of wiggle-room -- the user can verify that it's there and move onward, or stop and take the appropriate action.
For technical papers, I consider active voice unprofessional. A technical paper should be reciting the essential steps to reproduce a result; saying, "We added chemical A to chemical B," means (erroneously) that the team which performed the experiment is essential to reproduce these results. As a reader or referee, I don't care *who* did what; I just want to know the *what*.
Active voice is acceptable and encouraged for expository writing. Technical writing is a completely different beast.
In Soviet Russia, the bike rides you.
Why do some people like it so much? Why is active voice in any way desirable. The hardest and most important question I always have to answer is why is a certain way desirable, because without that answer it won't get done that way.
Instead of the Americanized English that they try to foist on students.
The best thing you can do is to present TECHNICAL examples of good and bad writing. Telling someone that a particular short story is good writing will not help them to be a good technical writer. You need to show examples of the good so students have something to emulate and examples of the bad to let them know what not to do.
I've spent my life consuming vast amounts of text, and I feel that above all else, reading anything that's well-written has a positive effect on my writing skills. All the teaching I've had over the years had a miniscule effect on my writing compared to decades of reading major newspapers, news magazines, and a very long list of books. If you want to teach engineers a lot about reading, get them subscriptions to The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, New York Monthly, US News and World Report, and other such well-written periodicals. They'll pick up a lot of good things from reading that stuff - far more than they will from reading technical publications.
You might also consider sending them to classes that involve a lot of reading, critical thinking about the reading, and writing about said readings and thoughts. Classes in subjects like ethics and art history can force one to think and write in very different ways from what one is used to.
nothing like a challenge to get people motivated. u can keep it anonymous by erasing their name.
Look, there's no need to get fancy - in my experience you will make a massive improvement in most (young) people's writing today just by teaching them how to use apostrophes and the difference between words like 'there' and 'their'. Mixing up 'than' and 'then' also seems to be something Americans, in particular, do a *lot* (something to do with accent, maybe ?). Speaking of which, telling people "words" like 'alot' aren't really words would also be a handy thing to do.
The state of English teaching today is atrocious, with many *teachers* not really knowing fundamental rules like when to use apostrophes, etc. Modern teaching philosophies like "as long as the message is communicated" and "it doesn't matter if you make mistakes, as long as your attempt is reasonable", combined with the steady downturn in reading (of "good" writing) and the increasing number of children (and many young adults) who are (/were) brought up with the TV as a babysitter are the prime culprits IMHO. The increasing pervasiveness of IMing and SMSing are only going to exacerbate an already bad situation. We've reached the point where even remotely correct English is unusual to see outside of carefully proofread professional documents and I, personally, am at the point now where I notice it more if someone spells "you're" _correctly_, rather than it's ubiquitous erroneous substitute, "your" (particularly on the web) .
The best way for people to improve their writing is to read, read, read. Not web pages and blogs (which are likely riddled with errors - particularly if they're written by, or targeted at, younger people - and just create a feedback loop of bad habits) but professionally published books and journals. Steer clear of low-end/populist magazines and tabloid-style newspapers, as well, as they are likely employing youger writers who will be making the same mistakes I'm talking about above - even if they *have* a degree of some sort.
The kind of attitudes you need to instil in your students are "close enough is *not* good enough", "just getting the message across os *not* sufficient" and "written language has rules, just like engineering, that should be followed to remove the possibility of ambiguity".
I have no doubt that I have also made technical mistakes just writing this, however, my point is that the level of basic spelling and grammar is so poor these days, that you don't need to be teaching complicated grammatical constructs to improve people's writing, you just need to be teaching the basics.
My technical writing skills got better by going to law school. I am not sure I recommend this course of action to most engineers seeking to improve their writing skills.
Brevity. That's the key.
Most places I've worked have had their fair share of people who were not good writers. My own set of criteria for making that call center around the following few points:
* Does the person consistently write documents which have a high number of ambiguities, requiring extended clarification and 'back and forth' time?
* Do the documents from this person raise more questions than answers?
* Do the documents generally lack a traditional 'beginning-middle-end' flow?
I've lost track of the number of docs I've received from people over the years which, spelling mistakes aside, were logically contradictory, or so ambiguous that they were effectively useless.
This is not a trait monopolized by the engineering/development crowd. I used to think developers/engineer-types had more ability to critically review their own written work, and to be able to read it from the vantage point of the person who would be reading it. For example, things like being able to anticipate nuanced interpretations and rework things accordingly, I had assumed engineers would be better at. They're not, but not any worse than management or any other group of people in a company you'd like to label.
creation science book
And, if you can, some attitude adjustment. It's good that you've got these kids at the freshman level. It's even better if this is an elective rather than a required course, but obviously that's not something you'll have much control over. The only writing class required for my engineering major was a senior course where not-failure was the main goal of most of the students there. I assume they all passed, but I would have failed several of them. Most of the students I talked to didn't have much respect for the class and thus didn't try, but I'd estimate about 10% of them really couldn't write good prose without considerable outside help, even if they were motivated to do so.
You've said you're not looking to be told to teach grammar. Fair enough. I still think you should stress it though. Without good grammar, it's hard to build good sentences, and without good sentences it's hard to build good paragraphs. Engineering type students probably don't need a whole lot of practice stringing together a good long-form response to something, partly because a series of good paragraphs, even if they're not well-connected, would usually get the point across, but mostly because if my classes were any indication, the students won't get the basics down in a semester anyway so there's little point worrying about higher-level issues.
For engineering, logical argument progression and other rhetorical skills are going to be important, but the students are probably stronger in that area than they are in basic English mechanics anyway. Again, drawing on my own experience working on a team project for class, there's considerable need for practice crafting good sentences. Clear, concise, unambiguous sentences that further some goal. As our team's editor, I saw copious amounts of butchered verbiage, but it tended to follow the standard essay format. The problems were that individual sentences needed two or more readings to clarify, and some resisted my best efforts entirely.
You can fix some of these errors through rote application of rules, but ultimately it comes down to practice. Find or write a short manual with the most common errors explained (with multiple examples for each), and have everyone write. A lot. I'm not clear on how focused the course is on writing rather than the semester's topic, but by college it's going to be very difficult to introduce the students to enough well-written prose to teach them by osmosis; they'll need to spend a lot of time writing. And tell them to read what they've written out loud. It sounds dumb, and it's hard to do in a college setting in a way that's comfortable for the student, but if you stress it enough at least some of the kids will give it a try. Writing the way you talk is a bad idea, but even so, reading what you've written makes quite a few errors more visible.
This is getting long, so I'll sign off. Good luck; keep at it; engineering needs the help.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
I'd suggest making them write persuasive arguments which articulate certain positions, then having them debate it out - using their essays for at least the opening of the debate.
Writing a case and then having to argue its points tends to give you a better appreciation of how to write clearly, as well as keeping things together in a logical progression.
Sometimes it's just a matter of practice and practice. No one would suggest that an art student read a book or two to learn how to draw or paint. Yet, many people think that they can write something once a year and improve their writing skills. Some of my co-workers haven't written a letter or an article in years. It takes practice -- scribbling passages down in notebooks or on a laptop, describing a scene, putting together a HOWTO. Even after that it's a process of refinement.
And don't forget to read something other than technical journals. On a related note, I've been studying film for the past couple years. One thing I've noticed is that I can watch "bad" films and still glean some knowledge from it. Often even the worst films contain a scene or two that are instructional whether it's an interesting camera angle or an interesting framing. Reading is like this. It may not be particularly eloquent, but maybe there's a word or phrase that stands out.
KLL
In my experience, the best way for someone to learn to write English is to take a field in which they are an expert (or at least becoming an expert), and demand that they write about that field in a manner understandable to a member of the general public (or the English instructor). This solves two important problems simultaneously: First, because the general public does not understand technical language, it forces the student to stop hiding behind terminology; and second, because the student is writing about a field which they know a great deal about, this avoids the frequent "... but I have nothing to say about that!" response which results from asking someone with very specialized and scientific interests to write about a "general interest" topic which is probably not of interest to them. As a side benefit, students who are thinking about how to present their field of study to a member of the general public will tend to gain a better understanding of their field.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Strunk and White's and On Writing by Stephen King. Those two books have had more influence on my writing than any other two sources. Strunk and White's is an obvious winner. As for On Writing; it may seem counterintuitive to put Stephen King together with quality writing, but it is both approachable and informative. It has interesting narrative that holds the reader's attention while conveying many key aspects of successful writing. And while one may debate the depth of his writing, it is hard to contest his ability to captivate an audience (poor film translations notwithstanding).
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Not to be contrarian, but I'd like to present a different viewpoint. I have never subscribed to this "just put your ideas down now; worry about the grammar later" school of thought. Such a process makes a chore of having to go back and correct the ideas to make them presentable, as if grammar and other finer points of writing were unnecessary burdens imposed by the teacher and other excessively picky individuals. For me, putting my ideas on paper (or on screen) in a presentable way from the very start makes my ideas flow better because I am channelling them into a form that is understandable by others and hence by myself. In short, it helps me think.
Now, I admit that perhaps this way isn't for everybody. It just so happens that I've got a pretty good mastery of grammar, spelling, etc. --I won't claim that it's perfect, but it doesn't pose any extra burden for me to do it right. On the other hand, maybe it's because of this very demand for doing it right that has made it second nature to me. If the students don't have this habit ingrained yet, one semester won't be enough to change that; but I'd hate for anyone to aim for a "correct it later" attitude as the norm in writing.
You could compare it to programming. What are your first steps when you sit down to write a program? Yes, yes, of course there are doodles, sketches and diagrams. But when you get down to coding, I hope that you don't just code any old program and then go back later to fix compilation errors. I hope that you'll make sure it's clean, well-structured code that makes it easy to improve (as opposed to "correct") later.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
This is absolutely true and something that took me nearly four years of college to figure out. Half the time, engineers (and people in general) get stuck because they think the first thing they put down should be perfect and should never need to be looked at again. After some time (and a lot of papers) I found that I saved myself a *ton* of time if I just got everything out on paper in a semi-reasonable format. From there, I could edit. Doing things in a two step process helped immensely and cut my time spent "writing" way down.
We solved this problem by requiring in our project-based classes every team present a series of large reports. Half the classes are project-based, so this is a lot of writing. It's relevant to the material, so it's not as bad as a english class.
For example, before a student builds an international mrotgage and real estate web site, (s)he must write a requirements document that is actually readable.
Andy Out!
one idea: use stephen wolfram's writing style as a kind of 'anti-pattern' on how to write. his most accessible and horrid work is 'a new kind of science'. the book's subject matter (cellular automata) is quite interesting and something that engineers will understand, but his prose is constipated, turgid, extremely repetitive, and deathly dull. it might be interesting to take an excerpt and ask students to rewrite it. (wolfram used a vanity press to publish the book; i seriously doubt it had any editorial input.)
i think i may be getting a grasp on writing after 20 years. it is quite a bit like programming, there is nothing one can do but practice. write again and again, about everything. i read my first paper the other day and i was appalled. not just about the sentence structure, but the the presentation, the topic, and frankly everything.
the difference about writing is that there is no illusion of correctness based on execution. it is all very subjective. i hated to read my own writing when i was younger. it was embarassing.
engineers can learn to write. 20 papers, that they are forced to evaluate themselves for clarity of exposition. as many reviewers as can be marshalled. make them keep working on the same peice until they are well past the point of vomiting.
they are the same discipline. refactor, polish, test. rinse and repeat.
While I agree with most of what you said, I want to call attention to your last point:
Third, while you might not be able to help people with their grammar or spelling, make sure they understand that those things do matter and need to be fixed.
With today's modern spell- and grammar-checkers, I'm not so sure that such things are super-important but what *is* important is good writing. That simply means making yourself understandable. I think you will find that someone who is intelligent and who cares about making themselves understood will automatically become a good writer.
I'll take myself as an example. There are lots of comments in this thread about how you have to read a lot and/or write a lot to become a good writer. The only stuff I read was textbooks and I didn't have time to write very much and yet I still came out alright. When I was finishing up my dissertation, I already had a job lined up and they were routinely calling me to hurry up my thesis and graduate so I could start working for them. Needless to say, my first draft of my dissertation was awful. I just threw it together and gave it to my advisor to look over.
He called me into his office and told me "Your thesis is something that you want to do a good job on. This is something that you want to be proud of." I got the message and resolved to clean up my manuscript. What did I do? I went through my thesis sentence by sentence and asked myself "Is there any way that a reasonably intelligent person is NOT going to understand what I'm saying here?" Man, I gotta tell you that was agonizing fraking work. I would literally spend an entire hour rewriting a single page until I could answer "no" to every sentence. But when it was all done and had submitted it to committee, I had at least one of the professors tell me "This thesis is extremely well-written. Most theses don't come to us like this."
I never read "Elements of Style" (of course, I have that book now), never read very much, and didn't write much either. I sure as hell didn't know anything about proper comma usage. But I was able to produce a technical document that was praised for its clarity. My secret? I gave a shit. I tried hard to make it something that I was proud of. That's all there is too good writing. You don't have to know a lot of rules of grammar or be an exceptional speller. The secret to being a good writer is to take the job seriously. If you are half-way intelligent and care about your audience, you'll figure out what to do.
GMD
watch this
The real issue is that technology is allowing us to write faster and faster. This means that less thought goes into what we are trying to say and how we are trying to say it. Look at the effect of email on people's ability to write business letters (electronic or otherwise), for example. None of these classes teach the most basic thing-- slow down and take time to make your point.
To this end, nothing works better than learning caligraphy or spending some time writing with a quill and ink. Such will do wonders not only for handwriting but for written communication skills as well. Secondly, I recommend some classics. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe or other artful selections of prose are helpful, especially if they are from the 19th Century.
But this might be too much time for folks who think a talking frog is kinda neat...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Years ago I took a great class on technical writing. While the instructor didn't realize it because she wasn't an engineer, the process she described for writing technical documents was nearly identical to the process I used for writing software. This process isn't the best for creative writing, but for more informational type writing it helps a lot.
The usual steps for writing software include get requirements, design, prototype, implementation, testing, alpha release, beta release, etc. There are steps for writing that parallel those: define goal, research (if needed), outline, draft, copy edit, review, proofread, revise, etc. I found that once I understood the process for writing a document, actually writing the content was much easier.
And this essay by Bertrand Russell is a must read: How I Write (especially the next-to-last paragraph).
Always use a spell checker on whatever you write in a business context. Especially your resume.
The kids who became the best writers all had the same teacher. He was a teacher with some kind of specialty in technical writing. This teacher made his students keep a journal where they had to write like 10 pages a day on different subjects a lot of time the students could choose the topic but other times they were assigned. Then once a week they had to choose and revise one of there journal entries into a paper. This teacher sometimes made them write these papers in different technical styles. I can't remember but I think some of the technical writing assignments had to be from certain assigned journal entries.
What I think made them good was lots of practice writing plus the teacher could see what there baseline skill from the journal and could mark up the weekly papers to show how they should improve them when creating a final paper from there baseline. The only downside was the students really hated the amount of time spent on a class that wasn't a core course to there engineering degree.
formatted more or less the way I wanted before I fat fingered the preview button the last time
The first step in learning to write well is learning to read. Make them read Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book. It was suggested to me at the beginning of my Master's program -- I wish I had read it in high school!
Second, they need to learn to organize their thoughts into a coherent argument. There is no substitute for good old fashioned outlining, as much as students hate it.
Third, if u cant spel, use propir gramir, or punktuashun, ferget writin, no one will want to read your stuff!
Fourth, the student must write, write, and write some more, and then re-write, re-write and re-write until it says what he wants. Writing well takes work.
Finally, unless someone has something interesting and worthwhile to write about, they will never produce meaningful, interesting writing. Have them write on things they are interested in, but also at a level that requires them to do some research (and organization of the information).
Practice does not make perfect: it makes permanent. Have the students work in small groups and critique each other's papers before they're turned in. Reading and commenting on someone else's work really forces you to think about what constitutes good writing and what doesn't.
Happy Hacking
A well written document is an essential part of the engineer's responsibility. The engineer must write clear documents that effectively communicate important ideas to his audience.
During the writing process, the engineer must focus his writing to the target audience. An overly technical document will be frustrating to the reader that is not experienced in the subject matter. Similarly, writing for the "layperson" will be frustrating for readers with a lot of experience.
Have the students study and "reverse-engineer" writings from other authors. I learned much through a combination of traditional "grammar school" lessons and from reading a wide variety of documents, including articles from the Economist, manuals from Beagle Brothers Software, and the classic three-ring-binder IBM manuals.
You can provide some templates to your students as "training wheels". At a former company, we used a corporate writing guide which included templates for API documentation, end-user documentation, whitepapers, et cetra. While the writing guide did not necessarily improve every employee's writing tenfold, it provided a very good framework that helped even expereienced writers.
Pictures. Taking a picture of some setup can be worth a page of words. You'll need to explain the context and maybe annotate it, but its just so much easier to show someone a screenshot or picture instead of using tons of words.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Thanks for pointing out that there are plenty of good uses for passive voice as a stylistic tool. I get a little annoyed by people who try to reduce style to a few prescriptive rules rather than techniques.
Good examples of passive voice in technical writing might include:
"When the button is pressed, the following popup window appears."
and
"The computer must be properly assembled prior to installing the operating system."
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
1. I second the active voice! Related: favor strong verbs (over preferential expression for nouns)
2. be brief,
3. and direct: assume the reader reads only the summary
4. and intellectually neutral: cast what you hope for as a theory, and acknowledge the opinions of others likewise.
In the end, good writing reflects good thinking. (But avoid cliches like the plague.)
The most significant thing you can do for you ability to communicate to a non-technical audience (or one otherwise not familiar with your area) is to just *let go* of whatever tendency you have to make what you're doing seem difficult. Get over yourself, in other words.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
"The best strategy on those fronts is a habitual reading of clearly-formatted texts..."
I think that musings found on Slashdot are not prime examples of clearly-formatted texts.
Really, you must understand that literature in the classical sense of the word accounts for a small percentage of the media that is consumed by a majority of people in the age group you are addressing. It is an entertainment-oriented lot, who find themselves visually stimulated by the products of others' imaginations -- from television to video games to sites like stupidvideos.com -- and have not been brought up in an environment that fosters active imagination. What they have read is by and large a literate nightmare: sites like Slashdot and the 5th grade english teacher's nemesis, the Blog.
Writing is learned by imitation of other writers -- and you can't imitate the style of an author you've never read. To become a good writer, one must read. One must be stimulated in imagination such that the visual imagery is crafted in the mind of the reader. The good writer writes in such a way as to capitalize on the experiences of the reader; the writer needs only give a minimal amount of description to suggest what the reader must imagine. The reader then fills in the details.
If your pupils haven't read already, then I'm afraid you have a Quixotian task. If you make them writers in a matter of months when they have no foundation of literature to guide them, it will be a miracle.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Either you are a good teacher...or you ask geeks on /. on how to teach
One of the most useful exercises that I have had in a writing course was given by my first semester composition professor. On the first day of class he told us to spend 30 minutes writing about some topic (I can't remember what it was now, something like why we decided to enroll in higher education or something like that). At the end of the class he told everyone to stand up, take their paper, wad it up, and throw it in the trash.
The point of this exerciese, he explained, was to get people used to throwing out writing. Especially for inexperienced writers, most of the first draft will be thrown away. Students should get used to that, as well as get used to the idea that if something isn't working, sometimes it's better to just start afresh.
Another useful exerciese was presented in my Technical Writing course. In it we were given exerpts from various technical manuals. Generally we were given something along the lines of 3-4 paragraphs and told to condense it down into a single paragraph. Througout the entire semester, the professor put a great deal of emphisis on brevity. Almost all assignments given in that class were explicitly given as a 1 page MAXIMUM.
I know that, personally, I have always had a propencity to use more complex language than may be strictly nessesary in my writing, and this is perhaps a symptom of the fact that I also use rather elevated language in my everyday speech. In general however, I think that many students have benefitted from being instructed to write more like that would speak. Specifically, many people speak in consice sentences. If you can teach students to write with such brevity, but also to add the clarity nessesary for written communication I think that you will find it a great help in improving their writing.
Finally, I would say that while grammar may not be a focus of the course, you should by no means disregard it. The standard of grammar and spelling among most people today is abysmal. I'm sure that an astute average reader or grammer nazi could find dozens of errors in this post, and I think that my own grammar and spelling is above average compared to that of most people. This being the case, you should be sure to tell students when they have poor grammar, and attempt to correct it. I would suggest not accepting any papers that have over a certain number of obvious grammatical errors. Common mistakes like its vs it's, they're vs. their, effect vs. affect, etc. should not be accepted. Many of these errors will not detract from the understanding of what is written, but it will immediately cause most readers who catch the errors to disregard the entire contents of the paper.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
My favorite general topic writing class in the engineering school was Utopian Societies. It applied well to engineering students who are always trying to find solutions, and then seeing how some engineering solutions to cultural problems don't always work. There are many books to read concerning this subject: Ecotopia, Utopia, blah blah blah... oh also something like "100 Years In the Future" or something I forget the name. However, they are interesting regardless of a person's major in college. The most useful tools in writing for me have been standard formats of documents (memo, thesis, etc.) and writing compression - by this I mean the ability to get a point across in the least amount of material. Also useful is how to set up in-text imagery with citations. In-text citations have always been the biggest problem for me. There are a few websites out there to do automatic Bibliographies/references. English majors are soooo picky about where the periods and commas go in the citations, and which order they are presented... ITS NOT LIKE THE PERIODS DO ANYTHING LIKE FOR INSTANCE C++ CODE DOES. Sometimes I get very angry. It's not like it is code or something or like you are going to be parsing a bibliograpy file. It is just read. The point of writing is to communicate. Actually I still even have problems with English classes in general. What is slang but an evolution of our language? If we didn't have evolution of language, then we would probably still be nomadically grunting. I think as long as the reader understands the vernacular presented, it's probably fine. For instance: LOL. Hmmm. If you don't know what LOL means and it's not in the dictionary, does that mean it is useless? No. It gets the point across. It communicates. What we need is to just have a new standard wikipedia dictionary where all slang words are accepted and can be looked up. Maybe it's not "professional", but then what is the point of the "profession"?
~nostrum
How I learned to write -
/any/ code) until I had the documentation for my projects correct, including spelling and grammar. I had to fix contorted phraseology, remove cutesy-pie attempts at hacker humor, and generally had to be professional about things; /good/ documentation;
:-)
1) Strunk and White;
2) A mentor who wouldn't let me write any code (and I mean
3) Reading lots of
4) A decade or so of practice.
I can't stress #4 enough.
Also, never underestimate the value of bad documentation ("Sheesh, I can do better than this...") or a lousy teacher ("This guy is dead wrong about...").
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
For each assignment, pick a general subject. Then work with each student to pick a different subtopic that you both want to learn more about. The student succeeds by actually teaching you something. They should also be aware of how to write for different audiences. Arrange "teach me something" writing exchanges between students (peer writing), business majors (their future managers) and, if possible, an 8th grade reading level target group.
Cultural studies subject ideas? The history of technology of culture X. The contributions to US technology from cultural group Y. Tech advancements that result from increasing cultural diversity in a discipline.
Just teaching engineers that writing something is much better than writing nothing at all is a great leap forward. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind here is comments in computer code, but of course there are other common situations like within design documentation where sometimes engineers tend to be too brief or concise, or not say anything at all where even something poorly worded could save a lot of time. I don't know how many undocumented functions I've had to try to maintain where just a simple one sentence "what is this function for" would have helped me immensely.
And of course the other important thing is to teach engineers to proofread what they read. For some reason, geeks are notorious for, as you say "horrifying grammar", but you should also just going back over what you've written once, to make sure you've gotten your thoughts properly in order. Even in e-mails. You'd hate to send an E-mail off to your boss about an important project and have him not really understand what you are talking about because you didn't have time to re-read what you wrote to make sure you said what you thought you said.
Better make the distinction between "good" writing and valuable techincal writing. From my experience, any manifestation of literary skill (beyond good grammar and concise description) is not valued in the technical world. The audience is of mixed background (in terms of native language) and struggles to comprehend more than simple sentance structure and very direct, unambiguous language.
Now if you're asking how to teach engineers to write well outside of work, then bravo & I'm all ears...
Lurking in the desert
The problem is often that people write thoughts as they are structured in their minds in an instant. They often don't bother attempting to structure those thoughts specifically for the writing process. Asking to write 2-3 essays per week is probably the wrong approach.
Have them write short essays, business letters, descriptions, technical notes, etc. 2-3 per week. No more than two pages apiece, hand written, ideally in quill and ink (why do you think that the writers of the 18th century were so much more eloquent than writers today?). The subject matter should be sufficiently complex to force people to be extremely concise in their approach.
In essence the longer it takes to write a sentence, the more thought must go into it. This is what you want to foster.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
ounce u write 1 way u get comfterable and it wrks 4 u an u c no reason 2 really change er thats how i see it as how many ppl prblby look at it like it doesnt matter u no what i mean jus my 2 cents like u never understand how u need to write in a standardized way or you learn 2 do it however but yer pplz kno what u mean right and organization of thoughts is overrated cause this shit worx 2
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
You can improve your grammar by reading books with lots of words and no numbers. I recommend the classics, HG Wells and the Sherlock Homes novels will keep you busy for some time.
Posting on forums is one thing, everyone is lax with structure. Being able to write a business plan and present ideas and reports in an attractive to read format will make a very large difference in your career.
All the school in the world won't help you if you don't read though. My $0.02.
..don't panic
I'm actually in the odd position of having written a 6-page (single-spaced) technical paper yesterday and a 25-page (double-spaced) humanities paper today. The juxtaposition of the two causes a lot of problems for me. Professors tell me to use passive voice in my technical papers ("The dynamics were analyzed using these methods" vs. "The team analyzed the dynamics using these methods") and I'm constantly hounded for not using active voice in my humanities papers ("The dialects have presented interesting challenges" vs "The dialects present interesting challenges"). I'd say the most important thing is to teach appropriateness and to recognize it. When I get into one mindset (engineering or humanities), it's hard for me to get out of it quickly to handle another paper in a different subject. I usually don't notice when I've used the wrong voice until I have someone look it over for me; the more you can encourage your students to have others proofread, the better -- I hate having others read my stuff, but it's worth it.
My suggestion is to encourage them to start writing something, anything about their topic. It doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be well formed, is doesn't even need to be coherent, they just need to get ideas out so they can start making something out of it. Too many people can't start writing in the first place because they expect fully formed perfection to come out.
If they're all engineering type students, you could easily link it to one of the most important concepts in many engineering fields: Get a solution first, then refine it. They probably understand and accept this idea without question as engineers, you just have to show them it applies to writing as well.
With a litte thought, I'm sure you could find many more parallels between writing and engineering that you could use for teaching.
I've been recently hired by a company to rework their user manuals. Up to this point, they have been written by the same people who developed the technology, and they were largely ignored by the company's first customers, also serving as beta testers. Recently, however, support calls started to multiply, as new customers had problems understanding the manuals. I found them beyond horrible, and I already started working on completely rewriting them. Here are some of the mistakes I observed over and over again:
* Sentence length. Engineers tend to write very long and convoluted sentences. Please make them stop, and teach them how to alternate between shorter and longer sentences. Also tell them that six or seven lines without a period is torture for the average reader.
* Subject descriptors. After the fourth or fifth noun in a sentence, nobody will know what "it" refers to.
* "if" and "then". These may work well in software programming, but the next time I count five "then"s in a short paragraph I'll shoot the writer. Engineers have the bad habit of overusing cause-and-effect structure in centences.
* Conjunctions. From what I've seen, using "and" after each word, instead of commas, seems to be pretty common.
* Redundancy. Some engineers think that they'll make it easier for the reader if they repeat the same information three times in a single paragraph. First, they put it into introduction, then they include it somewhere in parentheses, and finally they add the same information to the end of the paragraph.
* Definitions. More often, and just as frustrating as with redundancy, engineers forget to clearly define terms. If they do, they put it into glossary or parentheses behind a word. I personally prefer to ease the reader into a term, by starting with common words and slowly building up the definition on top of them.
* Parentheses. This is yet another favorite element of engineers. It allows them to make sentences much longer without triggering the long sentence alert in Word.
* Dashes. Engineers love to use dashes, sometimes without regard whether they replace periods, conjunctions or semicolons with them.
* Workarounds. This is more a mindset than writing, but if you can change this you'll do the mankind a great service. Engineers have problem to think like their readers. That is, if they are concerned with it at all. As a result, I've seen many instances where the engineer has no problems confessing that a feature doesn't work, and instead describing a complex ten-step workaround in the manual. I believe that writers should strive for simplicity; if something gets too complex you should flag it and challenge the writer's underlying mindset, not writing.
I hope this helps a little, but not too much. If you manage to teach engineers how to write, I may be out of job.
Have them write like they speak. My writing got much better when I realized that I didn't have to fluff up the written text. You *can* fluff it up if that's what your audience expects but at least you'll have a starting point if you have what you would have said written down.
-CZ
Just read any typical Slashdot story or comment. You'll find a lot of very common "engineerese" errors, the top ones probably being...
- Unable to group thoughts into coherent sentences and paragraphs.
- Passive voice.
- Not knowing the difference between "its" and "it's".
- Not knowing the difference between "loose" and "lose" and/or "lead" and "led".
- Not knowing the difference between there/their/they're, your/you're, etc.
- Not knowing or caring how to spell.
- Not knowing or caring how to type uppercase letters in appropriate places.
For some reason, I've found passive voice vs. active voice one of the hardest things
to teach engineers and have it "take". Not only is passive voice ingrained in their
brains as the "professional" way to write, they seem to have a hard time learning
to "refactor" sentences into a simpler, more active form.
But then, I guess that's part of why I have a job as a technical writer...
A nitpick: since this article is about technical writing, isn't getting the facts straight (the boy is going to the *store*, not the shore, in the poster's example) more important than whether active or passive voice is used?
I heartily agree (at least for the moment) that the chief virtue of writing is clarity. And what has most inspired me to strive for clear writing is seeing good writing contrasted with bad writing.
For example, I genuinely enjoy reading The Economist Style Guide, just for fun, because it shows tons of examples where phrases we use every day are wordier than necessary. To me, the thrill of engineering is striving for the most elegant and powerful solutions to a problem. Demonstrating that writing has the same capacity for beautiful solutions (even to practical, and not artistic, problems) is all the motivation I need to write as best I can.
I am currently a freshman at a university where many of my peers go on to become engineers. In my introductory physics class, we do lab write-ups in groups, so I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to the technical writing that my classmates do. Here are some suggestions of what to emphasize based on my experiences: - First, one of my biggest pet peeves: When I pick up a technical document, I am expecting it to present information to me, not pass judgment about my reading level or my level of education. Avoid the use of words and phrases like "obviously" that assume something about the reader. A phrase like "That may have been a lot of information for you, but now on to something simpler" makes the writer seem obnoxious and unprofessional. Writing at the correct level usually means that someone who is familiar with the topic but not with the particular experiment/focus should be able to understand the writing. - Many students don't understand the purpose of an introduction or how it differs from a conclusion. A lot of people try to add verbiage to introductions simply to add length to the paper, because they don't think that it is a very important part of the paper, or because they are not sure what to write...blah...blah...blah. Introductions should describe the problem and summarize the conclusion. They should include a derivation of equations to be used later on, with all of the correct mathematical symbols included and defined. In my opinion, the introduction is the most important part of the whole document. If the TA grading the paper is having a busy day, she might just read the introduction and skim the rest. - Don't try to turn a piece of technical writing into a short story or a friendly letter. Using jokes/emoticons/unnecessary flowery description doesn't come off nearly as well to the reader as most students might think. Being direct and concise is itself an art. - Formatting, layout, and diagrams are important. Show the students how to use/configure the formatting tools in Word (or whatever editor they are using). They should be able to use Greek letters, mathematical symbols, subscripts, superscripts, etc. Vectors should be distinguishable from scalars in some way. Diagrams should also be done on the computer if possible. Hand-drawn diagrams generally look less professional than diagrams done on the computer.
Or you could use the imperative voice:
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
What a redeculous question -- to think slashdotters might need help writing.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The biggest benefit to my writing ability is from what I have read. Reading a lot has helped me to improve my grammar and build the vocabulary necessary to write eloquently.
My most enjoyable and rewarding writing experience was from my freshman composition professor at the University of Central Florida, who tailored his curriculum towards engineering technical writing (as our class was entirely engineering students). The class was also linked to a humanities and a calculus class, as each student was in the same set of classes. This allowed for a more in-depth approach to writing, both individually and as teams. The same engineering students were reading about Plato's Republic, learning about Mark Tilden's fascinating BEAM robotics, and at the same time, creating technical documentation for anything they chose. At one point in the composition class I remember asking the professor if I could do a story writing assignment in hypertext, and he was very supportive of the idea. We also had a self-directed group "invention" project that generated a lot of group writing work, such as describing the idea and how various aspects of it would work. A paper on the unique structure of the curricula is here.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
When I was in college my chemistry teacher was on some national (or international) body that made up the standard for technical writing of chemistry and he wouldn't accept any of are lab papers if they were written in anything but passive voice and made point about it being the standard.
The most pressing problem for most engineering and science students regarding writing is that we simply do very little of it at all. Unlike the humanities and social sciences, many courses don't require any writing whatsoever, and those that do are mostly in the form of lab "reports", where, if the figures and results are fine, it simply does not really matter to anyone if the language is good (or even makes any sense). I had classmates that had never written a whole, uninterrupted page of normal language at university until they had to write their Master's thesis (and tellingly, a number of them never finished it).
So whatever you do, the single most helpful thing is probably to enable - and require - constant writing with quick turnaround time for the feedback. Don't require one or two large bodies of text; make it a bi-weekly thing to write and hand in something, anything, as long as it's coherent. Nothing helps improving your writing skills than just, well, writing. It's just like programming, where reading theory and looking at examples are helpful and essential, but secondary to buiding your familiarity and facility by _doing_ it.
And the feedback should not be focused on grammar, nor on "style", but on simple readability in comparison with good texts. Make people look at their own texts with new eye and understand how it will be received by someone who has not written it (ie. eveyone else than themselves). Show bot h good and bad examples, and explain _why_ they are good and bad; make people see when an explanation is deficient, when steps have been omitted, when a clarification is anything but.
I write a blog, and while it's not much to read, it has helped me immensely by the simple virtue of constant practice and the need to actually think about how to say things so it's not utterly incomprehensible. Requiring that kind of smaller text chunks would, I believe, be similarily helpful.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Aasimov was both a scientist and a prolific writer. Some of his short stories are essentially in the form of 'reports'. I think that they might make a good example to start with. The fact that "I Robot" came out as a movie last year would help pique at least some people's interest.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Immerse yourself in the writing of great writers and you will become a better writer. The "Elements of Style" by W. Strunk and E.B. White is an excellent first step. Vonnegut would be a good second.
I just finished school about a year ago from RIT and sadly enough I felt that when I was done with school I was a worse writer then before I started. This was mostly because I actually wrote a lot in HS. In college after freshman year when I took my writing courses I didn't need to write much afterwards.
On a side note. I agree with the person that wrote that know the difference between passive and active is important. At my first job that was something that we were trying to change throughout the entire work culture. Most of our technical/letter type documents were written in passive voices and just read very poorly. They instituted a new 'Technical Writing' course that was tought in house which one part of it was trying to teach you the difference between passive/active.
Out side of that. If you are teaching mostly engineers I must feel sorry for you. They don't want to be there.
But, they should know that if they can't write they are limiting themselves a lot. My first two jobs require significant writing. Both work around the gov't. The first required deep technical writing analysis reports that can evovled to 1000+ documents. For just a single sub assembly of a larger system.
My next job most of the documentation is concernd with the SBIR programs. Here there is techincal aspect, but there is also a persuation aspect.
So, I would say the things that you really need to teach are as follows. 2 weeks of just review of grammer. I know this is sad, but they really aren't learning this is HS or middle school for the most part. Don't do this as a lets go over what a verb is, but as all those rules of thumbs you actually think that we know.
Next, go over the different types of technical writing techniques. I actully had to write a letter to my boss at my old job that finished with 'Yours very truly'.... Yeah, it felt very lamn writing that.
Next persuation. If they are going to writing(helping at first) proposals to the gov't for grants. This will be helpful (very helpful). The guys that these grants are written to very often have very little technical background. Therefore, it isn't always about who has the best understanding of the concept. But, who can convince the reader that you know what you are going to do. Very good skill to learn and develop. Yes, what I am saying here is if you are very good at BSing, writing proposals will be a good skill to work towards.
At some schools, they have people that all they do is write proposals for PIs. I know some people that have masters in their degree and all they do is take the notes from PIs at schools and companies and write their technical journal articles and etc for them. Yes, they get paid very well. 70+K within 3 years. Starting around 45K. This is to say if you write well.
Ha, I could go all night.
I guess what I am saying is that instead of covering things like poems, non-fiction work, etc. The intro course for engineering types schools should be most pointed at the electives that deal with things that I discussed above. If it does not, then the students will be less inclined to take those elective which they would really benefit from.
Anyways, it is 12:30 PM I and somewhat drunk off my ass. So, I hope you enjoyed my rant.
The idea that someone might actually read it, and not just inside of a classroom context. I am one of those people who has trouble learning or producing something unless I am either interested in the topic or someone else is going to use it.
When I was in my technicaly writing class in college we had to write instructions on how to do something (I chose the installation of a Half-Life Dedicated Server). The paper was given to five students. Every student was 20% of your grade; If they were unable to accomplish the end result because of a problem with your paper, you didn't get the 20% for the student.
Even the Business major in the class was able to do it with my instructions. THAT is an accomplishment!
Another thing that helped me become interested in writing a good paper is being interested about the subject - which usually meant that I had to choose the subject. Sorry, but writing about the complex social commentary buried in some obscure novel from the 1930s just doesn't get my rocks off. I couldn't care less. Those were my worst papers.
Simply enjoying doing so. Some people like to read; others do not. I'm not sure that there is anything you can do about this. You can't force someone to enjoy an activity. Personally, I read to get away from the 'real' world or to learn about something I enjoy. Most of my reading is fantasy, about animals, or about brewing.
We write to convey ideas. If my target audience can't understand that idea then my time and their time has been wasted.
Also, as mentioned above, if I care about what I'm writing I am much more likley to spend time on revision.
If my work is going to be seen by other people then I will give it more effort. Noone likes to be embarressed. This is, of course, a problem with students who are shy. Shy students may spend less time writing and revising because they don't want anyone to see what they've done, so they will do nothing at all.
Seeing examples of bad writing can make damn sure that I don't make the same mistake. I remember reading one of the Shanara books by Terry Brooks. One of his paragraphs had six sentences, all of them starting with the word 'He'. It wasn't done to create emphasis as far as I could tell; it was just damn annoying and it disrupted my flow of reading. The editor must have been on crack to miss that. Ever since then I've been extremely aware of writing just TWO sentences in a row that start with the same word. It just bugs me now!
The courses where I read a lot of different styles of writing. I seem to learn well when given different ideas to compare, and then pick and choose the parts I like the best.
Also, I took a creative writing class in high school the was helpful; Every day we were given a subject (though broad, and it was more a suggestion than anything else) and a particular style or form to try, or certain rules. No words with more than three syllables. End every paragraph with the same sentence. Write for a 5 year old. Write for a 30 year old. Write the same story, but from different perspectives, each with a different cultural background. Write a story that goes backwards through time. etc.
Something that can be helpful for creativity is to choose a topic, say, "rings", and just write a sentence or two (or a paragraph, whatever) about what you COULD write about. Just write down ideas. For rings, I could write down:
1) A story about a wedding, where there is a focus on the symbolism of wedding rings. Obvious, boring, but it's sti
Love sees no species.
So, "the boy be roded" is wrong?
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
In a setting like this, I think you'll want clarity of communication over clarity of writing per se. One of the best ways to do that is constant peer review, and one of the best ways to get that is in a public speaking course, instead of a writing course.
One of the best classes I've ever had in my life was a Voice, Speech and Debate class, with emphasis on the Speech. The premise of the class? You're selected randomly to speak for three to five minutes on a topic selected randomly out of a hat. You have a minute (later 30 seconds, later about five seconds) to come up with your speech. Don't write anything down, and don't use notes or props or cards. You give these speeches in front of the class, and your peers give comments and review you. You're graded on the clarity and organization of your presentation.
Granted, it's not the writing course you were looking for, but I think in teaches what you really wanted to teach: how to organize your thoughts, and how other people do it.
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
I'm in a 2 network engineering program. I just finished the first year which had two technical writing courses. The first centered around things like writing instructions, formating and writing memos, proper resume creation and a relative merits report.
Our second semester was focused solely on creating a proposal and report that was being done in another class. It focused on progress reports, formatting various sections of the report, working together in a team (it was a 20 page report worked on by 3-4 group members), editing, table and figure usage, works cited lists, and of course the general writing itself.
We worked on creating parallel structure, avoiding usages of "I" and "We" unless completely unavoidable, writing objectively, etc.
There are two books that help endlessly in your life as a technical person:
For everything but formal texts, you need you use the book (I think every Highschool Student should get a copy for free):
Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M. Williams
For Formal Articles, Books, Papers, etc, you need you use this book:
Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas
The first book teaches you how to write in a plain, eminently understandable style. It underscores how to structure writing, sentences, and even individual phrases to clearly get across the points you wish to communicate. It eschews proscriptive rules like certain other writing books do *cough* Strunk and White *cough* that get too much attention.
The second book explains how to write in what is called classical style. This is a style of writing that you'll come across in documents such as the american Declaration of Independence, all of Descartes writing, and most of the writing of the Enlightenment. It is highly adaptable, and very comprehensible to anyone. Many popsci books go towards this style of writing, including some of Hawkings work, and most of Bronowski's. Classical style is more sophisticated than the plain style advocated in Williams, but some ideas are important enough to pay the cost of nuance at the expense of conscision.
--Michael
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
And possibly illegal.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
My English professor in first year cleared it *all* up when she told us: your objective is to say what you have to say as simply and as clearly as you can.
That's it.
Horrifying grammar is a common problem, but its not a problem I can fix in a semester-long class.
I would think not.
Writing, like most everything in life, gets better with practice. Encourage your students to write often, giving them many small assignments rather than focusing on just a couple of "big" projects. Also, for technical writing, I find it helps to know your audience and to think about what it is you're trying to communicate as if you were a member of your audience. What questions would someone from the audience have after reading one of your paragraphs? What ambiguities are there? What follow-up questions would naturally arise? And so on and so forth.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Personally, I'll add my biggest suggestion to become a better writer: recognize and experiment with the value of wordplay. Write some poetry. Spot puns and double entendres. Try to find a five-letter word that means roughly the same thing as the seven-letter word you were going to write down. Proofread your sentences to come up with the most comedic but literal misunderstandings of your intended meaning.
I don't advocate a glib and playful tone in documentation, but wordplay will energize your language centers and help you write things that the reader will find useful instead of tedious and confusing.
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'MarkusQ' wrote a very nice guide above.
I've run into a lot of poor writing as an editor on various group assignments. Presuming basic language skills, there are two major issues that repeatedly come to a fore:
- Lack of Outlining
I don't believe it's possible to write an engineering paper as a 'train of thought'. The result is almost universally poor flow, excessive and redundant phrasing, and scattered logic. It's akin to building train tracks without first deciding on a destination.
Further, the outlining process often reveals counterpoints and tangents that would not have been otherwise apparent.
- Poor Perspective
This is really a catch-all for many problems.
- Presuming knowledge the reader does not have, or drawing conclusions from implicit assumptions
- Writing to a level above or below the intended audience.
- Ignoring the purpose of the document; what might someone reading this be looking for?
There are other issues, but these two in particular rank highly.
yeah, bigdavex is definitely dead wrong. The two tenses he is using are the present and present progressive... not helping the image of engineers as bad writers with that one.
I used to get A's in all my high school English classes, no problem. So nothing really impressed the importance of revision on me until I took freshman writing at college. What the instructor did was have us write 5 or 6 essays throughout the semester. Then, our last (and biggest) grade was just a rewrite of one of our other papers. It was graded on improvement from the first draft, not overall quality. Then he had a conference with everyone in the class to discuss with them why their paper was better the second time. It worked quite well, too. The importance of revision was definitely the best lesson I took out of that course.
As someone who works in an engineering field and has writing skills, I hold an advantage over my comrades. It would trouble me to see this advantage eliminated by some writing course.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I agree with Jjeff1 and I find MarcusQ's suggestion interesting and very insightful. My own suggestion is based on over 30 years in the business of Engineering at four different major companies. I also have two kids in College and one getting ready to go there. They and their friends have told me that the current trend in teaching writing, is to communicate and not to worry about Grammer or Spelling. I am not perfect at either. What I do know is that "A" papers are coming out of some of our college students that would fail the Spell check of even Microsoft Word. I find this thought abysmal and depressing. I review about 200 pages a month of technical documentation, before it goes to the Tech Writers. Without saying anything about the multi-national flavor of the engineers employed in America today, I find that most of them can not Spell. So, If I were a teacher, I would Red (or Blue) Line every single spelling mistake in their homework and deduct 1 point each. At the very least, you will teach them how to use Spell Check! The documents that come out of my company are read by Customers and the words that are not spelled correctly imply a lack of professionalism that is difficult to repair. Clarity in Customer documentation is vital or otherwise your Support costs will increase. I realize that our High Schools are supposed to train our children in how to write. I also realize that a majority of our schools are not successful in this endeavor and that many of our Colleges are not stressing this topic either. I applaud your effort and wish you the best of luck.
"There are three rules in my House. 1) Keep Mama happy. 2) See Rule 1. 3) Life is NOT Fair, Get Over It!"
Use the free-flowing ideas as a pre-writing technique. If a student is staring at a blank screen, then they should do some more planning.
Brainstorm, write an outline or organize the ideas in your head.
Editing a paper is very important, and it will be easier to clean up the ideas if you don't have to clean up a ton of grammar and spelling errors first.
PS. I'm an ESL teacher and a professional writer.
Writing, review, and rewriting helped me most as a writer. I had an excellent teacher in junior high school who made us write constantly, gave us a face-to-face critique of an essay at least once a week, and forced us to go through several revisions on many of our papers. The students critiqued each others' papers as well, which wasn't as helpful as the teacher's critiques but at least taught us that bad writing is unpleasant and unedifying to read. (It also convinced the skeptics that the teacher wasn't exaggerating how many passages were unclear or incoherent.)
The most common failing I see in myself and my colleagues is leaving out important bits of context. I think the best cure for this is reading and critiquing other students' writing.
The most important thing is to force them to write as often as possible. Have them write one-off essays in class, and have them go through three or more rounds of peer review on several papers. At least one paper should go through three rounds of review personally with you. That way they'll get decent advice from at least one person. Frankly, I think everything else should be subordinated. Whatever amount of theorizing and speechifying you manage to fit in between writing and review will be plenty.
I'm an anomaly, but I learned a great deal about how to write well through online discussion boards.
Through daily participation the boards at http://www.ambrosiasw.com/ I probably wrote in excess of 200 pages and read in excess of 2000 pages in one summer.
Another thing that I considered very useful in my english classes was conferencing every paper. First the teachers would mark everything they found wrong in a paper, and then have a 15 minute conference with me for us to work out the differences and for me to understand my mistakes (or to defend my original decision sucessfully).
Furthermore, in 5th grade I had a spelling textbook. My homework involved copying about 80 words a week with the correct spelling. Over the entire year, that is over 3000 words spelled correctly, with some repetition. Some people will remember this sort of training, and some will forget it promptly. I tend to be of the remembering type. My elementary school also did a thing called "Daily Oral Language (DOL)" to flesh out grammar rules. I didn't forget too much of it.
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What has helped me with my writing is law school. I tend to write a lot more concisely, a lot more coherently, and spend a lot more time ensuring that I say what I mean.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
I dropped out of HS 2 times, earned a GED, entered a local CC for a quarter, aced the system and moved on to a 4 year school. 3 years later, many 1000s of dollars I had a 4 year degree in 3 years (fulltime summers included) time. I then went to another college for graduate work, and finished in 2 more. All the while I took Engrish classes over and over only to have to finally pay my way to a passing grade after 5 attempts. Motivation, to get out and earn a living. My writing skills still suck, however I'm one of the best code monkeys I know, and the pay is proof. It is almost completely irrelavent if someone has the ability to even communicate well if they write code. One reason, most code doesn't live longer than 18 months in today's cycle turn into trash release system. My advice to anyone that is looking to be a software engineer, get out and get experience writing, debugging and doing it in less time than the next guy can graduating next semester. 20 years of coding, and I still don't no how to spell or pronuncieight properly. :)
1) Getting him to say things outloud first. If it was supposed to be a persuasive paper or some sort of analysis, I had him explain his argument to me outloud. This gave him an opportunity to explain his thoughts in complex sentences and think out everything he wanted to put donw on paper. Once, I even recorded it for him and made him listen to it before he wrote. This really helped his transition from thinking to writing without that pesky engineering filter killing his points.
2) Writing for fun. Since I was taking numerous writing classes where I had to keep journals, I got him to start his own journal. I told him it could be anything he wanted, as long as he tried to write different things in it. In the end he started to write small poems, short stories, and a diary in the same spiral. More than anything, this got him used to writing in different form while still keeping his voice. It also made him into a faster writer.
3) Red ink is painful, but needed. I loved my roommate like a brother, but I was more than willing to slam red ink all over his rough drafts. The problem with showing your rough drafts to peers in classes is that people fear reciprocation. If you say something negative, people might do the same to yours. So you get a lot of cursory comma markers and spelling errors, but nothing of real value. So I'd go through his and find everything I could think of that was possibly wrong. Jumps in logic. Grammar errors. Splitting paragraphs. Suggesting where sentences could be deleted or rearranged. At first he didn't like it, but he certainly went back and gave his papers a hard edit. After a few papers, I could just read it over and give him those same comments face to face while avoiding the little errors he already started to fix on his own. In a classroom setting, consider doing peer revisions anonymously, and explain that editing means more than comma splices.
Those things really seemed to help him get out of his shell. To this day I don't think that Engineers are bad writers, they just have this wierd filter installed in their heads that won't let a lot of them write down what they're thinking about. They can explain it to you outloud, but not write down those same words on paper. Getting them past that hurdle is the best thing you can do.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
I just finished my Senior project for my AP English 12 class, a very intensive course with a teacher who rivals Snape, and rather enjoys emulating him. The project was completley open ended, and had only a basic list or requirements, 8-10 pages long, MLA Style, at least three sources one a novel of literary merit, and it must be based upon a criticism. Due to this openendedness, I chose Vampires, and because I was able to choose a topic of my own choosing I enjoyed the project, read 13 books pertaining to it, watched 8-10 movies, read comics, and even grabbed a copy of a pnp rpg based on vampires! the openendedness really helped me pull it together. The more choice, the more enjoyable.
I have had no English courses in college, but the best class I ever had the pleasure of taking was my High School AP English class. It was taught towards the AP exam. Twice a week, we would come into class, receive a poem or short story and we had the remainder of the period to write an essay on it. Each essay was graded and handed back to us. I am sure that it was a lot of work for my teacher, but nothing has benefitted me more than that intensive class. I suppose the short answer is that teaching style and grammar is good, but the only way to really reinforce skills that will stick with students is to have them write. Having a limited amount of time forces students to write, rather than stress about word choice or grammar. They will learn their own weaknesses, not those of spell-check or the thesaurus, and they will improve. Cheers
Try to remove all distractions from the writing process.
/VI on school machines) and comment on each of them as I go. .txt file to a slightly more featured editor with a spell checker (I use "CopyWrite" in fullscreen mode so all i see is my document text), write a full length first draft without figures/tables. .rft) to a full word processor (MS Word, Pages, LaTax) and set all the formatting bits.
... for some reason people don't like it when I email them .txt files of my sections. Go figure.
Many people tend to play with things like formatting and layout when they should be worrying about communicating their ideas. I see this all the time with both individual and group papers, and it drives me up a wall sometimes.
The approach that I've personally found to work the best (for me, YMMV) is to use this workflow:
1: Draft a basic outline on paper with a list of topics / points that I need to hit.
2: Type the outline points into a basic text editor (Textedit on my Mac, Pico
Comments include basic thoughts about what to say and how to say it, figures that I expect to need, specs that I have in-head, and a few fully formed sentences.
3: Transfer that
4: Revise the draftfor coherence / completeness.
5: Transfer the document (now a
The only problem that I have with this process is when working in groups
George Orwell wrote a good essay on the overly fancy writing style employed by too many people. The use of stale metaphors and meaningless words are covered, and it's a pretty big eye opener to writers who try to make their work sound more special and educated by throwing large words in it.
If you're interested, it's called "Politics and the English Language"
The students that you are teaching have already taken at least 5 years worth of education in english. What is one extra simester going to do?
My opinion: The greatest impact a course can make is to inspire. Teaching is secondary, because if I am inspired then I can teach myself.
That said, I think that the goal of a final course in english (since I presume that many of these students will not take any more english courses) should be to convey the importance of good writing, the difference between good and bad writing, and to inspire the students to continuously strive to improve their ability to communicate. Ultimately, you want to instill in them a sense of pride for their ability to communicate clearly and concisely.
Many english courses, especially earlier ones, are used as a creative outlet. This is excellent for younger ages, but for university level i think that the creative aspects of writing obscure the true purpose of the course: to instill a sense of pride in clarity and conciseness of writing.
So, I would not make the course a writing course. I would make it an editing course.
Teach the difference between good writing and bad writing. Demonstrate the possible consequences of bad writing (from engineering and business perspectives). Most importantly, teach them how to transform bad writing to good writing (editing).
If a student can transform someone elses bad writing into good writing, then it will only be a matter of time before that student starts writing better. As an added bonus, the students would actually learn how to edit, which is vital to working in teams.
Lastly, assignments on editing can be short and to the point. The students can be given sentences or paragraphs of bad writing and asked to fix them (mix in a few examples of good writing to throw them off... or use paragraphs that are mostly correct, but can be improved sightly). They can be asked to justify all of the changes that they make, and those changes can be marked and graded in a relatively transparent fashion (as opposed to most writing courses where teacher discretion plays a significant role in any marking scheme).
Comments on this idea is appreciated.
Cheers,
RighteousRaven
Um, why?
Every single confused attempt I've seen at explaining why passives are such a horrible thing have turned out to be nonsense.
And the prescriptive grammar of other European languages have no comparable proscriptions. Are the people who teach writing in those languages morons who've failed to recognize an universally valid principle of logical language, or is it just that literate English speakers are traditionally taught nonsense?
Are you adequate?
I believe it was T.H. White who said that the three most important rules for writing are simplify, simplify, simplify. And bless you, by the way, for doing god's work.
After all, it got me into The Register:
d y_bear/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/05/devil_ted
"Those are both active. I'm pretty sure you meant to write something like this:
Passive: The bike is ridden by the boy to the store."
Actually, "is riding" creates a nominative sentence--not active. It describes the boy as having a state of being: "riding." The word "riding" is a verbal noun (gerund), which is also used as an adjective. So "Subject (helping verb) adjective" - nominative. The sentence is not active at all, but passive.
Also, the best way to avoid the "it's" and "its" issues is advice I received from a professor: never write a sentence requiring either. A sentence is less ambiguous when the sentence does not contain the word "it," although takes a bit of effort. He dropped a paper's grade by one letter if he saw the word "it" used anywhere in a final draft. Back then, I just took "it" out of the spell checker. Besides, one typically does not apply a contraction (e.g. it's) in formal writing.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Are you adequate?
Bartleby offers a free electronic (HTML) version of "Elements of Style".
On the same site, they offer a few more classic texts and reference books on English Usage, Style & Composition. I find their collection of electronic references very useful, because it includes a "search" function, which by default searches through the entire collection. Very handy for looking up grammar rules or proper word usage.
I'm currently reading essays for 1st - 4th year psychology students. If I were to identifiy aspects of writing that could use a lot of emphasis I would suggest two key elements. 1) A need to clearly state at the beginning of the essay what they are going to discuss. I'm not interested in clever or subtle methaphors etc. I have limited time and effort to devote to technical reports. Tell me what you are going to say and the pieces you will use to support this idea in the FIRST paragraph. Then follow that outline. 2) A good conclusion is key. Students need to to be able to create a relatively simple summary of complex topics such that of the reader remember nothing else about the essay it will be the conclusion. Tie all the different pieces of the essay together into the "take home" message.
DNA, the splice of life.
Dying metaphors:
herein: examples include toe the line...
how many times have you heard that used in the media lately
LOL!
I consider myself a good writer and I would take that active/passive simplistic preference with a huge grain of salt. There are many instances in which the object which is acted upon is more important than the actor in a particular context and thus for clarity's sake deserves to be mentioned first. For example:
The White House was almost burned down by British commandos in the war of 1812.
If I were to start out with "In the war of 1812, British commandos almost burned down..." then you would have no idea of the significance of the sentence until the very end.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
To add to this slightly, assignments could be paragraphs/essays with context. For example, students could be told who the target audience is and what the paragraph/document is supposed to convey (documentation of a process vs explanation of a concept vs description of an error... etc), and students could be expected to make the paragraph/essay more clear and concise while identifying any holes in logic and cutting any unnecessary fat.
Cheers,
RighteousRaven
That's a bunch of bullshit. Is riding is a periphrastic progressive form. You won't find a linguist anywhere that says anything of the sort that you've said here.
Also, the best way to avoid the "it's" and "its" issues is advice I received from a professor: never write a sentence requiring either. A sentence is less ambiguous when the sentence does not contain the word "it," although takes a bit of effort. He dropped a paper's grade by one letter if he saw the word "it" used anywhere in a final draft.
Your professor is a moron. Why should anybody refrain from using any grammatical construction used by all of the authors in the English language literary canon for the past 500 years or so, because of a dumb apostrophe? If for some reason the apostrophe really matters (like, you have to send your text to a bunch of jackasses who won't actually read it, and instead merely scan it mechanically for every instance of perfectly grammatical English that they were somehow taught never to use), well, that's what we have copyeditors and proofreaders for. Worry about organization and audience first, and only then worry about the small stuff.
Are you adequate?
I've found E-Prime worthwhile enough to suggest it to others when they ask for writing tips. I use it for pretty much all my writing when I need to write for clarity. It has a simple rule: don't use the verb "to be" which includes be, being, am, is, are, was, and were. That rule makes passives sentences almost entirely impossible to construct, for one. I like to use the example that "mistakes were made" cannot be used. Instead, a writer has to put down "X made a mistake".
You can check out the wikipedia article for an overview. Then you can peruse some of the journal articles written about it in ETC at http://learn-gs.org/library/etc/#is
Then you are unfamiliar with the business of writing and how most professional writers work.
* You could compare it to programming.
I could. In programming, one also finds that things like security must be done in a separate pass to be done well. That's why folks who try to just spit out secure code end up with things like Windows, while folks who do separate security audit passes have a much better track record of achieving their goal.
Passive: The bike is ridden by the boy to the store
In this case, the infinitive "to the store" is placed in such a manner that it described the boy. He is now "The boy to the store". "The bike was ridden to the store, by the boy" (comma optional but clarifying in this case) would be much more correct. Removing the comma would make the store "by the boy," in a sense of an adverb -- location. bla bla bla. No one will read this.
In other words, passive is "mistakes were made (and we're saying it this way to try to duck the blame)", and active is "we made mistakes"?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
There are two events in college that helped me more with writing than anything else. I attended an engineering university, and continued with scientific/engineering coursework after graduation.
The first was an honors class that required me to write a paper ever week. The catch? It had to be under two pages. These papers covered a variety of reading material--short stories, essays, and books. I had to find something in the reading material to write about, and write two pages on it. This helped me an enormous amount--it gave me constant feedback on my writing, helped me be clear, concise, and precise, and it enabled me to write a two page paper with these characteristics very quickly.
The second event happened in a class called, strangely enough, "Technical Writing." After I turned in one paper the professor handed it back to me and said "take this back and write it again in English. All of your sentences are inversions--70% of them should be Subject, Verb, Object."
The biggest thing through all of it was practice, practice, practice with constant feedback.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I spent the last year working hard on improving my writing skills, and I can attest that translating a writing guide into a set of rational design rules is a crucial first step when teaching writing to scientists or engineers. Most humanities people have a very different view of what it means to "analyze" or even "understand" something, and accordingly most writing guides heavily rely on examples, rather than on logical explanations. I find that older books, like the venerable "Elements of Style" already mentioned here, are easier for me to understand and learn from, because they tend to be more prescriptive, and thus focus on the rules and, most importantly, rationalize the rules rather than simply state them. If I understand why a certain style element works best, I can much easier spot and correct the incorrect usage.
I did not learn how to write well in high school, nor did I learn in college. Now that I am in law school, I can at least see the flaws in my writing even though I may not know how to make it better. Before law school, the great majority of my previous writing experience is of a technical / descriptive nature, where my goal is to describe something, whether it be a book, a project, an experiment.
The difference with writing for law school is that I'm writing to win an argument, and I know there is someone on the other side trying to be more persuasive. As an engineer, you believe you win arguments by presenting the facts and analysis, not really by being persuasive. The change from engineer to law student means I see a different objective in everything I write. Instead of just trying to include all the relevant facts, in whatever haphazard manner, I see my writing as trying to convince the reader. This means that concious of various elemts of style -- such as sentence structure, word choice, paragraph structure, transitions, and flow of the entire paper -- in writing my papers.
The other change is in how I read other people's writing. I started to notice particularly well phrased passages that could convey a certain feeling or argument in a powerful way, and I would try to see how I would the same. Invariably, my efforts pale in comparison, but this gives me the opportunity to compare and see how I can improve.
Therefore, I suggest having writing assignments that are more than just descriptive, such as a book report or a summarization, but rather pit students against each other in writing from different points of view. Make them read each other's paper and critique what was good, what was weak, and who's paper prevailed.
Cheers.
Get the students to read voraciously for about 25 years. It worked reasonably well for me. : )
Seriously, I think reading recipes is a really good idea. Have the students figure out what makes a good recipe good.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
As an engineer that bills out at a rate that's a few hundred dollars an hour higher then a technical writer - why bother?
All I have to do is write the details clear enough to hand off to a technical writer to polish up for the final documentation.
Having me waste time on writing a full blown, prose perfect, document is a huge waste of company resources.
It's the same reason a medical doctor might have a business staff of 4 or 5. It doesn't pay to have the doctor do anything else but doctor stuff.
The ambulance took the injured man away.
I was just talking to my wife about this today. We were driving around a section of town where we know a few good restaurants. The area is packed with restaurants, and I was thinking how nice it would be to have a HUD that would display a user-feedback-style star rating above each building as we drive by. Not only would that make it easier to pick new places to try out, it would have saved us from the lousy place we had just gone to for lunch. I've seen pretty much all of the components of such a system demonstrated at some time, somewhere (GPS, recognizing images from the eyeglass camera and relating it back to cartographic data, high-speed Internet access from a moving vehicle, etc). Once we get the basics for a mobile HUD in place, I think people will go wild coming up with new ways of tagging objects, structures, or people with metadata. The privacy nuts are going to have to pool their money together and buy themselves an island somewhere...
"There isn't a real-world problem I've come across that doesn't have common human ignorance at its core."
There are far too many college students who do not understand how to write their own papers. They will copy and paste from another source. Some think that as long as the URL appears somewhere in the paper, that it's OK. Others don't use double quotes when copying verbatim, even though they may cite the source. Maybe they don't know how to properly integrate someone else's work into their own, or maybe they don't care.
Few instructors take it seriously, and the students get passed on to the next class. The end result is that a few end up plagiarizing in their graduate work - I've seen it in Master's theses and Doctoral dissertations.
To be more charitable towards Strunk and White, they kind of incipiently shoot at the rule that subjects are usually topical, in the little bit where they talk about the passive being OK if the topic of the paragraph is the passive subject. The problems are that: (a) they issue an unhelpful, near-blanket prohibition against a construction, and an even more unhelpful side comment that it's somehow sometimes OK; (b) native English speakers already know at some level that subject should be topical, and already use passives in their spontaneous speech to make sure that the topical argument is the subject of the sentence.
Are you adequate?
I'm amazed at what horrible grammar and spelling passes for normal these days, I'm far from perfect but I try my best.
A relative of mine is has a pretty cushy job in a Tech field but he writes such things as "ware" for "where" and "he doesn't look good" instead of "he can't see very well" (referring to someone's poor eyesight).
The best writing advice I've seen is the writing chapter in Don Lancaster's book, The Incredible Secret Money Machine. His tips:
The perspective of the rest of the book is a bit dated (it's pre-Internet), but the basic concepts of his writing chapter are still just as relevant today.
The second of the two also strongly suggests using what I call the Christmas-Tree approach for any technical document.
1. Make a Summary Statement. Blatently tell your reader what they need to know in a VERY short paragraph (and a paragraph can be one line). e.g.,
"We need to replace the office file server."
2. Give some background. This can be a little longer, and gives them the background to understand why you are making the first statement. e.g.,
"During the last thunder store the hydro-pole outside the office was struck by lightning. The lightning then over loaded the surge protector and UPS, and then arched through the file server. The file server is now a heap of semi molten metal. But we still have good backups from last night."
3. Give the rest of the facts the reader needs. e.g.,
"The former file server was an HP mid-range model and had the following specifications:
Blah
Blah
The new file server should be replaced with current technology . The current HO mid-range model has the following specifications:
Blah
Blah
Given our current growth rate, it should suit our needs for the next 5 years."
4. Finally give the supporting data (this is much larger, and may be only an appendix that will be references only if needed). e.g.,
Quotes from suppliers
comparisons with other models and manufactures of file servers.
An analysis of usage patters over the last three years on the former file server
etc.
In the end you get a document that looks like this (the *'s indicate size),
---*--- Make a Summary Statement.
--***-- Give some background.
-*****- Give the rest of the facts.
******* Give the supporting data.
and the reader only has to read as far as the need to make a decision.
At the college where I'm an english major, we teach a class called "Writing for Engineers". No joke. Engineering majors take that instead of another class in the basic writing sequence that every other major takes. Mostly, it's taught by whichever english faculty draws the short straw.
Having a writing for engineers class separate from the normal english sequence means that other students who are more into, say, creativity than analyticcs are saved from the sort of writing instruction that might be very effective for engineering majors, but soul numbing for the rest of the world.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
1. As others have said, "The Elements of Style". In particular the rule "omit needless words".
2. Ignore advice to prefer the active voice. The passive voice is appropriate for much techical writing. "The modulation was measured in the standard CCIR bandwidth" is appropriate. "I measured the modulation..." is chatty and unnecessary. The method and the results are important; the identity of the experimenter is usually not.
3. Never write anything you cannot substantiate. Know what you would cite as a source if you were asked.
4. Don't bullshit. If you find yourself using vague words such as "significantly", "mostly", "highly", etc., replace them with actual numbers. If you cannot then either delete the sentence, or go do some more research until you can.
5. Structure. Write the outline first and fill in the details later. Do not be afraid to reorganise if it becomes clear that a different structure would be clearer or simpler.
Let's avoid the vulgar confusion of good writing and good grammar. Horrifying grammar is a common problem, but its not a problem I can fix in a semester-long class.
Sorry, but that's wrong. I have taught such classes (both to adults, and to young students), and you can indeed cram everything needed into single semester. Once upon a time, when Latin was taught and History wasn't referred to as Social Studies, basic grammar was a single-semester course of study. For most, the subject can be mind-numbingly dull, but without it you have no foundation on which to build anything. If a student can't parse a sentence, he most certainly won't understand how to form one, except perhaps by mimicry.
Put another way, no one has learned advanced mathematics without having gone through the requisite rote memorisation of multiplication tables at an early age. If I was in your position and the subject was teaching advanced algebra and I discovered that many students couldn't rattle of a multiplication table, I'd call up a time-out until the deficiency was corrected. And I'd ignore the groans knowing that everyone would then be in a position to move forward when done.
It also might be enlightening to pause for a moment and consider the reasons why students whose first language isn't English typically don't suffer from the "horrifying grammar" that you believe to be so widespread.
As for the discussions of style and clarity, I'd think those are moot in a class where the students are unable to recognise and hence use the basic parts of speech. Can't conjugate a verb or understand tense? If you can get past writing a full sentence, you'll choke in a paragraph or two, leaving the reader to wonder where the hell you are or going. Can't make sense of subjects and objects or know what a gerund is? Refrain from laughing (or crying) and nod approvingly when you hear: "I don't need to know, because me being an engineering student, it's not that important." Transitive and intransitive verb forms? No worries. The words "effect" and "affect" are homonyms and interchangeable, right? Cases? Who the fuck cares?! I've got a busy life and no way am I going to learn all this ablative, genetive, nominative, possessive gobbledygook. So what if I can't distinguish between "its" and "it's", or my overuse of subjunctive (whatever that is) is routinely criticised as bad style. An introduction to foreign languages to teach appreciation of derivations and, hence, meanings? No way! My students are American, and Latin is a dead language. Besides, that would be so unrelevant, irregardless.
If your target audience consists of engineers, your pupils can and will appreciate being taught standards and clear rules. The fact that you'd be covering ground that should be have been addressed in grade school should provide reason enough let alone an impetus.
I'm not a great writer, but I've always gotten good grades on papers without having paid particular attention to grammar or the technical aspects of writing. My writing has steadily improved for one reason:
I notice what works and what doesn't in others' writing
The fact that I can recognize great writing does not really help me write better, but it helps me edit better. I may have to write 4 or 5 drafts, but when I get to something that works I can recognize it. Likewise I don't hesitate to delete whole sections if need be. Too many people try to swing a first draft as final copy, or spend too much time trying to perfect the prose as they go. Better to spew out all your ideas and then organize them through progressive drafts.
I am taking a technical writing course as part of my IS major at UMBC. This is a 300 level class. It is required for all the Engineering and IS majors here. It is mainly related to improving the writing for when we are out of school. Our assignments this semester included, writing a resume and cover letter, a full analytical research report (mine was about 30 pages) complete with appendixes, table of contents, glossary and sections and now we are writing a manual for our final project. English classes typically hold written assignments to a much higher standard than other departments so its been challenging but interesting to get some writing experience in our fields of interest while meeting the tough grading standards of most english departments.
I suggest you have your students read--and write to--newspapers.
Whether it's writing up stories for the student newspaper, or writing letters to the editor of the region's broadsheet, your students will not only learn how to write things concisely, but they will also see how professional editors polish the things they have written.
By reading newspapers, they will also hopefully be able to imitate the concise, but varied, style of a newspaper column that will keep their reader interested.
I am of the belief that once you see your name in print once, you will try hard to see it again--it is through this process of trial and error that they will learn writing skills.
Of course, that requires having something to write about. Nobody can teach that!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
But I assume you speak of the great unwashed masses (the other 95%) of engineers, who cannot think but whom you wish to teach to write. For each of those I recommend a spell-checker, a grammar-checker and possibly a pet monkey trained in Emacs. Other than that you're on your own.
If your ambition is to be an engineering professor the emphasis is somewhat different. In many of the academic/technical journals, (for example those that emphasize computational electromagnetics) if English is your first/native language you already have a huge advantage. It often feels like there is more mathematics than actual text in many of these journals. A mastery of the usage of such phrases as 'which yields', 'thus', 'hence', and 'it can easily be shown that' are absolutely essential. Beyond that, the simple ability to make concise and coherent statements is good enough to get published, even in good journals.
Regardless of whether you're in engineering or not, if you fall into the category of the aspiring academic, which most first year students do not, one of the simplest and best things you can do is read articles from the top journals in your specialty area. You can get a feel for the level/quality of work required to get published in these journals, and you probably need to be reading them in the first place.
If you're an engineering student and want to be a professor, take a look at the salaries for US business school professors, you might be surprised.
First, teach them to be concise. Engineers who cannot write well often try to make their writing sound as stuffy and pretentious as possible. They should learn to use smaller and simpler terms as often as possible instead of trying to sound like they *think* well-educated people should sound. Another poster mentioned active vs passive voice, which is a good start. Second, make sure they all understand the common mistakes techies make. When should apostrophes be used, and when should they not be used. The difference between "loose" and "lose", "it's" and "its", etc. These are very common mistakes, and losing a half mark for such mistakes never seems to drill their importance into people.
I agree with many of the parent's comments.
However, once they have gotten to college, the damage has mostly been done. If their writing is barely passable, I doubt you'll be able to improve it much. On the other hand, if their writing is IM-style, you need to go into salvage mode and beat them soundly about the head. What passes for writing in many forums is barely literate.
You have to give them a reason why writing is important. The obvious answers are documentation and communication of ideas. Engineering is often committee based work. If you can't communicate what you want to the rest of the group, your ideas will not be considered important. If you want that promotion from upper management, you need to be able to talk to the marketing and business guys. As a freshman it is easy to be myopic and feel that all you have to do is engineering. They need to understand that this is wrong. You'll likely change careers and certainly positions. In order to do that you need to be able to communicate.
Also realize that for most of K-12 these people were yelled at told they were no good at writing. Many of them have given up. They are not going to play this losing game; instead they'll play a game they can win, math. I don't know how to win them back. Just realize that this is the attitude you are dealing with.
As stated, the easiest way to figure out how to write correctly is to read. Try to get them to read older works. Writing styles were better in the past. Now everything is too stream of conscious, conversational style - even published fiction. Blogs and internet writing are atrocious.
Try to get them, to read things pre-1980. After 1980 the internet began to creep in, the TV generation fortified themselves on center stage, and writing started to go downhill fast. There is plenty of good science fiction pre-1980, if you feel the need to make them read "engineering stuff". (Narnia, Lord of the Rings)
Students tune out grammatical rules. What matters is that they learn how good writing sounds. Once you get the cadence and rhythm of proper English, you are able to generate it much more easily. It is akin to learning music, at a certain point to stopping counting beats and just feel the proper timing of the piece. The downside is that incorrect English then sounds like nails on a chalk board (e.g. "more easy" versus "easier").
The other downside is that if you read too much non-American writing, your writing starts to sound non-American. I can shoehorn a "u" in between any "o" and "r" you given me - labour, humour, harbour. I get accused of using archaic phrases all the time ("amongst" versus "among").
I also put my quotation marks inside the period. This is frequently how programming languages place quotation marks. It is also acceptable British style. So, you might want to explain both the American and British conventions and live with what they give you regarding quotation marks.
Engineers often get beaten up for using passive voice. I would simply ignore this. Too much engineering literature (manuals, documentation, etc.) is written in passive voice for it to sound incorrect to them.
It is true that stone doesn't burn. But that doesn't change the fact that the white house was burned down.
I had a professor of English in university who inspired me to write and rewrite in a clear, correct fashion. He would not put up with anything close to plagarism and this included failing to quote sources. It was a much harder course than I was required to take, but I'm glad I took it anyway (I wound up getting an A- on the course even though my major was computer science -I completed my degree 3 years after taking the course). His passion for clear, interesting writing and words inspired me more than all of the bored and tired english teachers I suffered through grade and high school. It was something that struck me about my university professors. Each was teaching a subject about which each was personally passionate. As for a writing topic, get them to write a list of hobbies on a sheet of paper. Have the students write a formal essay on their most favorite and least favorite hobby. The hobby must be introduced clearly and completely, and then include some statistics on how many people enjoy the hobby, extreme versions of the hobby (try to pick some that are interesting to a wide audience), and areas where the hobby can benefit people in other areas of their life, not directly related to the hobby. To encourage them to write more effectively, they should be made to formally edit the paper 3 times, and turn in each (the first two can be hand written and marked up). Then the paper should be re-written to explain the hobby to a group of grade 1 children, and also to a group of seniors, taking their perspective into account. Each re-write should include the 3 formal edits. The proper essay format: Introduction/Body/Conclusion should be followed, and an emphasis on interesting writing and clarity of thought with sentences making sense in and of themselves, but also their place in each paragraph, and each paragraph within the essay. Rewriting is a good habbit, and forcing a class to do it might just make some students continue to do it.
"mistakes were made"
why the passive voice is otherwise known as pentagonese
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
"Was has impressed on you the importance of revision, or at least of reviewing your writing at intervals?"
What do I find annoying? The fact that you obviously didn't proof your own submission. Otherwise, how do you miss catching this line?
The Sense of Structure : Writing from the Reader's Perspective by George Gopen
The focus is "tools, not rules".
English professor: Teens always fall pray to peer pressure! Engineer: Teens have a tendency to be swayed by peer pressure.
Sweeping generalizations and hand-waving logic is the norm. While I find some the best writers are notorious sticklers for details, most english professors are not.
Teach engineers to write by number.
Most engineers want to find a mechanical process or mathematical model to describe physical phenomena. Their creativity comes from finding and exploiting that model. In other words, show them examples of good writing. Teach them to outline the arguments in the paper. Show them different methods. After seeing several templates in action, most engineers will be happy to deviate from the standard and let their creativity take hold. Engineers like concrete things. They need something to see something 'mechanical' before they can be 'brilliant'.
While I think the best writers are more mechanical than most liberal arts majors want to admit, too often introductory composition and writing courses are taught by flakes. These pseudo-intellectuals like to stuff big words into sentences and construct long-winded diatribes. They're more than happy to deconstruct everything and assume that a book is inherently as consistent as the real world. Reason transcends any field of study and all of the good scholars embrace it. This is true whether the scholar is an english professor at Yale or a physics professor from CalTech.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Forcing engineers to take English 101 or a battery of humanitarian courses to 'round them out for their own good' is only adding stress to the undergraduate student who doesn't need to be stressed out more than they currently are.
Have the Ivory Tower dwellers who make up liberal arts requirements for engineers ever considered that maybe the reason johnny isn't socially developed as the artsies on campus is that he has twice the workload, and forcing him to read poetry as a requirement is only making him less of a person, not more.
SlashDot readers be goodish riterz.
For style, make your students read the Wall Street Journal every day. The Journal contains decent, and jargon-free, writing on business subjects. Teach your students to write like Journal reporters, and top management will understand what they have to say. Advanced students should read the Economist.
Textbooks? Strunk's "Elements of Style", and "The Associated Press Manual of Style and Libel Guide", two utterly practical books on writing.
Perhaps Cliff could take a page from the "good grammar" book and learn that "less failures" is the wrong way to say what was meant. If the item at hand can be enumerated (that is can be counted in a semi-tangible manner and in distinct units), one would use "fewer," as in "fewer failures." The term "less" is used when the item cannot be enumerated, or is a collective noun, such as intelligence: "There seems to be less and less intelligence in Slashdot's posts, as there are significantly fewer editors who proof-read same."
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
I think it's pretty difficult to improve your writing significantly without doing a lot of reading. Maybe that goes without saying, but it isn't mentioned much in the other posts here. At any rate, practice in the form of reading is probably as important as practice in the form of writing, if only for the simple reason that it is almost exclusively the written word that is grammatically correct in our society these days. Without having done a lot of reading, a person can only write in the way they would normally speak, and our normal speach is appalling in terms of grammar.
A-Bomb
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
...teach them to communicate. This means consistency, clarity, coherency, cohesion, and completeness. Once they're able to maintain the five C's of communication, /then/ see about teaching them how to write. You'll find that once the core communications skills are in place, it will be a lot easier to get people to understand some of the more technical details (comma use, why parallel structure is a good thing, why active voice is a good thing, etc.)
Some thoughts on assignments:
As a group, define $really_common_term. Make sure multiple groups get the same term. Once the groups are done, have them share their definitions with the class, then compare and contrast them. Ask them about their process, how they found their wording ("why did you phrase things like ______ rather than like ______") -- this is about getting your students thinking critically about their writing. Maybe do this on a regular basis (new groups and terms each time).
As a class, define characteristics of successful communication. Use these characteristics to define metrics for communication, then apply them (for example, to the above group exercise).
Ultimately, your goal should be to use these exercises to instill some kind of discipline into your students' approaches to communication. Show them how you can apply engineering principles to constructing their communications in an effective manner and let the writing center deal with punctuation and grammatical minutiae.
Good luck!
UC Santa Cruz has had a tech writing for computer scientists program, with both an undergrad and graduate level class, for years now. See for example http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmpe185/. There's a pretty senior professor behind it, though they use lecturers for most of the sections. They probably would love to help out other schools...
to know when to use its or it's.
I find spelling errors very distracting when I read something. It distracts from the message. So please learn some fairly simple rules (it's not hard) or/and use a spelling checker. Then on to 'How to write'.
Many people have already mentioned it, but it bears repeating. You absolutely cannot go wrong with Strunk (and White's) Elements of Style. It's short, easy to read, and informative. Following the advice in Strunk's book will be a great help for anyone wishing to improve his prose.
I write the same way. It takes me longer to get a first draft out than most of my peers, but editing winds up being a very quick process, usually just consisting of reading it a few days later and seeing if it still makes sense. My technical writing professor last semester had nothing but good things to say about my writing (and she's not an easy grader by any stretch of the imagination), so I guess it works. That being said, I also know that I think very differently from many of my peers, and that method just flat out doesn't work for a lot of folks.
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
No matter what career path & subjects you were taking at GCE "O" Level (age 16), you *always* took English & Maths at least - this meant that no matter where you ended up in life later on, you had a good understanding of English grammar and could perform most simple arithmetic in your head. This wasn't just something that happened at my school, all of my friends of a similar age have the same ability.
At the grand old age of 44, I'm now a pretty good all-round tech support engineer in telecoms and computers. I've got 20 years experience behind me, I write white papers without ever resorting to a spell checker & I author training presentations which I frequently present myself to other work colleagues - again, a number of similarly-aged work colleagues have equal abilities. I don't have a degree, I was educated to 'A' level standard (age 18) but would have gone to university had there not been some family issues at that time.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that if engineers need to be taught how to write properly at the point they *are* engineers, then it's the education that they've had up to that point that has failed them. Certainly, in the UK, the education system has changed very dramatically over the past 20 years and standards have been lowered considerably - simply because everything is about statistics and politics.
Nowadays, you can walk round any UK town centre and find degree students with weekend jobs in just about any shop - yet those same people frequently suffer from poor communication skills, an inability to perform simple arithmetic in their heads & poor spelling/handwriting skills. No, I'm not saying *all* students are this way but it certainly seems to be the majority.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I had a major in Computer Science and a minor in writing, and work now professionally now as a writer (though I still do CS work on a regular basis).
The best class I took in college to prepare me was called Technical Writing. The key insight of the class was that one can use good writing techniques even when dealing with purely scientific material.
The example I remember the most went something like this:
1) "In early February, a robin was observed doing [some scientific term for preening feathers] well in advance of [some scientific term for mating season]."
2) "On February 4th, a robin was observed on a low cemetery wall, preening its feathers in an unseasonal display of mating behavior, well in advance of when similar sightings had been reported."
I don't think I'm making #1 dry enough (but it was really I-want-to-sleep-now dry), but I think one can see the point. The key point being the addition of the bird being observed on a cemetary wall. It doesn't really cost you any additional space, but it suddenly creates a mental image of the observation in progress instead of some purely numerical fact.
The course's other key observation is that one can use fiction writing techniques in technical writing. Not blatant vehicles like alliteration or metaphors, more like crafting beautiful sentences that still convey the same level of scientific fact and meaning. And this makes your technical writing much more enjoyable to read. And understandable -- which makes you in turn look something like a genius by being able to explain difficult concepts cleanly and easily.
I was a Mechanical Engineering major at an Ivy League school. I got number of As in my literature and English classes - much to the chagrin of my English and Literature Major classmates, who did NOT get As in the same course. Why?
1) Organization of Thought. I planned the outline in my head and knew pretty much how I wanted to present my writing to my reader (the teacher). The details can change and be moved around later, but the structure remained more or less the same.
2) Clarity of Content. The outline skeleton is a good start, but it needs to be backed up with good content. Then this content has to be presented in a clear set of sentences, or paragraphs, or even sections. Also try to stick to basic grammar and use sentences that are as short as possible to get the point of the sentence across. It is also wise to be careful when using those "big" words.
3) Punctuation. I have often read sentences which make sense if you read them out loud (slowly), but they can very confusing when written. Good punctuation really helps readers through those longer sentences that have "big" concepts.
(I hope I have followed my own advice in writing the above!)
P.S. I did not learn English until I was nine years old.
By stressing writing as a subcomponent of communication, it pulls it from some abstract artsy-fartsy crap to something a decent engineer can/will/should use as a tool. Without the ability to communicate, no engineer will get novel concepts out of their brain and into the workspace. With the engineers I work with, though they are very good, they are all hampered by the ability to explain rudimentary concepts and proposals without actually creating a CAD drawing or some other intense level of detail. You can be the best engineer in the world, but if you can't explain to your boss or coworkers why this great idea will work so well, everything you create will be relegated to the trashheap before it even gets started. Personally I think there are other essentials with communication that lay hand in hand with writing, but they need to be used together for maximum effectiveness (witness powerpoint... all text and it's worthless, all pictures and it's worthless)
Another good idea that appeals to engineers is the peanut butter sandwich process... have an assignment where the task is to detail exaclty how to make a peanut butter sandwich. And then proceed to make them according to the written instructions. (this was actually a writing experiment for my brothers second grade class, but it does serve a purpose) They forget to tell you to use a knife? use your hand. Don't tell you to spread on one side of the bread? spread both. Don't tell you how to assemble the halves? put them together backwards... there are an amazing number of permutations in the process of assembling a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, any of which can be intentionally misread for comic effect.
Move the idea collecting stage to a mind map using pencil and paper. That way, there will be no spelling and grammar to block you, and the structure comes out much more clearly. Pencil and paper tend to boost creativity.
Only then write it straight down. You will save a lot of time on editing if you have a clear concept to communicate.
The extent of pre-structuring depends stronly on your language skills.
In French, my drafts tend to detail the contents of every sentence because I need to dedicate a lot of my attention to prepositions, the right choice of words etc. On the other hand, a quick stare at the wall will often be enough for me to come up on the fly with good wording and grammar in German.
Proofing mainly catches all the good ideas you have once you get a bit of distance (and spelling errors).
-- up-modding policy: make a good point, write self-contained.
For most people, writing better means writing more succinctly.
My history professor gave me some excellent writing training. He gave us strict page lengths. The assignments had to be no longer than 1 page, no smaller than 10-point font, and double-spaced. We had to take a position on hard issues and defend them, all within the limits of 1 page.
Turned in 2-page assignment? He'd rip off the second and read only the first.
Two things he said stick out in my mind:
"2 reports are given to a manager. One is 1 page, the other is 10 pages. The 1-page report gets read, the 10-page report gets skimmed and thrown away".
"All students have practice padding their papers with filler. What you need is practice presenting your opinion succinctly".
It was great practice, endlessly cutting my paper down to its essentials.
- Strunk and White's Elements of Style
- Ayn Rand's The Art of Nonfiction
Of course, one needs something to write about. That, sir, I leave to someone else.A very effective way to learn to write (especially in large group settings) is to be read a passage slowly and to write what you hear. Then, compare what you wrote to how it is actually written. This technique is seldom used in North America but is used in the French language, with all its grammatical rules. I learned more about writing in the two months where I was read passages I had to write than in all the years before. And this was in English. Test yourself. Get a friend to read a passage from a newspaper or book. Write as they read. Then compare. With students, you'll be amazed at how quickly you can identify their weaknesses and where they need to improve just by doing a couple of these exercises. You suddenly see what they're thinking they should write, which is often quite different than what they should be writing. Quash
u need to tellk them to practicr complainiing in teh internet it wurked for me!!!!+++++
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
While working on my BA in English, I helped a few engineering friends/classmates with their papers.
I don't mean to generalize, but one common fault I found in their writing was that they often put way too much thought into what they were writing.
Sure that sounds silly, but they just had an inability to write down information in a manner was easy to read. There was no flow. They're smart people and they often looked at writing as a simple task. Their attitude was usually something like, "I'm an engineer and this is easier than doing problem sets." That mindset held them back IMO. Often their papers read "like stereo instructions." They were full of information, but boring and difficult to sit through.
Mind you, the papers they were writing were for english classes, so they didn't have a whole lot of technical info in them. One classmate, in writing about Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing," expanded the section on defining "nothing" to two full pages. The problem is that she could have made her point with one or two paragraphs at most.
These could have just been the issues with these particular people though. Again, I won't say it's something all engineers have a problem doing. But it was a common thread with the six or seven I had classes with and helped.
--Dave
I would be wary of telling people who need to be able to write things for school or work to emulate professional writers. People who make a living writing not only write well, they tend to be able to write well quickly. When a pro revises, he is working far above the level of spelling and grammar. Those are automatic for him. He is working on structure, style, or, in the case of fiction, on even higher-level abstractions such as conflict and character.
Processes vary among writers; I can only talk about my own in any detail. I have been a technical writer for nearly two decades now. I tend to do between one and three revision passes for most pieces, and sometimes as few as none. I have always written generally correctly-spelled, grammatical first drafts, starting when I was in school. I was that kid you hated who wrote his term paper the night before it was due and got an A on it. In my professional life, some of my first drafts have been published because I was on a very tight deadline and simply didn't have time to do even a single revision. Those pieces were far from my best work, but the words were generally spelled right and the subjects and the verbs mostly agreed, so they weren't a complete professional embarrassment.
When I write, I think in sort of Platonic, ideal sentences that appear fully formed in my mind. They are already grammatical and correctly spelled, so the only really hard part is to transfer them to the word processor without making any errors. This requires no more than sustained attention to the task at hand. (If I don't pay enough attention, I do things like drop words, or misspell them by using the wrong hand to type a letter.) After I've finished, I may do a revision pass to improve the organization and style a bit (and catch the inevitable brain-to-keyboard misfires) before I call it a "first draft" and send it to the client. Additional revisions are mainly to implement changes requested by the client. Usually it takes a couple of these at most.
It is true that most people can eventually produce decent prose with enough revision. So the "don't worry about the spelling and grammar, fix it later" is a useful strategy for someone who needs to do the occasional bit of writing for school or work. But it is by nature not a technique that a professional would use; it is far too basic. I know that if I had to write that way, I'd be in some other line of work. The flip side of this, of course, is that the casual writer who doesn't know where to start probably shouldn't try to emulate full-time professional writers because his skills simply aren't pro-level. (Which is nothing to be ashamed of. All of us have more things we can't do at a professional level than things we can. I take my car to a mechanic and I leave the opera singing to others.)
The best advice I can give for someone using this technique is to pay attention to the mistakes you are correcting when you do your revisions. Take notes if necessary. The next time you have something to write, review what you learned try not to make the same mistakes again. Pay attention when you read, too. Read stuff like Harper's and The New Yorker and try to figure out what makes that Malcolm Gladwell piece on diapers so damn compelling. You can learn a lot just by paying attention to good writing. You won't just notice these things automatically until you get yourself in the habit. Over time, and with a lot of practice and some guidance from others, your writing will probably improve. It may take more or less time for you than for others, but it's worth it either way. Writing is a useful skill to have and is a competitive advantage in nearly any career.
I've coached a comp sci student to improve her prose, and quite successfully too I might add. But that was largely because of her diligence at the task...
My general advice:
1. Write like you speak
A lot of people say this, and I concur: contrarian impulses be damned. Even the most inarticulate programmer is able to show you how their latest application works if they happen to be looking over your shoulder and pointing at the screen. Telling people that the way they speak is OK for the most part helps them to relax, and then the ideas flow more easily.
2. Immerse yourself in good prose
Face it: the prose you read rubs off on you. If you happen to embark on a detailed exegesis of (say) Roderick Chisholm's work, you'll start to write a little more like Chisholm, which may or may not be a good thing!
For my money the standard-bearer for good, clear English prose is The Guardian, the UK newspaper. Read it regularly.
If these are engineers, start them off with what they're comfortable with: emphasize putting together a structure that works. I once had an assignment to write a paper on how to make a PB & J sandwich. I actually flunked it, but it was the first thing that really got me thinking about structure and how to write clearly. Since then the most important thing I've found (not only for writing, but for coding as well) is that practice at trying to find the backbone of what I'm trying to write (the central thought, of which all points are branches) and going from there makes whatever I write much better. One of the prerequisites for doing things that way is knowing what you're talking about so I also absorb material better. All it really takes is practice thinking that way. It took me three years of in-class essays to get to the point where I felt comfortable with it (something I don't think you have time to do), but you can definitely be the PB & J story for the people in your class.
I've always pictured the color of OS zealotry as a sort of bright flamingo pinkish hue
Precis is a much under-rated skill. It enables you to take long documents produced for other purposes and distill the key point applicable to your situation.
If they always imagine a reader asking "why are you telling me this?" and "so what?", then you will enable them to write something that is useful to their audience.
_Style: Toward Clarity and Grace_ teaches by example. It takes real-world examples of the kind of incomphensible writing that leaves us feeling stupid for not understanding it, and rewrites them a bit at a time until you can absorb the meaning just by looking at the text. At each stage of rewrite the book explains the principles at work and uses the horrible example to illustrate one part of the theory of clear writing.
The Williams book is about practical and clear writing, as opposed to Strunk and White which endlessly advocates "forcible" writing(*). Williams will help you write sentences that say what you mean without wasting the reader's brain resources. His book will teach you how to write paragraphs that transmit data instead of leaving the reader asking "Did that have a point?".
After teaching you to write things that have a detectable point, STCaG has a short section about grammar rules. It's short because grammar rules like "its" vs. "it's" are a minority of what you need for clear writing. It's there because your reader will have a better experience if she can simply cp your meaning without having to throw an exception and process it.
I also second the people here who've recommended reading well-written material. If you ever find something that you're reading effortlessly, as if you were in a mind meld with the author. re-read it later as if you were disassembling code. Try to see why it works as well as it does. Try Asimov nonfiction, The Economist, a Quicken manual from 1995 or any other year when the program was still good, or in general anything you don't notice because you instantly absorbed it.
(*) Strunk and White may be useful if you're called upon to write a forcible API reference or a forcible sex manual.
As a Chemistry grad who's had to do QA on documents produced by Engineers, Physicists and CS grads I'd say (in order of seriousness)
1 - The blank paper syndrome
2 - excessively long sentences (but hard and fast rules are difficult to define)
3 - excessively reflexive structures (at sentence, paragraph and section level)
4 - use of jargon without explaination (especially when the doc is aimed at non-tech staff)
5 - bad spelling, e.g stationary instead of stationery, dependant instead of dependent
6 - inventing new words for no obvious reason
My advice would be to have the engineers write out instructions for simple tasks, and work with them to improve the clarity of their writing until it's crisp. For example, many people start a sentence backwards and are loathe to change it even though it sounds weird. Another common problem we have is inconsistant tense in instructions. People always swap between present and future tense.
Really? I do my best writing while inebriated.
You just have to remember to proofread the next day.
> Second, let's say that the chief virtue of good writing is clarity.
And clarity comes with structure, usually. Teach to think and organize before writing something down, and it will improve the resulting text by a huge margin in my experience.
Structure (or the lack thereof) is something you can recognize by just scanning the TOC and the minor headings. It is a bit more difficult with shorter texts, but even there you can distinguish one that presents the information in a reasonable order and one that interleaves sentences in complex ways.
I'd like to comment upon your statement about commas. Although, research might suggest it, but the rules for commas was one of the best things that were taught in high-school. I'm not very good at writing, but simple rules about where to put commas, or other gramatical appliance are really good. Before I was taught about them, I really had no clue of how to use them, and now I do, mostly. :)
So, you may not need to have it as a goal, but one lesson, I believe, would be a wonderful thing to do in such a course.
Almost nine years ago I married one of my English professors. This didn't completely fix my grammar (or my writing) but the private lessons can be quite fun.
haha!! I think that you have a good question there.
At first, don't take as a reference my english, because I know it sucks. I've learned a few things about writing in the last couple of years. When you have a person, an engineer to be more specific, you have to take in your mind that they have a tendency to make simple things complex. This doesn't seem relevant for many of them, but this is the most important barrier to break. That is because they will try to sound smart or complex minded or with a superior level. And that is really BAD when you try to put some things on paper. I think that this may not be new for many reading this, but thinking a lot when writing should lead to disastrous results.
Orthography, vocabulary and grammar are learned in a long way from elementary school, and it will continue to be learned in the years to come. But good writing is only achieved by been sincere when putting things in plain words.
I had met a few writers, most of them with published works, and you should be surprised looking how much MS Word's orthography correction tools help them. But they do the job, and they write great things.
Parent is at +1 now and deserves much more.
Active voice is often easier to read but sometimes it sounds weird:
"A 51% majority elected the President"
and sometimes passive voice puts the reader's attention where it belongs, as in flogic42's example. The most interesting part of that sentence was the White House's near destruction. It is not a sentence about British commandos and it should not put British commandos at the front.
People that read a lot will write better. You learn spelling, grammar and sentence structure by seeing it in use.
So make them read.
I highly recommend the book "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. The first 7 chapters make the whole book worthwhile.
c es/zinsser.htm
Here are the most worthwhile chapters:
http://www.cla.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/general/sour
The rest of the book is okay, but these three chapters are simply inspired.
writing comments on slashdot of course.
(1) "The boy rode the bicycle over rough roads with maximum impact loads of 2.5g at temperatures from 5C noncondensing to 30C with intermittent exposure to a solution of road salt to the store"
(2) "The bicycle was ridden over rough roads with maximum impact loads of 2.5g at temperatures from 5C noncondensing to 30C with intermittent exposure to a solution of road salt by the boy to the store".
If you're designing bicycles then (2) is more appropriate to you. You probably don't care about the boy's boring life. In fact, notice that (2) has pinched off a pseudopod carrying unneeded material and begs us to rewrite it thus:
(3) "The bicycle was ridden over rough roads with maximum impact loads of 2.5g at temperatures from 5C noncondensing to 30C with intermittent exposure to a solution of road salt".
Wow. That's the second Best of Slashdot entry in two days.
Heinlein said that the class that best prepared him for writing was the "Orders" course at the Naval Academy. Each student had to write an imaginary set of orders for the day on a chalkboard. Each student passed when and only when he could write the orders so that none of the other students coulod find a way to misunderstand them. That class covered at least three of your points.
One common thing I've found when I've been writing is that if a sentence starts to read a bit clunky, dont try and patch it - rewrite it! Sometimes as more than one sentence. So many academic papers I read have long, rambling sentences that take too long to parse and understand. Keep it short. Snappy. Make each sentence comprehensible in itself.
It also helps to really study written material. Perhaps get your students to proofread each other's papers?
And never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
To teach the activity of writing, teach that very few can write well spontaneously, that effective writers rewrite everything that they write for others, even short memos of a single sentence. Both successful writers and successful programmers spend 80% of their time rewriting. Readers of the blithe multitudes who do not will spend 80% of their time re-reading, trying to coax value from a defective product.
(Yes! Now the engineers get to play with grammatical analysis tools and run them on their documents, which was a really cool thing back in the just-after-punchcards days
Some engineers are really good at grammar and spelling, and consider computer languages to be fundamentally the same processes of clear and beautiful thought as human languages. Others handle them as entirely different things - can't spell worth beenz and don't grammar thier English, even though they spend all day producing flawless syntax in artificial languages. Those of us in the former group don't really understand the latter, and find their behaviour annoying, but it's such a common pattern that it's obviously a different set of mental structures approaches to information processing or something, on the level of spoken-vs-written-vs-visual focus, as opposed to laziness and stupidity (:-) (Though the folks who don't find grammar and spelling natural should really use spell-checkers...) And I'm not ragging on non-native English speakers here - it's extremely common in native speakers, while the non-native speakers I've worked with often learned formal English grammar in school and don't use many of the more subtle verb forms of colloquial speech, though they do often have problems with spelling.
But as the original article says, grammar and spelling are much different issues than organization of content. There's a real value in teaching engineers how to write.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Before I begin with my opinion on this particular subject matter, I'd like to make it known that I am an Electrical Engineering, and Professional and Technical Writing double major. Take that for whatever it's worth. It doesn't mean this post will be entirely grammatically correct, mostly because I happen to not be an anal engineer.
First of all, since this class is dominated by engineering students, I recomend that there be at least a couple of weeks worth of instruction on how to properly write a lab paper. This is the form of document most engineers will find themselves writing throughout their lives, and most students have no idea how to do it. The first thing that must be instilled upon an engineering student is to unlearn all those pretty grammatical strategies that serve to lengthen documents. Subject redundancies, multiple titles for the same object, and the preperatory phrases. (i.e. "First of all") In addition to the instruction on how to be concise a professor should instruct students on how to properly use passive voice. In a lab report, the use of I, me, we, etc... should be strictly forbidden, thus passive voice becomes the most useful way to convey action while keeping the focus on the subject, not on who is doing it. The main problem with passive voice is that it tends to become convoluted and confusing if misused. Thus instruction is necessary. Placement of graphs, and order of topics should also be covered.
Beyond the instruction of lab writing, students should learn how to write towards an audience. A lot of this topic will run counter to what I said about lab reports, so be sure to let students know that labs are an animal all their own and etiquette in lab reports should be largely ignored in most other documents. Writing to an audience is crucial to a budding engineer, especially those engineers who lack certain social graces. Is the reader going to be a boss? A consumer? The marketing department? Fellow engineers? An engineer needs to learn how to adress each of these people, and learn how to be best understood. Intruction should be given on how to properly set up a traditional letter, how to properly use grammar in an e-mail, and how to dumb down the technical jargon of instructions so that they can be disseminated to the masses. Have students practice writing several types of document. It is my belief that a writing course should be taught with a generous helping of in and out of class writing assignments, to galvanize the concepts taught in lectures.
Teach resume writing... Good god most people, angineers and otherwise, can't write a resume to save their life...
Motivation. Most engineers can't write. It's a fact, and given the intelligence and capabilities of most engineers, a rather sad fact. Now the easiest motivation to use is by intilling the fact that engineers that can write get paid more. The average boost in paycheck for an engineer with an english or tech writing minor is $5000 a year. Not so bad for an extra 4 or 5 courses. It will also help in job hunting after leaving college. Engineers who can write, and deal well with people are rarities that are gobbled up by companies in a hurry. It gives them a competitive edge, and minimizes the need for additional employees just to act as liason between the engineers and the marketing/administration department.
I have yet to find a way to make myself, nevermind anyone else, review and revise my work. Good luck with that.
I'd be a little more helpful in general but I'm writing this at 4:30AM and I think I want to sleep. If the OP or anyone else has any question on style or grammer in their technical writing feel free to shoot me an e-mail. Most of my work is in grant proposals and an upcoming instruction manual for engineering programs and professors on incorporating team building and tech writing into first and second year college engineering curriculum.(Written in conjuction with The Birch Group, LLC.)
Please, try not to sound so stupid...
... so put down all hackneyed writers you've been reading, the Rand and Heinlen novels and all the other sci-fi crap, and read something by a non-nerd.
I'm not an engineer, but I am a pretty good writer. I attribute it to reading. Since I was a little kid, I've always read for pleasure. I don't think it matters too much what you read, as long as the sentences are well-constructed. Which is virtually every author. Most sci-fi authors can't write worth a damn, but their fundamentals are fine. People don't learn language so much as acquire it (I'm a linguistics major), and so something like reading which is semi-passive (you're not paying attention to the words and structures - just the plots) is perfect for absorbing good writing skills.
Like most engineers, my writing skills were underdeveloped when I finished my master thesis. Then I became a Ph. D. student and learning to write acceptable texts in english became a necessity. I was lucky to have a supervisor who was a) a good writer b) a good peer reviewer. I was doing various things wrong systematically. Once that is pointed out to you and you understand why, you can then make it a point to do it right, always.
I'm sure there's some problems left, I'm a non native english speaker and will never become as fluent as native speakers. Since then I've supervised students myself and seen them make the same mistakes as I did. Some of these people have Ph. D.'s now. I know several people who attended writing courses as well (which is usually a more structured form of peer review). Also there is plenty of material out there for self study. And of course learning by example works well to: read!
As for things to do in courses is of course organizing proper peer review for written stuff. That is hard and takes up time. This why engineers write so poorly: their teachers prefer not to spend to much time on such technicalities as writing. Many master thesises for example are extremely poorly written but still good enough, apparently, for the student to get a title.
The big pitfall for engineers is to assume that writing is a creative process. It isn't, it is mostly about applying techniques and testing sentences and paragraphs against simple grammar and stylistic rules. It's the content that requires the creativity, not the form. Writer's block is about having nothing to write about rather than being unable to write. Once you figure that out, it is just a matter of picking up enough knowledge so that you can apply it.
Jilles
If I RTFM and read "The gostak distims the doshes", then the writer was Not Nice to leave out definitions. But maybe it's a document for people who deal with gostaks all the time and can be expected to know the word. In any event, there's no harm to readers except the wasted time typing "define:gostak" into Google.
The real crime is if a later sentence says "The freeble distims the doshes". Now the writer has set off a combinatorial explosion in the mind of the reader, who suddenly needs to keep track of the questions:
o is a gostak a special case of a freeble?
o is a freeble a special case of a gostak?
o can freebles and gostaks distim doshes at the same time safely?
o are freebles different from gostaks in the kind of doshes they distim?
o how do I tell what kind of dosh any given dosh is?
o if I have a gostak installed, do I need to install a freeble to get my doshes distimmed?
o if I have a gostak installed, do I need to uninstall my freeble to prevent conflicts?
o if a gostak and a freeble are installed together, what combinations of version numbers work?
o do doshes need to be distimmed twice, once by the gostak and once by the freeble?
o in what order?
The reader has to consider all those questions while trying to fix a broken system, anxious that a wrong move will make it even more broken.
If the writer meant "freeble" as a synonym for "gostak" then he should spend eternity in Nerd Hell, where all the computers are IBM mainframes and all the beer is American.
Superstitions???? In what way will supernatural bad-luck fall upon someone for using passive voice.
I don't like regular/continuous use of the passive voice because it's weak, limp, and wussy-ish.
Stand up, get a spine and tell us what happened, or what needs to happen.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
it does not matter if you write you stuff in quick hash, to redo it later. many of the best writers in history did this. there were also many that took their time, with emphasis on style, but they also had to redo many things. a professional writer has 2 things an engineer will never have. 1 an editor. this is not just for spelling and grammar (who gives a shit about that anymore?) but also about style and organization of ideas. 2 choice of topic. engineers do not have this luxury, and have to write about technical, non artistic, even boring things that would tax many of the better writers in history. can u imagine shakespeare writing the help files for windows, or spencer about stress strain curves, tesla coils etc?
the best thing you can teach engineers is to think in english if they want to talk/write in english. this is really th key to any language. but before this you need to do much. 1 never rely on grammar checkers. 2 spellcheckers will betray you; their, there, they're not able to think. 3 read. lots. if in england read british books, if in austalia read aussie, if in usa... well u get the idea,
so i guess my point is not to look for one method to fit all, but come up with a way that works for the way a person thinks, harder in the beginning, but pays off in the long run with more disciplined thinking
Most writing I've seen tends to have a high fluff-to-content ratio. It appears to stem from insecure writers' attempts to sound sophisticated.
Writing is supposed to be about communicating as clearly as possible, so teach your students to be concise.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Any topic that is too PC, is religious or dogmatic or insults the value systems of the students is going to generate resentment. If they can write to the resentment and use the anger, fine. But usually students understand the teachers ideology as the Party Line, stifling energy.
At one point in college they made us engineers write "how to" manuals for putting on a coat or turning on a computer (harder back then) thinking that was more copacetic than old farty poems. It was boring, too.
Nowadays we have email and web content. Get them to write long involved stories or explanations that will be sent out or published on the web. The vision of real people reading your stuff can be energizing. This is the 21st century, composition has become textual content.
An assignment based on fantasy and/or science fiction has the possibility of inspiring in a more flexible way. The romantically inclined can write about interplanetary romance, the techno-geeks can write about solar sails and nuclear fusion, and the frat boys can write about beer in space, if they are so inclined.
A writing assignment is like the premise of a sitcom or weekly cop show. Each week some new characters come into the airport, hospital, police station or the office and have their little drama and leave. A flexible premise allows different screenwriters to shovel in their own themes and plots.
I knew of a student who tried to write an essay about how to smoke pot (this was the sixties) and came within a nanometer of being kicked out of school. Tell them the rules early. Like maybe it has to be in English, written, with text and not comic book drawings, and no profanity. Or whatever your rules are.
People who post on forums are motivated to write a lot and get practice. There's a little crackpot in everybody and if you can get to it (punch the right buttons) maybe you can turn on the spigot of text and get them practicing.
Software engineers are, for some reason, the most logorrheac of all techies. They write endlessly about the internal and inter-personal process of writing software. I think it all comes from having too much keyboard time. Make sure all your students know how to touch type -- it widens the gates.
People learn by seeing good examples and bad examples of the same paragraph. They also learn by modifying their own text over and over. If you know how to teach patience and how to teach them to accept criticism gratefully then, uh, you don't need any help from me.
I18N == Intergalacticization
Taking AP Comp in high school, combined with strict english teachers, is what does the trick. Of course, I took AP comp, and had strict english teachers...
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
The best writing style to avoid active or passive sentences remains E-prime. Just prohibit the use of the verb 'to-be' and your message comes out a lot clearer. In this case: 'The boy rides the bike to the store'. In this case the sentences mostly describe action or relations, instead of the abolutes. Using the verb 'to be' makes the writer either allseeing or a passive victim. Using the previous example a passive sentence would become: 'The bike is ridden to the store by the boy.'
t ml/e-prime.html
E-prime helps me a lot in making my technical reports a lot more understandable and clearer.
For more information see:
http://www.wonderfulwritingskillsunhandbook.com/h
http://www.angelfire.com/nd/danscorpio/ep2.html/
I am told Rudyard Kipling used to go through his prose, striking out all the adjectives and adverbs, and then putting back the ones that were absolutely necessary. This works for technical writing too: it is easy to put in qualifiers such as 'probable', 'fairly', 'somewhat' in your text to tone down unsafe statements, but most of them don't convey anything useful. Plus, it helps focus you on what you are really saying.
Simple us usually safe.
I would throw in my hat for another book in a similar vain: On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, by William K. Zinsser, that is just about to be released again. (ISBN: 0060891548) It's an excellent guide that makes one think about the cluttered way one often writes.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
What makes me cringe is nauseating misuse of the language by people who majored / are majoring in English.
I'm a tech. If I can repeatedly show someone up on what is supposed to be their own turf, with zero preparation on my part, what am I supposed to think about their ability to do anything else?
Huh? Oh, nothing, boss. Funny, I was just thinking about you.
When I first started using IRC in '91, I made the conscience decision to never use emoticons. I took it as a challenge to express myself without using them. In 15 years, I still haven't used emoticons. My grammar and spelling may still suck, but it taught me to be a little more complete in my writing.
1. I think you are correct about Grammer. I have no idea if the first two sentances above are gramatically correct. But they reflect English as it is commonly used. I think they flow well. I don't think they are ambiguous. Arguments about whether the second sentance lacks a subject or has some other heinous grammatical fault seem to me pointless. (and yes, I know that a Grammar Nazi would probably want that to be "...seem to me to be pointless".]
2. In 1958 or 1959, I took a wonderful course at UCLA called English 106S -- English for Science and Engineering Students. It was one of about four college courses I suffered through that wasn't either tedious, badly presented, or both. I really enjoyed it even though it involved taking an hour every other day out of play/work time to write a 300 word essay.
The course started with a class period devoted to discussing a word. I believe it was "measurement". Homework: write 300 words on measurement. Next class. (Some of the) students read their essays. We discussed them. Homework: write 300 words on measurement. Next class. (Some of the) students read their essays. We discussed them. Homework: write 300 words on measurement. ... This went on for three or four weeks.
Points successfully made by that exercise:
3. Scientists, Engineers, and Programmers face a problem not faced by politicians and lawyers. The former sometimes really need to express thoughts clearly while latter only have to sound like they are expressing themselves clearly. English often doesn't make clear expression easy. 'And' and 'or' are a lot mushier than they seem. "Vistors must turn off Cell Phones or Improvised Explosive Devices". I've got both, Do I get to pick which I turn off? Is that 'or' inclusive or exclusive? If I try to clarify things, I may get into trouble with the lack of an explict convention in English for evaluating sentances with both 'and' and 'or'. Left to Right? So, "A and B or C" always evaluates to "(A and B) or C"? Not Hardly. Even 'not' can be tricky. I'm told that in some languages "Isn't the door closed?" means exactly the same thing as "Is the door open?" English isn't one of those languages. ... and pronouns ... There are perfectly adequate rules for using them. But people often ignore those rules without problems. Need to be a bit more diligent in technical writing. Not because adhering to rules is important, but because not building stuff that doesn't work is important.
etc, etc, All that stuff should be addressed, no?
4. Frequently, I encounter writing done by people for whom English is a second language. Some of them express themselves clearly. Some don't. This is entirely independent of whether they occasionally stumble over English grammar, case, tense, gender, voice or our appalling spelling conventions. My conclusion: clarity may well be largely independent of grammer and spelling.
Might be fun to present the class with a paragraph or two written clearly by a non-native speaker who has some difficulties with English and contrast them with the same material garbled by someone who writes correctly, but not clearly..
5. It might also be fun to present some examples of really awful writing. I once had an example of a paragraph by an computer scientist noted for his turgid style. I'm nearly certain it said "Sometimes you have to use big words because small ones won't do the job". I just said that in 14 words -- most of them 1 syllable. He took about 300 words -- most of them polysyllables. I suspect the guy had good things to say. But, man, did he need an editor.
Good Luck. I hope your students enjoy your class.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
> which experiences, practices, and pressures you think have
> made you a better writer?
Honest criticism of my flaws.
Don't condone bad spelling/grammar, disorganization, or unclear writing.
This may be the first time in their lives that a teacher hasn't tolerated horrible writing. These guys will be honestly surprised that their work isn't "good enough".
Will you get into trouble if you fail half the class?
The best way to improve writing is to give meaningful feedback to students. It seems so obvious to me, but it (almost) never happens. IMHO the best class I ever took was an introduction to philosophy class my junior year of high school, and of course, it was taught by the best teacher I have ever had. It was also, perhaps surprisingly, the lowest course grade I got in all of high school. Every single assignment I got back I without a doubt earned the grade written on it. Every mistake I made in my papers, such as lack of detail or even too much detail, was clearly annotated in the margins. I was then able to change what I did wrong. If there was ever a doubt on something I talked to the teacher and he clearly told me how to improve it.
Now four years later I am an engineering student at UT. The problem with *every* writing class I have taken in college is the focus of *assessment* of writing, not improvement. My first semester in college I was very studious and even met with the TA before the first paper was due in my Introduction to Philosophy class. When I met with her she, concisely, like my paper and gave me no recommendations for improvement. When I got my grade back, at the bottom of the last page she had written "good" and an 88. That was it, no other comments of explanation. I can't fix what I don't know they want me to change.
I also just want to articulate that that comments have to be meaningful, and detailed. In my upper-division technical writing class the most memorable assignment handed back to me was 5 pages long, exactly, which was the maximum length for the assignment. There were about two sentences of scribbled feedback that amounted to "not enough detail." The paper was written by my four person group, and after talking to the professor, none of us still understood how we could have more detail without exceeding the page count.
Bottom line, at the college level, I don't think there is any way to improve writing aside from individually looking at what is done wrong and fixing it. Everyone knows "how" to write on a conceptual level, and every student consequently writes in a way he thinks is correct. Unless problematic issues are pin-pointed, no college writing course will improve writing. Bottom line is that if you want a good writing class, you have to be willing to give detailed and meaningful feedback.
One of the biggest problems with teaching people to write is getting them to read what they have written
Last year I attended an excellent 2 day writing course for science. Besides sessions on tools and techniques, we workshopped a piece of our own writing. The critique was done by our class mates (based on what we have learned) and on day two we presented an improved version. It was instructive to see how something that you thought was clear, was not always clear at all. Most of us were guilty of including "extraneous neat stuff" that was of technical interest, but not at all relevant to the audience of our writing.
I find journalists are really good value for technical writing, they have a straight to the point focus that seems to work well with such classes.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I am not known for being a good writer so take my advice with a grain of salt.
Consider exposing them to some E-Prime. The engineers might like it, a lot. Some of them may already be struggling to express themselves as accurately and truthfully as E-Prime does. Let them go for it. The other problems people have brought up (ownership, passive voice) are largely nuked by a non-dogmatic use this subset of the English language.
Now speaking of dogmatic, what is your "cultural studies" section of the course? Is this semi-idiotic of fully idiotic? Seriously why are language studies so unimportant that it's overrun my cultural studies and symbolic studies? The cultural studies I've seen overtaking English classes is pitched to interest uninterested undergrads is the most degrading fucking groupthink crap thought ever. I haven't seen it turn anybody on who wasn't turned on already, I seen it turn many silently off, and of course made most bullshitters who get by writing bullshit. Everybody knows what cultural studies is in this context. It does enormous damage to any ideology, or more importantly tools you want to expose people to or give them. I know it's probably mandated by the curriculum but if you can tone that cultural studies shit down, build any rationality left in it up and show the shrewdest example of symbolic interpretation, not the slock unconvincing and uninspiring shit normally shown in that crap component of the course.
I'm learning a lot from my experiences from wikipedia. I think it would be a great idea to give assignments out to students of the form "go and create an article of topic ###### for wikipedia".
Give them the usual policies and then at the end, mark all the assignments and combine them into a better article for ######.
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
Hopefully someone else has made this point already:
If you want your students to write well, you must do things to get them to read well. For engineers, this means having them read several technical reports, business memos, product specifications, etc. It is very much a "learn by example" situation.
I am a man of const int sorrows
Would be not to solicit Slashdot for writing help. And help with teaching writing? Oh, shudder.
"THE WHITEHOUSE WAS ALMOST BURNED DOWN!" -- most significant point.
"Who would do such a thing?"
"When...?"
"Why...?"
Etc.
In my experience, it helps a lot to make students read each other's papers, grade them and comment on them. Then grade their comments - it forces students to do honest job. Seeing examples of good (clear) and bad (confusing) writing is a very useful experience, or so my students say.
Here's a hint. Join the current technology.
/.; this is not wordprocessed; and I further give a crap about the final result here, as this is transient in nature, not a finished product.
/. posts, as these are excellent examples of how your writing can make you look retarded.
Most people write as if they are using a typewriter. In other words, they type their paragraphs in paragraph form. This makes it more difficult to edit. Not only because the surrounding text can hide errors, but because it's simply not using the wordprocessor technology efficiently.
This, of course, does not apply to arenas like this, where you are forced to intersperse actual English with HTML.
Note: I did little of this with this post because of the cumbersomeness of posting on
For instance:
If your desire is to write more than a simple sentence, break up your sentences into one-liners.
This paragraph is an example of that approach.
That way, the sentences can be rearranged quickly and each one can be inspected for correctness.
They can be moved up or down with ease, adjusting the flow of ideas until they feel correct.
A short list of dos and don'ts follows:
Turn on the spellchecker and keep adding the words it does not contain.
Turn off most (Microsoft's) grammar checkers, as they (it) suck.
Use color to indicate areas you have concerns about.
Never think you can write something without one or more edit-throughs.
Never think that you can edit your own writing with adequate efficacy.
Learn how to friggin' capitalize correctly.
Oh, yeah. A final P.S. Learn words. It's horrible reading technical writing that sounds like a third grader trying to talk like an adult. Along that line, do stress that grammar is important.
You might give an out of class assignment of having them read
Audience and Purpose.
p.s. the whole concept of paragraphs and sentences would be nice too, but that's hopeless. I have too many folks with graduate degrees who don't understand.
then you tell them what you want them to learn, and last you tell them what they should have learned.
I agree that bold mini-headlines can help draw attention to the important highlights. I also agree that poor grammar is terribly distracting, as is too much passive voice (which is hard to understand even for reasonably well spoken folks).
The who, what, where, when, how rule used by beginning reporters can also be helpful.
But the "I tell you three times" rule is one of the best. To tell the story three times you have to be concise, and you have to be sure what you're trying to say.
One class isn't nearly enough if they don't have a clue. Assigning reading will help, reading your stuff out loud (even quietly to yourself) helps a lot!
JR in WV
Specific. The market is flooded with wonderful resources. Why not put the ball in the students' court? Give as the first assignment the task of identifying a couple of reasonable writing resources, and discussing their relative merits? That way, when you hand back the first assignment you can summarize their ideas. This also tells them, from the start, that you care about this.
General. The answer depends on class size.
In a small class, the best scheme is to refer them to some standard materials (Strunk and White is effective and popular) and to get them writing. Then mark up their work with individual-based hints. Probably you'll find it helpful to invent a key system, e.g. I write an encircled T in the margin to indicate a weak transition near an underlined spot in the text. (After you've graded a few papers, your key system will solidify. If you supplement it with examples, you'll have a guide that you can hand the students on the first day, and it will have the advantage of being calibrated to the particular class at hand.)
It's also a good idea to have office hours, since sometimes a quick example can save the day ... but you'll need to distribute such help fairly, so that one individual doesn't take time from all the others.
(For tiny classes, you can suggest that they hand in work a second time, after following your editorial advice. But I doubt that anyone teaches such classes; this is more for one-on-one work with graduate students.)
For a large class, say hundreds of students, then clearly your hands are tied. The simple answer is that you're not going to be able to help them very much. My advice is to point out writing resources on the first day, and then to simply grade the work. The larger the class, the briefer must be your comments on the writing. You may find it helpful to just mark up the English of the first paragraph, for example. You may not have time to do even this, so you may have to just assign a grade for communication with no explanation ... you have to wonder why they are paying tuition for such an overcrowded school, however.
Fail those who don't learn to write, as you would fail those who do not learn the relevant engineering skills, because writing reports is a relevant skill. Nobody is happy to fail students, but it's not all on you, mate. The Registrar let them into your school without the requisite skills. The President together with the Dean set the faculty hiring practices that led to an overfull class. You can't work 24/7.
If you are going to teach engineers to wright maybe you should learn first.
'put commas) doesn't improve compliance.'
'Doesn't' is a slang expression for 'does not'. It has no place in a request for help with formal writing.
'Second, let's say that the chief virtue of good writing is clarity.'
If you are going to speak of writing clearly then you should learn what clarity means.
Try this:
'Second, engineers must write clear concise sentences.'
'While some kinds of writing prize being strategically elliptical, and others prize brisk and clever metaphor, '
What does this mean in clear concise English?
If you has said:
'While some writers prize being elliptical, and others prize brisk and clever metaphor,'
I would know what you meant.
Or if you had said:
'While some style of writing values strategically elliptical content and others prize brisk and clever metaphor, '
I would know what you meant.
'my students aren't writing grant'
Lets see here:
'aren't' is slang for 'are not' but is 'are not' the correct verb phrase in the first place?
'are not' means that your students are not currently doing this. That is reasonable students do not write grant applications, ever. If what you are trying to say is in the future most of your students will not ever writhe grant applications then you should use the verb expression ?most of my students' future writing will not be in the realm of grant applications, patents, or poems?
But what you have given here is an example of incompetence [your first sentence of this paragraph] backed up with incompetence [your second sentence of the paragraph] compounded with incompetence [your usage of slang in formal writing].
My suggestion is if you are going to teach English writing learn to write correct first.
at usf, mechanical engineering lab II is no longer a required course to earn a BSChE (which, i think, is a big mistake). but it was when i went there.
i learned more about the proper technique for writing a lab report from Dr. Wilkinson than i learned in any other technical writing class i took.
sure, it was damn near impossible to earn an 'a' in his lab, but the time spent was well worth it. even now, some 15 years later, i still refer back to his class and those labs when preparing a report.
funny how the most informative writing class i had was a lab and not technical writing.
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
The key to writing cogently is brevity. If you force yourself to reduce the length of your writing, you also force yourself to order and discuss the content clearly. Assign them a 2 page paper on a complex topic. Then make them rewrite it as a paragraph, retaining all the relevant content from the two page paper. Exercises like this are how professional writers get better.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Latex is good for writing because the output looks good and the work gets similar to programming which makes things easier.
I write a lot. It may not be the best, but it does get results and people comment that they like it. The one course I had that influenced my writing was a course on reading theory. You tend to write differently when you realized all the work the reader has to go through to follow your train of thought. Long sentences suck. Long narative lists really suck. Passive voice sucks. Our teacher gave us an article to read that was horrible; the organization and structrure were torture to get through, and in the end you had no clue what the author was trying to tell you. That said, the rest of the course was spent looking for ways to take a really pathetic block of words and turn them into something meaningful to a reader. I guess having to edit a lot of material builds skill too. Grammar is good, but think like the reader when you write. ay
As engineer when writing about disasters and not wanting to access blame always use the passive voice.
Here is an example:
Active: Airman Dunderhead put the powered-up board onto the metal table. The table shorted out the board which caused a fire which burned down the laboratory.
Passive: The powered-up board was placed on the metal table resulting in a short which caused the fire in which the laboratory burned to the ground.
See, now Airman Dunderhead doesn't get into trouble.
In the real world the rule is to do what works. When writing contracts one needs strict adherance to rules of grammer. Pronouns which refer to the wrong noun often cause major problems. This is especially true with both contracts and with technical directions.
IE: Hold the nail. When you nod your head, I'll hit it with a hammer.
Yes, it is a joke, but it shows the problem.
Clear writing is a joy to read. But clear writing doesn't always suit the purposes and agendas necessary to get funding and to continue work in a technical field.
Where ever you work there is always a jargon involved. Learn to use it. In Government you need to use the buzz words.
As a professional writer and editor (as well as an engineer/programmer in a past life), I have to weigh in on this grammar business.
The relative importance of grammar varies according to target audience/readership. An audience of engineers doesn't give a fat hairy ray's ass about grammar; they are interested only in information/facts. However, an audience of business leaders/managers, arts majors, etc. pay stricter attention to gammar and construction aesthetics, and will judge the writer's knowledge (perhaps even intelligence) based on the writing.
The fairness of the latter notwithstanding, it remains a fact of importance when communicating ideas. Two engineering proposals might express identical ideas, but the best written one is chosen almost invariably because the perception is that the writer "knows what he is talking about."
Do not discount the importance of grammar and good writing in an engineering environment. Think of it this way: If two pieces of code accomplish the same task, but one is bloated and top-heavy with overhead and the other is simple, elegant, and straightforward, which would an engineer label "good" code? And, were that engineer a manager, which would he buy? In like manner, which of two written proposals (with identical ideas) would a non-engineer be more likely to accept, the well-written or the poorly-written one?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Comparing writing to programming isn't going to work very good. I think it is a very good idea to just write what comes to you the first time around. It's going to be more natural, and you're not going to hung up agonizing over every word you choose. Then, when you go back, you might end up re-writing entire paragraphs, but you've already got your whole point across and don't have to worry about word choice so much.
The biggest problem I have seen with engineers writing is lack of structure.
A report often consists of a set of statements with a confused conclusion at the end.
I found the pyramid principle by Barbara Minto very helpful.
http://www.barbaraminto.com/
The top down structure she recommends has strong parallels with good coding technique.
Hukked on fonixx reely werkt fur me!.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
Ultimately good writing comes from two practices, reading lots of well-written material, and then writing with a sensitivity to the quality of the product.
Unfortunately the modern experience of passive, predigested video-based entertainment does not lead people down this path.
If you could get only those across, you'd make a world of difference. "aptitude install dict dictd dict-gazetteer dict-gcide dict-jargon dict-moby-thesaurus dict-vera"
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
For engineers, treat it like a programming or design problem; they need to realize that, just like Java or C++ programs have a global structure, so do papers. Structure is not enough for great writing, but it's good enough to set them on the right path. If they think it's all inspiration and talent, they're never gonna make it.
Beyond that, they need lots of practice and feedback.
All the people I know who can write well are people who read extensively for pleasure. As far as I'm concerned, outside of Mathematical pursuits, the majority of education should be replaced by efforts to whet people's interest to read, and then not harassing them with lectures. The average lecturer, while by no means a stupid person, is far less eloquent or erudite than some of those whose thoughts one can encounter by way of the written english word. Try to convince your students that they have something to gain by reading Jane Austen, or Mark Twain. Ideally, go back in time and convince them of this when they're nine or ten, and install enough gumption in them to ignore much of their 'schooling' in favor of their education.
"Top down, bottom up, lather, rinse, repeat!"
First, come up with an overall structure that embodies your goal; second, try to implement that structure using primitives you are sure of, third, identify problems, fourth, try to fix them, and fifth, do it all over using what you learned in the prior pass.
Top down doesn't "stink," but it's only one step of a multistep process.
--MarkusQ
Have them write a help system and user guide for an application, possibly an Open Source project which needs it.
Documentation needs to be clear, concise, and complete. There is enough style dfference between online help and tutorial/user guide to give some choice in how to write. Choose an application that would interest most students.
Another possibility is Wikipedia articles. Articles also need to be short, clear, and concise. Some may need to be created from scrathc and some edited. There is a wide range of topics, but you could choose a subset, like "biology," which would include everything from biochemistry-related topics to biographies of scientists.
In both cases, the students are *doing* something, which has a better chance of engaging interest than anything else. In both cases, students can have a bit of choice in what to write.
Yet another one is writing pamphlets or copy for a local charity or free newspaper. Newspaper articles follow a well-defined format and must be (you guessed it) clear, concise, and complete.
I hate to say it, but if you can't write (and spell) reasonably well by the first year of college, you're doomed.
The one thing that helps writing skills is READING. If kids read voraciously in their early years, the art of writing is learned painlessly.
Self awareness - try it!
Also unfortunately, you can't force yourself to read because you think it's good for you. You read if you want, otherwise you do not. I read because I enjoy it, not because of some higher duty.
I am not sure what the stats are, but how many successful authors have also not been voracious readers?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I went to a college that had a strong bias toward fiction and "creative writing" in their English program.
That program was wholly inappropriate for me. I am a scientist and an engineer, and my writing needs focus exclusively on non-fiction.
As a result, college did almost nothing to help me become a better writer. I started learning to write after I left college, when I finally had an environment that was appropriate for me to develop as a writer.
I think it's scandalous that I didn't have any chance to write non-fiction in my college English program. It was clear to me that the needs of scientists and engineers would not be met until there was a major cultural shift in the professional education establishment. Now, 25 years later, I wonder if that cultural shift has yet to begin.
Some related resources of mine are at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-style. html, based on experiences editing student papers. See also http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-bugs.h tml.
Both of those sentences are in the active voice.
'Is riding' is the imperfect tense of the verb 'to ride'. It indicates continuing action. It describes the boy's state between the time when he starts riding the bike and the time when he reaches the store.
'Rode' is the simple past tense of 'to ride'. It indicates a single completed action. It describes the boy's state after he reaches the store.
The passsive voice inverts the actor and the thing acted upon, and often ignores the actor entirely: The bike was ridden to the store.
The passive voice emphasizes the action over the actor. If we only care how the bike got to the store (this one was ridden, that one was shipped in a truck), using the passive is fine. Usually, though, readers want to know who did something.
In business communication, the passive voice is a great way of hiding high-level muddleheadedness. It gives managers a way to talk about what needs to be done without ever narrowing things down to a specific group of people who should do it, or assigning them the resources they'll need to do the job.
In general, using the passive suggests that you don't really know what you're saying, yet. You have a general idea, but haven't spent enough time thinking about it to get down to specifics. If you know for a fact that only the actions matter (one of the bike's went through Mrs. Grumpy's garden, there are only two bikes present, one was ridden, the other came in a truck) go ahead and use the passive. Otherwise, keep working on the idea until you can express it in 'X does Y' terms.
While I'm not an engineer (rather a software developer), I've noticed the attitude about writing is largely the same. "I'm not a writing major, I'm a(an) [insert technical vocation here]." I can't vouch for your curriculum, but I would say there are few changes you could make that would make better writers out of these students. If they don't recognize the importance of effective communication, because they don't think they do or will ever need to, your best efforts will just go in one ear and out the other.
Hey, I work in the US's oldest writing center, and I've taught writing since 1991. Strunk & White is useful because it is a key into the world of proscriptive grammar. We can talk about descriptive grammars, fluency, natural methods of language acquisition all we want--I myself am an avant-garde poet committed to process and organicism--but IF YOU DO NOT KNOW THE RULES OF PROSCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR YOU WILL STILL BE JUDGED BY THEM NO MATTER WHAT LINGUISTS AND POETS THINK. My students who are no nonnative speakers find S&W useful because it begins to give them advice about STYLE. No discussion on slashdot is worthwhile, or seems really meant to be so, but if this conversation were to be worthwhile, we'd do well to distinguish carefully between writing process, correctness, and style. Writing is a complicated business, but with all due respect, a linguist offering advice on writing is like letting a primatologist pick your wedding dress-- far too many levels of abstraction away from the real practice. Oh, some of my best friends are linguists, so this isn't some anti-linguist bias.
I think one of the best ways to learn how to write well is to read well-written articles. Find the best journal articles, etc. you can find - that demonstrate how to communicate a complicated idea well. Have the students read them and critique them. Then give them some poorly written articles that demonstrate what not to do - have them critique them. Then have them write a couple articles themselves. Practice/critique/re-write helps learn how to communicate well.
Anything other than a general interest topic (like the 1960s, ideas about the American West, or fairy tales) isn't an option.
These are TERRIBLE subjects for engineers. Do you really want someone that enjoys deep, scientific analysis to suffer trying to analyze the 1960s, or the American West, or fairy tales?
And analyze he will! Or fail trying.
Some engineers simply won't put up with all the fuzzy thinking that's permitted in the humanities. They'll try to become social scientists first before writing the first sentence.
Remember, they're going to be engineers designing million dollar structures and systems. People MAY DIE if these engineers make a mistake. They need to know the science first. They need to understand their area thoroughly before proceeding.
Now you come along and ask them to engineer a paper about an enormous subject like the 1960s. Just how do you expect to them to be able to do that?So, in their desperation, they give you a mediocre paper back or nothing at all.
Remember your audience. You're not dealing with poets.
When I was a high school student and an undergrad and had an essay to write, I would make it a practice (after the research and before I started to write) to read an essay by either George Bernard Shaw or Mark Twain. Both of them write extremely well and with crystal clarity, economy of words, and are very convincing. Then, with that ringing in my ears, I would start to write and found that it flowed more smoothly and came out better. Good editions of Shaw's plays contain the introductory essays through which he conveys why he chose to write the play, and there are collections of Mark Twain's essays available. Of course, others may suggest other authors, but these are the ones I used.
As to punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss is both clear and very entertaining, something I would have thought impossible until I read it.
The most important rule in The Elements of Style is:
Omit needless words.
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
Get the words on paper. Then go through testing adjectives and adverbs. If the meaning is the same without the extra word, take it out.
First off, clarity will always die a bloody death at the pen of someone with poor grammar. You can not dismiss grammar. If they have poor grammar by college, you have to wonder what they've been doing with their education to date. Odds are they aren't going to make the best engineers. Unless you are some engineering genius, no company is going to let you design systems which you can't document well on your own. I haven't seen many engineers with personal secretaries that do their technical writing.
Obviously this would beg a title change for a lot of programmers who deem themselves 'software engineers'. The minority who actually spend as much time on design and documentation as punching in code are worthy of the name. The rest are glorified date entry clerks. I'm not trolling, just calling a spade a spade.
Short answer on how to become a good writer: read as many books as you can get your hands on. Not the latest D&D mass market paper back. Read Orwell's essays to learn how to write with brevity and clarity for example. Read editorials in major market newspapers to learn how to express a concept in limited space. Look at what you read with a critical eye and identify the mechanical processes the writer uses to accomplish the goal.
Please teach them the difference between "their" and "they're". I'm a engineer/manager and can't tell you how many resumes I see and reject because they lack even basic good grammar. In an environment where technical documentation needs to be concice and accurate this is critical.
Yo dood like dunt no what yer talking bout eh, but like totally if u want to learn yer studunts sumpin, den Jew can't gib dem to much infermation so like don't gib dem all dem apostrofee liddle rules Ed said "er uh" or Jew woan teach dem nudding bout some larger issues. In sum dem areas teachurs god to mantane dem dissiplun mo dan dey kin teach. Uddr me doan no no teachers widdout grammur skeels. Nebber dem less, most childruns watch dem two much Dee tell a vision. And not dem read bookz or magazines, most of which amwrittem poor ennyway, such am dem manuals, magazines, newspaper articules am written very poorly. Itza said sitch u eight shun, but I not know whut doo. I am a teacher, and my grammar skills are just fine. Your essay is poorly orgnanized and wanders from the point. Do not confuse rant with reason.
Get fucked.
No no no no no no no! If I didn't say that clearly enough, NO!
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the use of passive sentences. Why does Microsoft word complain incessantly about them? They are an accepted part of the English language, and are widely used in academic texts the world over. The only country that seems to have a problem with them is the USA, and I for one am not lowering the standard of my writing to cater for one country.
I'm an ESL teacher. My better students understand passive sentences, although they would struggle to write them.
I have always felt that I learned more from watching things break, than by watching things work smoothly. Thus, while grammar rules and instructions are important; I feel they can be taught better by showing what happens when these rules are violated. Otherwise, one only has a bunch of rules and very little background as to why they're useful for conveying information.
It is also quite instructional to show how something is grammatically correct, yet still ambiguous or confusing. From an engineer's perspective, the goal is communication. Liberal Arts students like to experiment with language, playing with the medium to see where it takes them. Engineers want language to "just work" for them ---just as liberal arts majors want their computers to "just work" for them. Don't teach fancy stuff. Don't teach too many writing devices. Just teach the basics. That's what they want. That's what they need. The rest will come in time if it is needed.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
I took a technical writing class recently, which covered many of those ideas, especially clear communication, which is probably the most important thing an engineer can learn in a writing class. (And, unlike grammar, it actually can be taught, at east somewhat, in a semester.)
We also covered a lot of theoretical junk in my class, which I don't really remember, but I do remember one book which really helped a lot:
Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, by Joseph Williams
It's all about simple, clear, concise, effective writing. In addition (and this is the key part for engineers) Williams teaches a series of extremely specific rules, which can be applied systematically and judged objectively. His rules are a little too detailed and structured for some people, but engineers will appreciate and react very well to them.
So, for example, if you take a clumsy sentence like:
"Despite beliefs to the contrary, it is argued that Vista will be on time."
This book explains not only that it's unclear (who believes what? or argues what?), but also explains why it's unclear (actions are used in place of subjects, and the real subjects have been dropped), and explains how to fix it (make the actions into verbs, and put the real subject back in), like so:
"Even though people who actually have a clue believe that Vista will be late, Microsoft representatives still argue that it will be on time."
In the class I took, it was the only book I kept after the class was over, and I've referred to it many times since.
>> Unfortunatly this inability to split what you write about into short blocks of text that address seperate concerns is worrying in an engineer.
Having been tripped up by Slashdot's default HTML formatting myself, I'd say that the GP *did* split what they wrote into short blocks of text that address separate concerns.
Oh, and you misspelled "unfortunately."
I would not start the code (grammer) until all the basic structure is in place.
Get your students to read. Read technical books, technical articles, good manuals, bad manuals. Read short stories, novels - everything. Reading teaches you about what works and what doesn't work.
Once they've read, talk about it. That will get them to realise what they now know about writing.
I know that you said that you don't have the class time to teach remedial grammar, but correcting other people's mistakes on the Wikipedia is a good crash course in the basic mechanics of writing. The Wikipedia also values a clear and direct writing style, which you mentioned as a goal of the class. Since the topic of the class is cultural studies, it might be that there isn't much information available on the Wikipedia, giving your class an opportunity to create new articles. Since providing sources to back up what you just said is a good way of convincing the other side in an argument (and there are *plenty* of those on the Wikipedia), contributing to the Wikipedia encourages good researching skills - a must for engineers, business types, and scholars in the humanities.
As far as encouraging engineering types to read, well, as an engineering student turned computer repair technician turned history/philosophy student, I've read science fiction as far back as I can remember. I also read the encyclopedia for fun as a child, and I still have been known to random walk the Wikipedia until the wee hours of the morning. If your students have managed to miss the reading bug until now, I'm not sure what to tell you, but if they also were encyclopedia readers as kids, they'll probably enjoy the Wikipedia, at least as users instead of contributors.
Back in the day (of BBSs) I ran several continuing stories on my board, I think it was one of the best things for my writing. It was fun to write something that wasn't work related (or computers for that matter) and also a challenge, such as trying to write a party tavern discussion or hand to hand combat, it certinaly was a fun syntatic/grammatic excersize.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The research paper was read in committee and it was determined to be in passive voice. Much irritation was had by all participants, whereupon it was advocated that papers soliticed in the future be written in a more active matter. Moreover, it was generally agreed that passive voice only lends an appearance of intelligence where it make actually be lacking. Such were the conclusions of this undertaking.
</satire>
Now I feel dirty. *scrub* *scrub* But it won't come off! ACK!
Seriously, though, passive voice can be very dangerous. I authored and maintained a set of specs for portions of a major SoC component at work. Despite all my training, I slipped into passive voice for large sections of text in the specs. Because I was specifying three modules that worked together to form a memory system, the division of labor and the interfaces between these modules is very important. I found myself slipping into passive voice in these areas though, because it was easier.
Why? Passive voice allowed me to dodge specifying the final division of labor among the modules. But, if you casually read the spec, you'd have this false sense that you knew how everything worked. We didn't realize just how vague and incomplete the specs were until we went to go try to build the machine. I ended up rewriting large portions of the text with fairly minor wording changes, but the result was a much crisper, clearer and in the end more complete spec.
The danger of writing in passive voice is that the writer eliminates the actor. In this case, I was specifying not only what needed to be done, but who does it. When I wrote in passive voice, I was only specifying what needed to be done, which led to some interesting problems.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Lots of good stuff has already been recommended, so I'll add what I haven't seen here, apart from joining the voices that recommend writing for your audience; never let that though leave your mind.
Precision is key, whether practicing technical or creative writing. It is a truism that every word counts. Whether you are expounding about 'a thing', 'the thing', 'each thing', or 'every thing', you must be precise about which thingy you are on about.
To be sure, precision is not an easy writing skill to learn; you need to be able to ruthlessly excise fluff from your scribblings, and reread your own words from the perspective of others.
While I agree with the OP that grammar is not critical at the first stage, basic punctuation is essential - the well known 'eats shoots and leaves' example proves that point.
Metaphor might be left aside in the early stages, but English is an idiomatic language and much of its colour comes from those idioms.
From what you have written, you are teaching folk who will be writing from positions of professional authority. That being so, metaphor is unlikely to be an issue, but common faults such as tautology and cliches will be - their use diminishes the authority of writer in the reader's mind.
Now to a specific point of personal pedantry: The clearest divide that I see between authoritative and also ran writing is in the use of prepositions.
In your own case you said, "First, let's head a couple wagons off at the pass". In this case, the missing preposition after 'couple' is commonly seen on the internet - it's kinda slang brung over from speech - but would be edited immediately (both in the US and elsewhere). No-one would say, 'a pride lions' or 'a swarm bees'.
That wasn't meant as an ad hominem attack, but it served to make my point. The list of abuse of/in/with propositions is long, but, used correctly, they add precision to a text.
If I were in your shoes, I would want to make clear to my students that there is a broad range of topics to keep in mind when writing, but that mastery isn't necessary to communicate authoritatively. However, to ignore them will result in writing that never gains the air of authority and will thus be treated as such.
One final suggestion: midmaps. For folk who find difficulty in moving their ideas from mind to paper, mindmaps are often a boon.
Marc
I think there has to be an emphasis on technical writing's purpose.
The purpose is to enable someone to do in one hour what it may have taken the author one hundred hours to do. To accomplish this, the actual, final answer should be emphasized, with an appendix for any relevent trade-offs that ruled out alternative paths.
It was hard for me to accept that readers do not care about the 99 hours of wasted effort, but only care about the 1 hour of 'how-to' effort. Once I did, writing got a lot easier because I had fewer words to write and fewer ideas to organize.
I trace part of this to TV. When I grew up, I watched a lot of TV. The goal of a TV show is to keep the viewer watching commercials, so shows continually withheld information across breaks. Right or wrong, that is how I started writing, and would save the 'punch-line' until the end of the document.
Learn to write what will help you get (and keep) the largest returns from your efforts as an engineer:
- Business and/or grant proposals
- Job descriptions and performance reviews
- Budgets
- Grant applications
- Patents
- Love letters
Get your tagline off my lawn.
Sure, teach them basic grammar and (please) basic punctuation, but most importantly - "Voice". Voice will teach them how to make dry, technical documents easier to read, not to mention giving them a style which makes the act of writing more interesting.
As long as we're on the subject, to fix a pet peeve of mine, please teach them how a paragraph is used. A little "Reader Centric" focus will go a long way.
Thanks for the effort of teaching them. In the long run, we're all better off for your help !
"[Timothy] Leary once told me that he thought that the best single piece of advice he could give to a writer was to either write stoned and edit sober, or vice versa."
2 _archive.as
-William Gibson, Blog http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003011
1) Find Crayon
2) Hold Crayon Firmly in Fist
The fact that this course exists, that these questions need to be asked, points at one huge problem: school quality in the USA.
People who are preparing for tertiary education are not required to perform well in complex matriculation exams, but on some relatively simple (in testing terms) scholastic aptitude tests. High schools do not generally focus on rhetoric, essay forms and writing style and thus it becomes a gap at the university level.
There is ample opportunity, given the desire, to prepare pupils in high schools for university education, or to have different streams for those hoping for vocational training. If you want dense, relevant courses in universities, demand a high quality result from high schools.
The type of writing I do the most of is actually professional emails. That is followed by powerpoint presentations. The key to emails is to get your point across quickly and simply rather than approaching it in a round about manner, (particularly when many people will be reading the email on blackberries and the like). Powerpoint presentations are very much about communicating very complex technical issues in every-day human terms.
Now the papers I did during school that had the most signifigant impact on my writing were my lab reports during a particular physics class. We were allowed 5 pages for the report and however much we wanted in appendixes. We also got a 1 page executive summary in the front. It taught us to summarize what we did to one paragraph and put it in the executive summary with a paragraph or two of our conclusions. It also taught us to get to the point in the report. The report said what we did and what happened up front. It followed with a more detailed description of the steps with only the most critical data in the report its self. (The rest of the data went into the 40 or 50 pages of appendixes.) We kept all subjectivity out of the report until the conclusions at the end.
That type of writing I have found to be important in my daily work. To be able to say "This is the decision that is needed, here are the facts, and here is my recommendation". Most of my coworkers prefer to spend pages writing about where things started, whats happened since then, who did what, bla bla bla bla bla. The simple fact is leadership wants to know what they need to do, why they need to do it, and what you think it is they should do. The rest can go in backup. If they are interested enough, they'll look there.
I do security
Never use a big word when a dimunitive one will do.
I've just finished the first phase of training 100 Engineers, from Pakistan and India, to become technical writers for the leading telecom in China. As others have said, resist the urge to bear down on grammar. That can come in later, as you do one-on-one reviews and edits with their own work.
This groups tend to look at this new 'skill' as just another project. I used a 200 page corporate style guide I wrote as the main course material, and found ways to gain their interest. The first step is to get them all on the same page, so to speak - show them how much they already know that can be re-used and make sure you know as much as they do, or you'll lose from the start. Train them up collectively at the beginning, using the group dynamic to keep them all moving along. I ran a total of three workshops, as they came into China in batches. Each workshop lasted two weeks, and averaged 25 ~30 engineers.
I'm at phase 2 with them now, which means breaking them into two skill levels (3 if you count the cut group), and targetting them separately. This phase will last for at least three more months.
They will push for 'practicals' (examples), but the only way to make this work is to have their content on hand for review. This means OJT, which they will resist at the start, but learn to appreciate later. I stayed away from all but the most basic examples. If you pick one for one student, you'll put the others to sleep. Save this method for later.
The most interesting thing about this was learning just how many skills they already had that could be leveraged towards making them technical writers. They have good discipline and know how to study, so be sure you are ready to keep up with them.
One of the best classes I had in college was a creative writing class focused on science fiction; first off it was interesting to me while teaching me elements of proper writing. The reading we did was about the technical side of writing like plot and character. But we had to have something writing for almost every class, just a page or two and we would pass them around to comment on. With one or two read in front of the class and discussed.
Creative writing is a bit different than technical or business writing and in this case you might want to focus on those. Doing oddball projects like write a history of the world in one page for CEOs, and nuclear physics for 3-year-olds help focus your writers on length and audience limitations.
One of the best pieces of advice I've gotten on business writing was from my father-in-law who used to work for Ford. It was-Business people are busy, so fit it on one page and leave the details to an appendix.
Grond can breach it. Grond can breach anything.
Covered on /. a while back: http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/21/ 1828202/
This is the book that I keep on my desk at work for when ever I need to write a manual, requirements doc, etc.
A key to getting engineers to learn to write better is some level of passion about their work, and of course, in coding, the most writing that the engineer actually needs is maybe enough to learn how to pseudo-code. The trick, then, is to give the engineer something involving writing to be passionate about. As most engineers spend their recreational time watching the latest films and games, fanfiction is a key outlet and possibly the main source of enjoyment an engineer will get out of recreational writing.
Unlike a blog/livejournal, fanfiction encourages cooperative writing and reviewing, giving the engineer feedback and the opportunity to improve. In fact, a subset of fanfiction writers, the 'betas', often serve as teachers to the less experienced and can give one-on-one coaching to new writers.
For obvious reasons, fanfiction is best done while young and less burdened with real life, but it's the best way I've seen yet to teach writing.
There used to be great course/exam run in UK schools called 'Use of English' - unfortunately I think the last year it ran was 1988.
The focus of the course was very much on journalism and editing, rather than creative or essay writing. It largely entailed taking extracts and either summarising them to 200 words, or padding them. These were great skills to develop - being able to edit someone else's work gives perspective on your own writing.
The only thing I question is the constant pressure on software developers to improve various unrelated skills. No company would hire someone on a software engineer's salary to write documentation, yet many spend man-years of developer time in doing so.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
I've had lots of "how to write" classes, and I was fortunate that my first teachers were very good at what they did. The first and best thing I learned was the five-paragraph outline paper. This techinque carried me through two college degrees, and made it easy to write anything from two page essays to 30-page term papers. Paragraph 1 consists of an opening statement; three statements in support of that statement; and the restatement of your thesis (opening sentence). Paragraphs 2-4 are expansion of the three supporting statements. Each gets one paragraph of at least three sentences. Paragraph 5 is a replay of the opening paragraph. Restate the thesis and ideas and in support of it, and end with a declarative sentence of your findings. Reading aloud and letting students review each others' papers is another good tool. Strunk and White's Elements of Style and the AP Stylebook are invaluable aids. Reader's Digest monthly magazine, as well as its' condensed book series, contain the best editing. It is instructive to read the condensed version followed by the original, and discuss how the editing changed the story.
(I wanted just to say that one word five times, but the "compression filter" didn't like it. Not a reader, apparently.)
I have already mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but I'll restate the point here. I my search for a good writing guide for improving technical writing, I repeatedly found that older books were much easier to understand than the ones from the last decade or so. Apart from the "learn the rules before breaking them" mantra, the prescriptive and proscriptive style of the older books is often complemented by rational explanations of the rules - something that people with an inclination for science and engineering require for and equate with learning said rules. In other words, it a lot easier for me to analyze and rationalize a simplistic prescriptive rule than a series of examples of usage by "good writers". Whereas, apparently, many people in humanities learn best from considering many examples, I find a sequence of logically-connected rules to be easier to understand.
So I would suggest that these differences in the style of explanation and learning between the humanities and science/engineering communities are one of the reasons why books like Elements of Style are still useful. They may indeed not teach me to write the great american novel, but the terse and reader-oriented style they prescribe is an excellent match for most writing I have to do as a scientist.
Linguistically, both forms have the same deep structure. Moreover, this means there exists a transformational lexical rule such that they can both yield the same phrase structure.
On what basis is it claimed that one structure is better than the other? Instructors hectored this particular descriptive grammatical preference for ages; however, they have offered insufficent argument---only invoking anecdotes to show the overall superiority of the active voice.
Aside from the computational complexity of actually parsing natural language, perhaps, the electronic grammer checkers of tomorrow ought to transform one form to the other, as to end this pedantic torture.
I agree with you. The bias against the passive voice has turned into a reflex, with people not understanding the reason behind the bias in the first place. The passive voice has its uses, and those who are unquestioningly against it do not really understand grammar.
It'd be interesting to see an actual breakdown of the coders who can write well in terms of what languages they use. I wonder if Perl programmers write sloppier code than C++ programmers. Or, perhaps grammar/clear writing correlates to understandable code.
I see both programs and natural language as means to communicate information. I can write code that communicates the proper information to the parser, but not to any sane person (without a good deal of deciphering); people can do the same with natural language. Perhaps it's a matter of respect to the recipient: are you going to put yourself in the other person's shoes during composition?
Personally, the only way I can tolerate english is if it is taight with an emphasis on its practical use. Engineers hate theory unless they can immediately grasp the practical application of the theory. When every you teach something, like the importance of active voice for instance, make sure you explain why it is important for them to know/use. For instance, use of the active voice makes for less verbose language and is more engaging to the reader because of its use of active verbs. That's the only way you'll get engineers to listen to what you have to say.
One of my current projects, along with craming for finals, is editing a presentation on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance that will be presented at a liberal arts college. Obviously I'm adjusting content for my audience. But there I just skipped the magic step, assessing the audience.
Writing to your audience is pretty hard if you don't know how to dial in who you audience is. For example, my partner and I looked at what we had and said, "Okay, there will be mostly science people at this symposium, but there will be a lot of social science people and a non-science people can wander through. Combine with the fact that we had to shrink our poster down, we decided to assume that anyone who really cared about the math will aleady know about 80% of background. That space was used for broad, conceptual explantions of theory.
Where as when this was presented a few weeks ago at a dedicated research symposium, we went buck-wild on the math, because we knew that the people there would understand and appreciate the nuance.
How did we know who would like what? Other than just looking at the groups and thinking, I'm not sure, but that is an area that deserves thought.
I think the major obstacle to most engineers learning effective writing is that they have to be convinced it's a worthwhile goal.
:-)
In my experience, most engineers certainly have the ability to write competently (if not spectacularly) -- they just don't think it's worth the time to focus on, or they don't think it's as valuable as spending the time on technical pursuits, or they simply don't have an appreciation of what actually constitutes effective written communication.
Sell them on the value proposition of learning to communicate effectively in written form, and the rest is all easy. (At least in comparison
Read Bugs in Writing by Lyn Dupré. I learned more from this one book in one semester at college than my previous 15 years of English, Writing and composition classes combined.
Question everything
Since you're working with engineers who get paid to sweat the details, spend a week on cleaning up common grammatical mistakes. You may be the first person to clearly and simply describe how to do the basics correctly. If you don't like teaching grammar because you find it dull, boring, and awful, then be up front about it. But don't pretend it's not an important basic writing skill, or delude yourself into thinking that your students don't need to know it.
Others have already commented on structure and its relation to content. My take is that you should spend up to half of your alloted writing time working on an outline. Your engineering students are used to breaking down big problems into smaller ones, and figuring out how to solve the small problems one at a time. Spend at least a week learning how to outline topics. There are a couple basic outlines that everyone can use: problem / cause / solution, past / present / future. Work with each of these. You can also use thesis / antithesis / synthesis, though this starts to go off into hypothetical, squishy areas that can't be readily outlined by engineers.
Your students should spend several weeks on voice. Active voice should be used in nearly all writing. It is cleaner, smoother, and easier to read. Others have commented on clean sentence structure and I won't repeat their advice.
Optionally, but strongly recommended, is giving a presentation to a small group. Forget the standing in front of the whole class with a projector; let students present to a small group of four or five other students. Only one activity is forbidden: reading verbatim from a document or set of slides. Anything else goes. Most engineers will face peer critique at some point in their careers, and learning how to present information and take suggestions back is critical.
Good luck.
1. On Writing Well, William Zinsser4 73650-2323300?v=glance&n=283155
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060006641/102-3
2. The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
http://www.bartleby.com/141/
make sure they understand that those things do matter and need to be fixed.
This is, I think, an incredibly important point. There is a very interesting parallel between good programmers (specifically, programmers who produce high quality, maintainable code), and good writers: they care. A good programmer understands that the goal of writing code isn't *just* to solve the problem at hand. A good programmer cares about things like form and style, maintainability and readability. Similarly, a good writer realizes that writing is about more than just recording ideas. It's about creating something that's clear, concise, and expressive.
Thus, if you want to create a good writer, you must start off by convincing them that it *matters*. Everything you write, whether it be a technical document or some code you've created, is an expression of yourself, and hence is something you should take great pride in. I even use this principle when authoring emails: everthing I write is drafted, proofread, reorganized, and proofread again before I allow other eyes to see it, because I realize that my writing influences the way people view me and my work.
I'm reminded of that scene in Shawshank Redemption:
One-line reply: N e v e r snob your students.
_______________________________________________
One detail you should never overlook is your attitude towards students.
In my first year of uni, we had a compulsory class "english literature for engineers", supposedly to help our essay-writing. The 'Teacher'* sat on her literary throne and talked down on us humble engineers and computer scientists as if we were unable to articulate a simple sentence. Most people who took that module considered their intelligence to be at least above average and were used to following demanding science modules. All of them were annoyed by the attitude of the teacher.
She used to repeat any sentence that the unlucky student spoke out without structuring it perfectly in his head, and of course after while we started correcting her whenever she slipped up. Here I will stress again that this was not an introductory module to the english language for dummies but an essay-writing module for engineers. If it were a 'this is a ball, this is dog' kind of class then correcting verbal speech would be compulsory, but imagine that you've been speaking english for 16 out of your 18 language-speaking years and being mocked like you forgot the 'a' in 'this is a ball'. Not cool.
At the end of the last class, the teacher asked us what we thought of this module and whether it helped us. After considerable sneering from the whole group, a student from the back of the class said something along the lines of:
"Do you know, when you're trying to figure out how to split a Word document into two columns, but can't, and you eventually ask a geek for help, and s/he spits out the answer full of arrogance and superiority? Same feeling, take away 'asking' and the 'help received' bits."
Whatever and whoever you teach, students will not receive you if you snob them. Guaranteed. This applies especially to classes orgnized by one department but intended for another department's student population, like a computer science academic having to teach BASIC to law students or an english lit professor having to teach 'essay writing 101' to ENG and CS students.
*I am well aware that members of the teaching staff in further higher education are not referred to as 'teacher'. If you didn't get it after you read the whole text, it was a failed pun.
Maybe you can't correct all the bad grammar in one semester, but please, at least make sure they know the difference between less and fewer.
Heard any good sigs lately?
There's A Student's Introduction to English Grammar, by the same authors.
Are you adequate?
The best strategy on those fronts is a habitual reading of clearly-formatted texts and scrupulous multi-stage review of everything you write, both of which are somewhat outside the scope of a semester-long class.
You could try to impress this point on the students. One value of a class like this is improving their writing ability. Another value is improving their ability to improve their own writing down the road.
Aside from grammar, what I've found most useful is peer review. Knowing that my peers will be reading a piece of text dramatically improves my desire to produce quality writing. At the same time, correcting others' writing improves my skills at critiquing my own writing and draws my attention to errors that I might be making myself. Being able to see the difference between a great essay, a mediocre essay, and a lousy essay will go a long way towards convincing them that they should put some effort in beyond the first draft. You can also get a lot more write-review cycles in because you don't have to read them all yourself.
It got rid of a lot of the fear, and it got me started.
I now write considerably better than I talk, but that's another story.
Your first sentence 62 words long. I stopped reading right there.
Also, your whole post is one solid paragraph. Have you tried to reading it aloud ? You would be gasping for your breath before you got halfway.
:wq
I found that the author of the above tome was hemmorhaging at the keyboard.
It was painful to look at, never mind read. I never got through more that a part of it. This person should NOT think s/he is an effective communicator.
Apart from the writing/spelling dichotomy of English, word order also makes a big difference. (English is an SVO (Subject Verb Object) language.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The failure of others to understand the intent of my writing.
Perhaps you could divide the students into small groups. Within each group, each student would critique the other students' drafts. That might identity areas in the drafts that are in need of revision. (This is not unlike the code reviews that are sometimes used in software development.)
BTW, a minor note on grammar:
[N]ative English speakers aren't rule-based parsers, so teaching grammatical rules (like when to use the subjunctive or where to put commas) doesn't improve compliance.
Shouldn't that be "such as when" instead of "like when?"
Having just taken the AP Literature and Composition and the AP History test and the ACT + writing exams, highschool students these days, at least the high achieving ones that take such standardized tests, are rarely taught that style of writing (ideas first, then structure). This is because of the limited amount of time on those tests in which you have to write. The writing section on those 2 AP tests is approximately 2 hours long, with three essays within those 2 hours. Unless you're superman there is absolutely no time to waste with proofreading and the such. It pretty much has to be perfect the second it leaves your pen and hits the paper.
Plus, you score higher with the occasional sophisticated word (vernacular, juxtaposed etc...) and "literary Trophe" such as metaphors and chiasmus get you extra points as well.
I realize the question was about college level writing courses, but In A Nutshell, that is what highschoolers are being taught. It's important to note that those who will go on to become engineering students such as the ones mentioned will for the most part be the ones taking those AP classes in highschool, so the most important thing is: Make sure that at some point, it is emphasized that in order to sound good it is oftentimes appropriate to back the level of writing down to that of a news article or highschool level for purposes of clarity. I read a proposal for upgrading my schools WAN from ---------------- and the was quite a bit of confusing language in it that just wasn't necessary. It was a waste of my time and brainpower (and most importantly, the system administrators!) trying to process those sentences. (I am a student assistant for the IT Managers at my school.)
Personally, I think that humanities requirements are just the university intellectual establishment's way of dealing with the people they fear most (engineers and scientists) by doing what they do best: indoctrinating. People ought to learn to write from reading. Mind you, there's a lot of crap out there that people read, but boxes of "great" books can be bought for five bucks. Reading them takes will, curiosity, and and open mind. You don't have to go to college to be told how to think about things. Books about that can be bought cheaply as well.
If your class is engineer heavy, then you need to use a few of these:
Manuals
Tutorials
Lab reports
Reviews
Internal technical documentation (code comments for programmers, notes for mechanical engineers, etc), which are primarily aimed at people lookiong for information on specific things in a project
Corporate documents
Each of these targets a different audience (or multiple audiences). Try getting people to cover the same topic in different ways (a topic like tying shoelaces can become interesting).
I would avoid the general topics for descriptive, essay type assignments. Create what if scenarios and ask the students to develop those.
A habit of reading books helps a lot. The more you read, the better your vocabulary and the better your judgement of the appropriate language to be used.
Remember that for your students, precision in writing will be important when communicating with their peers, but the form of language used will be more important when communicating with the rest of humanity. They will need to learn both.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Do you know what irony is?
Yeah, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron.
My other first post is car post.
The real problem with most writing is not grammar and spelling; anybody can (but obviously doesn't) learn those rules by reading some books and charts. The real problem is the organization of ideas, which includes paragraphs, sentence order, amount of crap to include in each sentence, etc. The most important writing process I have is making an outline. My software of choice for this is OmniOutliner, but the process works just as well with just a piece of paper.
Making a complete multi-level outline of a piece of writing before it's written will almost always ensure that its clarity is much higher than just attacking it head-on in prose form. For example, my work requires me to write software, write design documents about the software, and give presentations about the software to completely non-technical people who need to understand the technical issues. The only way I can accomplish this well is by creating outlines before I ever start writing code, paragraphs, or presentation slides. I'm convinced that my work comes out several times better than it would without a similar preparation and organization method.
Essentially, your students should learn to write an entire paper as just an outline first. If the outline is complete enough, then the paper will make sense before it's even written. If it's not quite there yet, modifying an outline is much easier than modifying a bunch of text. Once somebody's outline is all ready, he can then turn it into paragraphs and start worrying about grammar and spelling. This final step will be fairly straightforward, thanks to all the support that the outline will provide.
Some other posts mentioned Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style". Yes. And as also posted elsewhere, it's available online for free: http://www.bartleby.com/141/
I've enjoyed and learned a lot from Bugs in Writing. It gets mixed reviews - it has an unorthodox style that some people like (I do) and some profoundly dislike. I have personally found it very useful in dealing particular constructions that are often confusing and problematic.
I have never subscribed to this "just put your ideas down now; worry about the grammar later" school of thought. Such a process makes a chore of having to go back and correct the ideas to make them presentable, as if grammar and other finer points of writing were unnecessary burdens imposed by the teacher and other excessively picky individuals.
I don't think that's the intent. The intent is to focus on one problem at a time. First, what to say, then, how to say it.
I hope that you don't just code any old program and then go back later to fix compilation errors.
No, but when doing any kind of algorithmic work (and not just utilizing an API), I often write pseudo-code first, which is the equivalent of "just put your ideas down now". Of course, I do it on paper, since I already know how the compiler's going to feel about it.
People that write in passive voice often miss the message. The reader needs to know who did what, or who does what. It is very easy for people to write long but vague messages with passive voice (either intentionally or unintensionally). Good instructions and good reporting of events requires active voice.
William Zinnser's On Writing Well has helped me the most, with Strunk and White's The Elements of Style second.
I'm no engineer, but I am a technician. I mention that fact because, as a technician, I'm often left "holding the bag" when it comes to dealing with the "aftermath" of an engineer's creations - both good and bad. One problem I've often seen in technical manuals, specs, and writeups is that the engineers and/or tech writers will sometimes write "over a person's head" by introducing a lot of technical jargon or high-level concepts while forgetting just who their audience happens to be. You have to remember that sometimes you're not writing for another engineer; your audience may be a CEO or maybe even "Joe Six-Pack" the consumer. Sometimes your audience may be a technician charged with fixing or otherwise dealing with your design if/when it breaks. I can't tell you how many times I've been completely frustrated by having to follow a poorly-written set of schematics (the things I've vowed to do to some of those engineers if I ever met then in a dark alley would put me in prison for life). I guess all I'm really saying is, try to remember who's going to be reading what you're trying to put out there.
This space for rent!
$hecky,
Examining your own writing may help you teach writing better. Condensing your 5 paragraphs into 2 by eliminating information unecessary to the reader is a good start. Engineers can grasp the economic style.
Let's look at the first two sentences.
"I teach several sections of a first-year writing course at a small, private college where most of the students are, or plan to be, some flavor of engineer. Right now, I'm planning next year's courses and wondering what has (and hasn't) helped Slashdot readers become better writers."
Does it matter to the reader that:
You teach one or several sections?
Your school is small or private?
Does "flavor of" add anything?
What is the difference between "Right now," and "Now?"
"I teach writing to mostly engineers or engineering students and was wondering what has helped the technically-minded readers of Slashdot to become better writers.
A 50% reduction of reading and writing.
the infinitive "to the store"
Prepositional phrase. But you knew that. Nice troll, AC.
I could. In programming, one also finds that things like security must be done in a separate pass to be done well.
Your example is an exteremely poor one. Security must be considered and "done" from the very start. It will more often than not be full of holes if it is "done in a separate pass."
That's why folks who try to just spit out secure code end up with things like Windows, while folks who do separate security audit passes have a much better track record of achieving their goal.
Again, your example is wrong. Windows security sucks because security was not considred and implemented from the very start. Instead, they tried to do it as an add-on in a separate pass, just as you advocate. Also note that you've underhandedly switched from the task of implementing security to the task of auditing it, to promote this nonsense argument of yours.
His argument is fine, but his example sucks (for the reasons you stated).
The reason I'd recommend using the quick and sloppy first draft method is simply that, when you're done with the first draft, you have something you can work with. It can be a pain in the ass to correct it, but if you try to make everything right the first time you may not get it done at all.
Obviously not everyone will be able to work that way.
reeding and right is tue hard. It much easy to give up let someone do it.
Engineers are humans too. Engage them and teach them like you teach everyone else.
Strunk & White's Elements of Style is superb. Another superb book is Style - Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace by Joseph Williams.
I used to hate writing, because I did it so badly. I found this book in the MIT bookstore, where it was the only required book for a freshman writing class. After working with it, I still hate writing, but I can do it adequately.
Williams claims that your reader will probably think your writing is clear & direct when they can get the 'story' (who is doing what) easily, without stumbling over words or backtracking. His book is a workbook that teaches you how to make it easy for the reader, both within a sentence and in how meaning flows from one sentence to the next.
It also teaches, step by step, how to turn a pile of gnarled institutionalized CYA jargonized crap writing into something that Strunk & White could live with.
How about A) teaching engineers or all scientists for that matter to write papers such that others can actually reproduce the results or B) teaching engineering professors to teach PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS of all the theory so you might actually be able to graduate and get a job?
If writing is going to be a required course, it ought to at least benefit the students
Software piracy is victimless theft.
You know, in high school I had a teacher who would check for passive voice by simply scanning the page for "be" verbs. I think you two might be using the same grammar reference.
I figured out many years after highschool that the reason why so few people understand how to write:
I think it is quite possible that most of the English teachers in North America know less about technical writing or writing essays in the social sciences than the average engineering undergrad. Infact, English teachers are the least qualified people to teach you how to write.
PhysEd teachers have a better chance of teaching you how to write!
(The most annoying part of communicating with my coworkers is translating English written with Chineese grammar into English with English grammar.)
i know that you're asking for writing for engineers, but everyone should read "Writing to Win" by Stephen Stark. It's meant for lawyers, but a lot of the tips and tricks should apply to engineers assuming that engineers want to write in a clear, straightfoward fashion with no bells and wistles.
I recently changed the way I write as the size of the papers I was writing achieved critical mass and I could no longer just wing it -- specifically, I was writing my first scientific paper for publication. I started by writing down the main sections of my paper: Introduction; Experiment 1 Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion; Experiment 2 Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion; General Discussion. Then in each section I wrote down the main points in logical order and decided that these would be the topic sentences of my paragraphs. Then I filled in each paragraph after each topic sentence with supporting text and further details. It made a huge difference in keeping the whole paper's organization manageable. In fact, it made writing a bit like programming. Having the sections enumerated, and the logical flow so clear (as a result of the topic sentences), made it easy to see where changes needed to be made, logic tightened up, further details added, etc. I highly recommend making an outline and filling in the details to anyone writing a paper. In fact, I liked the outline form so much that it almost broke my heart to do away with the outline and submit it in paper form. I found myself thinking that all papers should be written in, and available for reading, in this outline form, as it makes it much easier to navigate large papers.
passive voice hides the actor. If you engineer for anything like a government you need to use pasive voice to avoid legal problems. Use active voice to impress, but passive voice to report.
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
I guess you approve of irony.
-Peter
The only way to become a good writer is to write a lot, and have a better writer (or at least proof-reader) around to point out what you did wrong, and how to fix it.
I should point out here that I phrased that as I did deliberately: having someone point out "what you could have done better" or "where you could use some work" doesn't help. Most engineering and comp-sci students have a big enough ego that telling them they screwed up isn't going to do them any damage.
When I got to college, I thought I was a pretty good writer: I'd gotten good grades in english, I read a lot, and so on. Then I went to a college where writing was considered to be the most important thing in any field -- you can always look up facts, but if you can't communicate, you're lost. So we'd all hand in our papers, feeling pretty proud of ourselves, and next class we'd get them back with comments like "I have no idea what you were trying to say. Rewrite this." or "This is garbage. Rewrite it." Once you got past the first comment, every sentence the prof didn't like would be underlined, with comments on what needed to be changed. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation were marked, but what they cared most about was clarity: how could this paragraph be made more effective? Would it be better if these sentences were reversed? How about just removing them?
These days, I'm inclined to think my writing isn't very good. I can look back at things I wrote later on at that college, and see that what I'm writing now is pretty poor compared to most of what I wrote there... but it's still worlds better than what I see handed in for Junior writing classes at the University where I work now. So tell your students when their writing is crap, then tell them how to make it better. They'll thank you in the long run.
I recommend the banishment of the term 'impact'. Whatever happened to 'effect' and 'affect'? One also needs to stress that 'I played good' is not correct. 'I played well' is. Also, one should use 'May I help you?' rather than 'Can I help you?'
Just wondering if you teach at HMC. I graduated a bit over 20 years ago and then went on to law school after working as an engineer for a few years. Interestingly, I found legal analysis and drafting contracts quite similar to the programming and debugging process. My suggestions would parrellel those of several below: treat writing as an engineering problem. Determine purpose, audience, space available, and desired outcome; but I'd add 'error handling'. By this last item I mean a writer should assume that the reader will not read carefully. There should be entry points and road signs to get the reader back on track to the goal. Most often in professional writing this means subheadings and short intro statements at strategic points. Of course this does not apply to fiction. The only other point I'd add is to remind writers to vary sentence structure.
Nick
Unfortunately, a lot of engineers write just like you describe. It's not a problem that they are writing clear, readable prose. What is a problem is that nobody has taught them that scientific and engineering writing has a specific structure that they need to obey, a structure that goes beyond your average college essay.
For example, you say "Hit the important conclusions in the first few sentences so your reader will read them.". Well, no, that's wrong. If you put your conclusions in the first few sentences of the paper, many people will likely not read them at all because a reader of a scientific or engineering article expects the conclusions to be at the end (and, in a certain limited sense, in the abstract, not the paper). The first few sentences of an engineering and scientific paper should be the motivation; readers familiar with the motivation for the work will simply never read those sentences.
If you move things around according to what you think will be most "interesting" for the reader, you have readers waste their time hunting all over your paper trying to find the information they need, or more likely, just skip/reject it. So, write clear, readable prose, but in addition obey the structural rules for scientific and engineering writing.
Horsefeathers.
The word "riding" can be a gerund, but it is not functioning as one here. Gerunds act as nouns in sentences, not as adjectives. That is part of the definition of gerund.
Helping verb? What's the main verb it's helping then?
I think the term you're looking for here is linking verb. We can build a sentence from a subject, a linking verb, and a participle acting as a predicate adjective. For instance, we can say:
He is charming.
So, having cleaned up the terminology, I again say horsefeathers. "Riding" is not acting as an adjective here. We can tack on an another adjective to my sentence and say:
The boy is charming and handsome.
When we tack on an adjective to the original sentence, it doesn't work so well.
The boy is riding to the store and handsome.
It doesn't work because "riding" isn't an adjective here.
-Dave
Using the imperitive here would be wrong though, as it implicitly has the subject as the second person. In this case, it is telling the person who is reading it to enter the transistor size.
"Supply transistors in this field" is analogous to "You should/must supply transistors in this field".
Passive voice makes the most sense for this context, as it does in most technical writing situations. Why are you adverse to using it?
A long time ago a State University produced electrical engineers who were top notch circuit solvers and power suppliers; however, their employers complained that they couldn't write. The Uni was proactive. The Uni declared that EEs must complete four years of English to be declared an EE.
I did my homework for English for Engineers. As an older grad -- who spent the previous seven years writing professionally and returned to college for a second degree -- I was rather proud of my homework.
The professor used my homework as an example of how NOT to write. The professor sterilized my active verbs and polluted my pristine sentences. "Joe discovered mercury" transdeformed into "it has been determined that mercury was discovered by Joe"!
I complained to my academic advisor who read my work and the prof's comments. My academic advisor pulled me from the class. Unfortunately The Mutilator was the department head.
If it were I, I would grab a copy of Strunk and White's "Elements of Style", Darrell Huff's "How to Lie With Statistics", Kate Turabian, and "Chicago Manual of Style" and teach my students well. (Or self-teach meself!)
Seriously, the biggesting then that helped me write better was doing my thesis. The idea that I couldn't "just be happy with a C", it was "I won't graduate until it is good enough". Constant revising. If you can figure out how to put this into a class, you'll be golden.
:)
The problem isn't that Engineers aren't smart enough to write, they just don't care about writing
Use "fewer" when you can count the things being compared and "less" when you can't. Try it, it sounds right too.
"I have fewer mod points than you."
"His bike uses less gas than your SUV."
etc.
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment â" Buddha
That said, I believe your students' ability to communicate in an engineering environment would likely be improved if you taught them to (a) learn to simplify their sentences, and (b) learn how to recognise and avoid ambiguity.
It might also help if you removed the parentheses keys from their keyboards until it was time to code again.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Hey, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it actually be:
/etc/foo /etc/foo
Active: The boy rides his bike - e.g. The system loads preferences from
Passive: The boy can ride his bike - e.g. The system will load preferences from
My understanding of using active voice is to use only assertive forms of verbs etc. The idea behind not using it in essays/reports etc is that it is taken as a given that someone is asserting something - using will, can, should in every sentence of a technical manual is just pointless.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
I 'carried the experiment out' and then layed it to rest.
I am not a brilliant advertisement for my tutors at college twenty five years ago. But I was impressed by the common sense approach in the "Writing for engineers" course we had to take in the first year of our University degrees. I seem to recall that they warned against using past tense, passive voice and obscuring jargon. Clarity and immmediacy was their philosophy and I find this advice is still useful today. These days the advice is probably to avoid the temptation to use street slang in your writing, because we now tend to write in the way that we speak. Writing as you speak is probably a good thing because it is more lively. The only downside is that there are lots of wonderfull words that you can write, which are hardly ever used in real life.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Sir, Please teach technical folks to always define parts per billion or billions as a number (scientific notation)as well as text words in any text for clarity to avoid deaths by the use of USA billion (10 to 9th power) as opposed to Asian and European billion ( 10 to 12th power). In pharmaceutical industry and general welfare this is a crucial error for USA folks overdosing when in UK, Europe and Asia. e.g. 10 parts per US billion is a gross overdose on 10 parts per UK billion , if the origin of number is not noted. regards eion
Regards Eion MacDonald
- To many of your readers, poor grammar, spelling and punctuation is a turn off. After all, if you cannot express yourself well, why should the reader believe that your technical skills are better than your English writing skills?
- Assume your audience has a short attention span - use bullet points that say what you think, and move the (sometimes turgid) technical detail to appendices and/or sidebars.
- Take a course in the most common abuses of the English languages. Many writing problems can be fixed by a short course on correct use of the apostrophe, common spelling and usage mistakes etc. It is just an area that engineers tend to avoid.
- Have your writing proof-read by another skilled writer. We all make mistakes that are not immediately obvious to ourselves. (Caveat - this post has not been proof read)
- Learn to take constructive criticism, and act on it.
- When rubbishing other opinions, do so with tact and logic - you need to convince people to accept your views, not to alienate them
- Start with a conclusion, amplify and expand on your reasoning, then end by emphasising your conclusion. Always assume that you are trying to persuade someone to agree with your line of reasoning
Above all, practice makes perfect. Even your coding comments should be easy to read. Remarkably, one can come to enjoy writing - even if it was seen as a chore early in one's career.To teach an engineering student to write a lot, it is important that they write about something that interests them (ie. engineering). Creative writing won't help anything. Emphasize clarity, grammar, and organization. Also, grade papers carefully. Be ruthless about weeding out the BS.
One form of writing I think would be useful to learn is business email. In school I remember learning how to write and doing some assignments specifically in letter form but who writes letters these days? It would have been better to teach the styles and ettiquite of business email.
I'm a fan of the old-fashioned spelling list and spelling test. Poor spelling and misused words bother me far more than an oddly-constructed sentence.
While it may seem a daunting task to improve ones grammar, citing a single semester as unreasonable to expect results seems a misnomer to me. I too had trouble with grammar and writing in back in High School. One summer, I acquired a tutor to help me with these skills. The first piece of advice I was given was to obtain a good grammar handbook to use as a reference when proofing papers. Believe it or not that one piece of advice has saved me a lot of grief on papers in college.
However, that was three months of a summer, far less then a semester by comparison. During that summer I spent one hour a day working on my assignments and about an hour on Tuesday and Thursday with the tutor. Having bad grammar may be a common problem, but is easily overcome with a desire to improve and a little discipline.
When I got to college, I found a few universes that I fell in love with and began writing my own blend of fan-fiction. Today I look back at the stories and papers I wrote during those early years and am ashamed at how poorly they were constructed, but they were a step on the path. If one wants to write better, one must spend time in composition. Find yourself a friend to work together towards this goal, and you may find find that it is not as out of reach as you initially sought
In summary, my advice is to buy a solid grammar handbook. The one I have has a long section just on transitional phrases and the writing process. Then take some time outside of your school work and write some essays, stories, or articles for yourself. A little time and a little discipline can overcome these problems.
Writing "crap" code (random variable names, somewhat haphazard organization, few design patterns) is a valid technique for getting the code out there so you have something concrete to work with. You'd probably best have spent some low number of years - say, five - writing high quality code first, so you know how to do that automatically and you're dropping quality for a valid reason, not just laziness.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
In high school, we had one English teacher who always said describe X in one sentence. So, we all got into the habit of cramming hundreds of adjectives and subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases into one sentence, that the sentence ended up taking up half a page.
The following year, the English teacher emphasized clarity. So, the half-page sentence ended up being broken up into several sentences, resulting in much more readable passages. This same teacher spent the whole year having us read a genre of literature or a particular author and analyze the style. So, we'd read Nathaniel Hawthorne and his references to nature and color and flowery sentences. Then we'd read Ernest Hemmingway, observing what was *really* being said behind all the stacato, short sentences.
An example of this kind of analysis would be something like "Lord of the Rings as written by X". You can take the same scene from one book, and Tolkein wrote it one way; Hemmingway would have written it in another, etc. This analysis of style has helped me concentrate on and develop my own writing style over the years.
My day job is as a technical writer. So, I have to explain things very, very clearly. I have to use short sentences. I have to be consistent in my choice of vocabulary, even at the expense of repetition. I don't want to take the slightest chance and make my reader think "executable", "application", and "program" are three different things, so I just use only one.
In my own blog, log, letters to family and friends, I am, of course, much more free to use longer sentences and a thesaurus. I don't even care about punctuation when it come to emails and IMs.
By concentrating on style, you can show the students that it's not so much what you say, but how you say it... although what you say is, of course, important, too.
I'd also emphasize the need for review. Most importantly is reviewing one's own work. In other words, proofreading. But, take a break between the writing and the proofreading. Up to a week, depending on what one is writing. Having other people look over your work, too. They can comment on clarity, grammaticality, technical correctness, etc. So, have your students swap papers and comment on each others' style occasionally.
speling:spelin/spiling:and of course'punctuatshun?
First, I agree that grammer and spelling are low priorities.
Second, Turn sentences into formulas. One thing that really helped me write better was the explanation of how sentences in a pargraph relate to each other. A + B in one sentence. That could be followed by thoughts B + C, or any other combination, but if you jump too much and don't connect them, you lose logic flow. Scientists like the formulas.
Third, in publishing I have found it is best to split editing into two parts. First do substantive, comment on logic and paragraph structure, sentences that make no sense, etc. That is what helps people be better writers. Then go for a second edit looking for commas, hyphens, etc.
Edit like sand paper, first rough, then fine, then poish.
For that matter, why not also include a section on diagrams themselves? Especially in engineering, a lot of the material can be best expressed as some sort of diagram. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to wade through endless paragraphs that would have been much clearer and easier to understand as a flow chart or wiring diagram. I honestly can't think of anything worse than attempting to read through and understand pages of "wire 3 is connected to pin 2 (function x) on the microcontroller. Port x pin 1 is connected to blah. Port x pin 2 is connected to blah...." It's horrible. I know it may be a bit different than what you were thinking, but if you could clear up little formatting and presentation issues like when a digram or table would be best, and what should be put in the appendices vs. the text, I'm sure it would make a lot of papers much easier to read.
Best of luck in your course. It sounds like a great idea and I hope it catches on with other schools.
...no two people are not on fire.
Jerry Pournelle, the accomplished science fiction and computer author, has similar advice. Read what he has to say on writing in his essay How To Get My Job.
My one piece of advice (and advice you'll find in almost every writing book) would be that unless you are writing a whitepaper or something more scholarly just write everything simple and direct. The object of writing is to spread information, not to impress the reader with your vocabulary.
Learning grammar, spelling, structure, organization, etc, is all very helpfull and necessary. The insight about specific books that teach organization is very nice (see other comments.) The short discussion about passive vs active is great advice (that is usually given in the first day of your first college writing course.)
Reading well written articles, essays, technical documentation, reports, or what have you is the element I see missing here (and most often in discussions of teaching how to write.) The best way to cement understanding of principles is through example, followed by practice, followed by more example, followed by more practice. Assign relevant reading. This takes effort as a teacher of course, but finding examples relevant to what you are trying to teach, and the audience you are teaching, is invaluable.
People can't write well if they are spending all their time trying to remember rules of grammar. It must become natural to write using clear grammar. Reading is the best way I have found to really embed grammar at the level needed to give people a chance at clear writing. Once the foundation is laid you can assign writing practice, interspersed with more examples of clear writing for the writer-in-training to read. This iteration of reading and writing will help the writer-hopefull to understand why the examples were written as they were - what made them clear, how it compares to their own attempts, and how they can improve.
Knowing grammar. Knowing active vs passive, noun, verb, adverb, subject verb agreement. These will help different people to a greater and lesser extent. Teach it, it's usefull foundation information, but example and practice is the way to make a writer.
I had the benefit of a very strict English teacher in high school. At least the foundation of good grammar, spelling, and punctuation was laid back then. In college, we had a really good class called Technical Composition. My classmates and I were all going into natural resource management; specifically forestry and wildlife management. Our professor really emphasized writing in short sentences, not getting hung up on large words. I think that, more than anything, drove the point home. You don't have to use long, convoluted sentenances to convey your ideas. Neither do you have to use 50-cent words where 10-cent words will do quite nicely. Stress to your students that quantity does not make up for quality. As one of my classmates said to our prof: "You know, I've been thinking, I remember seeing the kind of writing you are talking about. It was in a red book with a black binding. It had sentences like 'Run Jane, run' and 'See spot run.'" The prof smiled and said "exactly!" Art
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832); German poet.
In my ninth grade class, the teacher on the first day announced that we could resubmit any paper as many times as we wanted and only the final grade would count. Literally we could keep improving the paper until we got the grade we wanted - but, in exchange, he was going to be incredibly hard grader.
From my own experience, I learned far more from his comments on my revisions than from the comments on my initial submissions. I remember working through four revisions on a story - going from a C- to a B+ and progressing from revising grammar to revising paragraph structure to tackling cohesiveness and story arc. It was a stunning experience to realize how many things were flawed within my story.
The most important lesson came when I submitted the final version. My teacher's comment was " A- Technically well-written and I think you've done as much as you can with this story but ultimately the topic is too weak for an 'A'. " It really opened my eyes that not every story is worthy of an A and I wasn't simply going to get a good grade because I had followed good grammar and writing rules - I really needed to write an interesting story in order to get an A.
I probably learned more from his revision process than I did in any other class.
-Peter
Years ago, International Paper had some good free flyers. They were each a single 11x17" sheet, printed on one side with lots of white space, so the actual text was short. They were writing tips on one topic by "name brand" writers -- Kurt Vonnegut, Steve Allen and the like -- with examples. They were great! But I do not know if they are still available or if you could get reprint rights for class use.
Was has impressed on you the importance of revision, or at least of reviewing your writing at intervals?
:)
Should be 'what'
Take C++ instead of English?
I can't tell if you're teaching a creative writing calss or a business writing class. If creative writing, I can't help at all because I'm not interested in creative writing. However, for business writing, and specifically from my role as a software engineer responsible for designing projects, I wish somebody had taught me a list of techniques for evolving and documenting design ideas.
As I see it, there are two basic problems in attempting to use paper to design things: non-linearity and evolution of knowledge.
Most things I write about are not linear sequences of any sort, but are highly cross linked and interrelated bits of knowledge. Writing, at least everything I was taught about writing, is all about linearity -- sequences of information. For example, consider documenting how the economy works. There is no starting place. There is no ending place. Everything affects everything else, sometimes with simple interrelationships, sometimes with complex ones. How do you document that on paper in a way so others can understand what you know?
The other thing I see writing used for is to evolve ideas. How do you go from "I have an idea for YYY" to "person A works on this, person B works on this..."? Perhaps I'm just deficient, but when the project grow beyond needing more than a few people to accomplish, I cease to be able to hold the whole process, and all the details, in my head without forgetting important bits. I resort to writing it down, but just don't have the mental tools needed to evolve the ideas using paper. Being taught some mental tools for how to evolve big ideas on paper so others can review and participate would have been amazingly useful. This would almost require breaking the class into teams so members with related domain knowledge can learn such techniques by practicing them.
Probably all off base and stupid ideas. Feel free to ignore them.
That little book was more valuable than all the writing classes I ever attended.
Most of the graduates I see coming through our company these days onlyknow who to write powerpoint slide bullet points. I'd like them to understand sentance structure, how to plan a report with real paragraphs; an introduction, body and conclusion, spelling and grammar.
Start by handing out copies of Strunk and White, then make them read it. You could also ask them to proof-read and mark up each other's work. Potentially an even better exercise would to have them present based on someone else's written material with no verbal briefing. The main point to written work is to effectively communicate an idea. If they can't pass on a concept in writing, they are not communicating.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
If your ideass are muddled, your writing will be muddled. If your thoughts are slapdash and inaccurate, that too will be reflected in your writing.
Now, I'm a real pedant when it comes to written material. I don't have to look for spelling errors; they leap off the page at me and interrupt my reading. Grammatical and punctuation errors grate similarly and annoy me intensely. But although it pains me, I'll try to overlook that if the text makes it worth my while. So if you have something worth writing, you're already ahead.
Far too often, though, I have no idea at all what the writer is even trying to say, however carefully I read. And while that can result from very poor writing ability, much more often I think it's because the writer has no idea what they're trying to say either!
So know what you want to say. Think about it first. You don't have to plan out every detail, but if your writing is to have a point, you'll need to know what that point is. Sometimes it's good to start by speaking it, either to a helpful friend/colleague or just in your imagination; and there are many worse ways to write. Other times you know what you want to say so well you can write out a final draft immediately. Most of the time you'll need to go back and edit. And careful proofreading can save a lot of embarrassment.
The technical aspects -- spelling, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, style, voice, etc. -- are important, but there's no point having them all unless you have something to say! And that something starts in your head. Clear writing needs clear thinking.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
the first example is active voice in the present continues tense; the second example is active voice is the simple present tense
passive would be "the bike was ridden by the boy to the store"
in passive voice, the object (the noun acted upon by the verb & subject) takes the first position in the sentence, making the subject unnecessary (eg the bike was ridden to the store)
To put it in a bit of context, the dominant form of intracorporate communications in those days was the "memo", which was typically a relatively formal paper about whatever issue, topic, or equipment you were working on, and the library system was able to file and index memos, but computers were only starting to crawl up from the days of punch-cards and paper terminals, so while we had email and nroff/troff, we also still had typists and our information handling models hadn't really been opened up by computers yet except for indexing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
English is amazingly flexible about verbifying nouns and nounification of verbs and general mashing-up and type-conversion of other parts of speech. And of course there are lots of verb forms that are regional - Southern grammar in particular is a lot more complex than the generic pretend-it's-Latin limitations you learned in 8th grade. There's a lot of usage that's just a deliberate attempt to sound important by using much fancier words and constructs than are necessary, and sometimes that can be interesting or beautiful. Other times it's just annoying, and of course if you're trying to express complex topics it's usually worth avoiding that sort of interference.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks