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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?"
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
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.
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.
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.
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
I wholeheartedly second this. The Elements of Style is superb. In writing, nothing is more important than getting your point across in as precise and concise a way as possible.
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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.
"Main Entry: hopefully
z i.shtml
Function: adverb
Date: circa 1639
1 : in a hopeful manner
2 : it is hoped : I hope : we hope
usage In the early 1960s the second sense of hopefully, which had been in sporadic use since around 1932, underwent a surge of popular use. A surge of popular criticism followed in reaction, but the criticism took no account of the grammar of adverbs. Hopefully in its second sense is a member of a class of adverbs known as disjuncts. Disjuncts serve as a means by which the author or speaker can comment directly to the reader or hearer usually on the content of the sentence to which they are attached. Many other adverbs (as interestingly, frankly, clearly, luckily, unfortunately) are similarly used; most are so ordinary as to excite no comment or interest whatsoever. The second sense of hopefully is entirely standard."
From Merriam-Webster, quoted at http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ian/Manifestoes/grammarNa
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.
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/
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.